Raw Milk Revisited

I am so P.O.'ed at the FDA right now. This is an excerpt from the FDA web site.

• The CDC reports that from 1998 to present there were 39 outbreaks in which unpasteurized milk or cheese made from unpasteurized milk were implicated.
• These outbreaks occurred in 22 states and two of them were multi-state outbreaks. An estimated 831 illnesses, 66 hospitalizations and 1 death were associated with these outbreaks.
• Not all outbreaks are recognized.
• Even when they are, not all are reported to CDC.
• Virtually impossible to capture all of the incidents of individual illness which might occur

This is just so absurd. They are reporting 831 instances of ILLNESS from raw milk over 10 YEARS! More people get food poisoning EVERY YEAR at Thanksgiving from eating improperly prepared stuffing! Good Grief! More people got sick from eating bad salsa last spring. Or even the current peanut butter scare!

Their position can only be a product of big commercial dairies. Anything to keep the little guy from being able to stay in business.

At least the State of Arkansas is considering legislation that will allow the sale of unpasteurized goat milk directly from the farm as long as they do not sell more than 100 gallons a month. It has been voted on in the house and sent to committee. From there it will go to the Senate. At least it is a step forward.

If your personal beliefs worked that way, you could almost say that Big Brother has gotten together with Corporate Farms and the Healthcare industry to legislate the health of the average American. It is bad enough the government funds conflicting studies on the health of different foods, like eggs, and tries to scare people into not eating them. For a while the demon was pork (too much fat), then it was beef (too much cholesterol), then they told us that skinless white meat chicken was the heathiest( thank you Tyson). Fish is really good for you, Oh wait, it could contain mercury and other heavy metals so you had better limit your intake. It is just getting out of hand.

What is wrong with growing healthy, pesticide free, antibiotic free food? Nope, they don't want us doing that either. Because our healthy livestock might contaminate the over-medicated, immune suppressed factory farms. They are even trying to get legislation passed to force the individual to "register" every head of livestock , including chickens, because there might be a disease outbreak. And that means that the government can come in and destroy your entire herd or flock to protect the factory farms. So not only does the individual have to pay a fee to register each animal, it can be destroyed without warning or compensation. All in the name of consumer protection.

If the government would just leave us alone, I would guess that in a few years we would make our own food choices and it would be healthier than if it is regulated.

Are you sick of it yet?

I have said it before and I will say it again, real food is healthier for you than over-processed, additive laden, profit driven food ever thought about being.

I grew up on food we either grew or traded for. Raw, unpasteurized milk, eggs so fresh they were still warm from being under the chicken, veggies you had to wash the garden off of before you could eat it, and the joy(sort of) of spending a weekend putting a pig or a steer in the freezer. And you can't forget the smell of hot wet chicken feathers, no matter how hard you try.

The studies are overwhelmingly in favor of organically grown food. The pesticides and other chemicals used in factory farms can kill you. That is why, just about every year, there are food recalls, and not just on vegetables. Government regulation of our food supply has resulted in marginally nutritional food-like products that only resemble real food in shape and color. If you haven't had a fresh peach that you hand picked, you have no idea just how much fuzz is actually on a peach. The fruit you buy from the store, even fresh peaches, has been processed to the point that there is almost no fuzz left on it. Not only that, it was picked so green that it barely has any color so that it can withstand the processing. When you bite into a peach and the juice drips off of your elbow, now THAT is a peach.

But the people who grow that kind of food these days can't sell it. Government regulation being what it is, if it hasn't been inspected, processed, packaged, and has a paper trail a mile long, it just isn't safe for human consumption. To that, I say, "Bollocks!"

It wasn't until the early 1900's that food went from being good for you to being a major industry. Regulation was mandated to protect the general population from being sold spoiled food products or products that had been adulterated with non-food products. At the time, it was a good thing. But as time went on, more and more small producers were bought out by corporate farms. When the corporate farms got big enough, they were able to enforce legislation to force the little guy to sell out. That was the downfall of real food.

With the rise of suburbia, more people were buying their food from stores than were growing their own. In the 1950's, store bought food was a status symbol. Kids were raised buying their food instead of growing it. These days, the closest most people get to growing their own food is the single bean they grow in 4th grade science. And just about every person in the US has some sort of physical problem, from obesity, diabetes, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, heart disease, cancer, or asthma. And if you aren't sick now, you probably know someone who is.

Until we can stop the aggressive legislation that is preventing us from eating healthy, real food, we will all be doomed to be sick. Because food is big business. And so is the healthcare industry.

Raw Milk

I have been reading up lately on the pros and cons of raw milk. It seems there is a great deal of conflicting information out there on the subject and, being who I am, I have to throw my two cents in.

Raw milk is cow squeezin's that have not been treated with heat, subjected to homogenization, or have anything added to it. It is literally, well, raw. All of the commercially produced milk is pasteurized within an inch of it's life, stirred until it is practically beaten to keep the cream from separating, and has added vitamins to replace those destroyed by the above mentioned treatments. Those processes kill harmful bacteria and help to keep the milk fresher longer on the store shelves. Those same processes also happen to destroy a good number of amino acids, lipids, and naturally occurring enzymes.

All of that being said, raw milk has had nothing done to it except being put into containers. Straight from the cow, so to speak. It has the exact same nutritional components that are necessary to feed a baby, well a baby cow anyway. It has naturally occurring vitamins, minerals, proteins, lipids, amino acids, etc, that mammals need to survive. I have even read studies that indicate that raw milk can reverse the progression of childhood asthma and digestive disorders.

Now, don't get me wrong, but aren't we supposed to be eating foods that have all of these natural enzymes and lipids and stuff in them as a part of a healthier lifestyle? Then why in the world is the Federal government going out of it's way to try to shut down small dairies that sell raw milk to consumers?

My guess is that the big business that is dairy farming does not want the general consumer to believe that raw milk is actually healthier for them that the product they over process, hormone inject, and and over-vaccinate. After all, if the general consumer starts to realize that the milk they bring home from their local Mega-Mart is not as healthy as something they could get for just about the same money at the farm down the road, Big Dairy will lose money. Can't have that, now can we?

There are some things to keep in mind about raw milk. It doesn't have an expiration date listed as two weeks from now plainly on the bottle. The reason for that is most of the time, you will have consumed it long before it will go south on you. Store bought milk has to have that expiration date so the minimum wage guy that works in the cooler of your favorite grocery store will know when he has to pull that bottle off of the shelf. Is it bad milk? Not really. Since it has been all but sterilized by heat treating and who-knows-what-else, that is just the date that the government mandates the stores must sell it by. There is no telling just how long it has been since that milk was removed from the cow anyway. What you might think is fresh milk could actually be a couple of weeks old. Raw milk will keep a good long time as long as it is kept cold.

Raw milk will also have a separation problem. The cream, which is actually the butterfat, will float to the top of the container just like any other suspended fat. This could be good or bad, depending on how you want to look at it. When I was growing up, we had raw milk. We swapped eggs for it. I thought for a long time that milk came in a pickle jar. Before we could dip out milk for our morning cereal( yes, with a ladle), you had to shake it up. That was just the way it was. Or if we wanted to make ice cream, we got an extra gallon and let it sit for a day or two in the fridge and scooped the cream off of the top. We made ice cream, butter, whipped cream, whatever we needed at the time with the cream from our pickle jar. Every now and then, we had to pick a cow hair out of the jar, but you know what, none of us ever got sick from it.

I think the Raw vs. Pasteurized debate just simply comes down to big business lobbies. People in Europe don't panic if their milk isn't pasteurized. They actually prefer that it isn't. And you don't see them dying in droves from E.Coli or salmonella. Odds are that that special imported French cheese that you pay $20 a ounce for is not made with pasteurized milk. And you know the holes in the Swiss and gruyere cheese is actually made by bacteria breathing. And, shock of shock!, blue cheese is mouldy! Geesh, get a grip.

All the government has to do to panic people away from eating something is to tell them what is actually in it. We used cow manure in the garden. Did we ever get sick from it? Nope. We had to wash the chicken poo off of the eggs when we brought them in. Did we get sick? Nope. We actually butchered our own meat in the winter and left it hanging in the shop overnight to chill. No Salmonella there either.

I think the government has tied itself so tightly to big business that it simply can't tell us the truth about food anymore. Small farms and personal gardens are way healthier that buying all of your food.

After all, people lived for thousands of years without preservatives and added vitamins, and lived healthier lives for it.