Raw Milk Becomes Contentious (Blog #3)

Raw Milk Becomes Contentious Printable Version of Article




The New York Times

March 24, 2010

Raw Milk Becomes Contentious

By RICHARD BERNSTEIN

NEW YORK — My neighborhood weekly newspaper, The Brooklyn Paper, ran a front-page story this week about a local mother who belongs to a group so secretive that, as the article put it, “she can’t even reveal its name.”

The accompanying picture showed the woman, Hannah Springer, holding a toddler in one arm and a glass of milk in the other. She doesn’t look like a drug dealer or a counterfeit DVD merchant, and indeed she isn’t. Still, the secret organization of which she is an enthusiastic member buys and distributes a product banned for retail sale in New York — raw milk, unprocessed and unpasteurized.

The article explained that when she was expecting her now 18-month-old boy, Ms. Springer learned that she had a chronic thyroid disorder, and when she started drinking raw milk, purchased in Pennsylvania, smuggled across the border and sold at clandestine points in Brooklyn, she was cured.

“I no longer have to take thyroid meds, which every doctor said I would be on for the rest of my life,” she told The Brooklyn Paper. She said that her son drinks two cups of raw milk a day and is healthier as a result.

“Basically, we spend a little more money on food,” she said, because raw milk is more expensive than pasteurized supermarket milk, “so we don’t have to pay the doctor.”

“Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are,” the French culinary philosopher Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin said, and today, what you eat seems as much a person’s more general state of mind as ever. The food movements picking up steam in America — organic, buy local, vegan, vegetarian, and the like — signal something a good deal bigger than just dietary preference.

And certainly that seems to be the case with raw milk, which is banned in about half the American states and whose purchase and consumption therefore involve a minor — though in fact not exceedingly risky — degree of civil disobedience.

But the element of rebellion against authority is more conspicuous when it comes to raw milk, because if, like Ms. Springer, you feed it to your toddler, you are flouting the conviction of most of the national institutions that monitor food safety and public health in the United States, including the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control, the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics. All of these agencies and organizations strongly advise against drinking raw milk on the grounds that it could harbor harmful pathogens — which is why milk is pasteurized in the first place.

“Raw milk is dangerous,” John Sheehan, the director of the F.D.A.’s Division of Plant and Food Safety, said in a telephone interview. “Avoid it all costs. Do not give it to your children.”

Responding to the many claims made for raw milk by what have come to be called the raw milkies — among them, that it cures thyroid deficiency, asthma, allergies, even cancer — Mr. Sheehan said: “That’s complete nonsense. We’ve reviewed just about everything that the raw milk advocates say, and we’ve found no support for it whatsoever. There are no signs that it is curative of any disease.”

And yet, the signs are that the raw milk movement is becoming something of a cult, growing nationwide, with several organizations and foundations lobbying for it and proclaiming its near miraculous merits. Next month the second annual International Raw Milk Symposium will be held in Madison, Wisconsin. Assuming that the urban guerrilla warfare taking place around raw milk in Brooklyn is not unique, more and more people must be drinking it, even in the states where it’s banned.

So what’s going on?

For one thing, a very American battle seems to be taking place, pitting disgruntled or suspicious citizens against what they see as an unreasonable, greedy, distant or simply clueless establishment. The raw milkies are a bit like the Tea Party movement in this sense — though they’re likely to be on opposite ends of the spectrum in most regards. They represent a sort of gastronomic populism that wants to inform you of what agribusiness and the retail supermarket chains allegedly don’t want you to know.

“You’ve probably been told all your life that pasteurization makes raw milk ‘safe,”’ reads one typical online comment, this one on a Web site called the Douglas Report. “But here’s the real truth — pasteurized milk is more dangerous than raw milk ever will be.”

Perhaps the leading organization on the raw milk front is the Weston A. Price Foundation, which, according to its statement of purpose, seeks to “restore nutrient-dense foods to the human diet” (the group is pro-organic and in favor of buying local, but fiercely anti-vegetarian) and it provides a seemingly very scientific PowerPoint presentation on the advantages of raw milk.

Raw milk, the presentation contends, contains powerful anti-pathogens that are destroyed in pasteurization, along with a lot of the milk’s nutritional value.

That’s exactly the kind of statement that raises the hackles of people like Mr. Sheehan, who say there is no science to justify it — neither the claim about these natural anti-pathogenic properties, nor the alleged harm of pasteurization. Still, there’s another argument on the product’s behalf being made from the standpoint of legal rights — namely that government has no business telling people what they can and cannot drink.

“All it is is unprocessed milk,” said David E. Gumpert, a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal and author of a new book, “The Raw Milk Revolution: Behind America’s Emerging Battle Over Food Rights,” which has made him something of a regular on the raw milkie circuit.

“I respect people’s rights to have access to that food, and I have trouble with the public health people who want to deny it,” he continued in a telephone interview.

Mr. Gumpert allows that raw milk is probably more hazardous than pasteurized milk, but, he says, there haven’t been any reported deaths from it in the past quarter century (there have been a few deaths from pasteurized milk, but it’s consumed in vastly greater quantities), which makes it seem something less than an imminent health threat.

“Is this a public health crisis?” he asks rhetorically. “My feeling is that, no, it isn’t, so the medical community gets hysterical about it, and part of the reason they’re hysterical is that there’s a growing demand for raw milk.”