In Eau Claire, Wisconsin, yesterday, four-hundred and fifty people showed up to offer 10 hours of testimony on state bills that would legalize the sale of raw milk in the Dairy State.
According to WSAU Radio in Wausau, “scientists, government officials, consumers, and farmers were among those testifying,” and apparently the pros outnumbered the cons in the audience. The pro raw milk side was organized in large part by dairy farmer Vince Hundt, who bought a ton of paper hats for supporters of the legislation.
Milk Freedom? Freedom Milk? Eh. I guess “Give It To Me Raw” was too long for the hat.
Vince Hundt seems to be a key force behind the pro side of the debate. He’s been beating the raw milk drum on behalf of small dairy farmers for years down in La Crosse, WI, and as someone who’s still sitting on the fence about raw milk (though leaning pro), I like his arguments even if I don’t like his paper hats. He’s a far more convincing raw milk spokesman than, say, the Weston A. Price Foundation, which all too eagerly leads with arguments like the benefits of probiotics and dangers of pasteurization, arguments that have weight with some, but which get knocked aside too easily in rigorous debate. Brainiac lawyer Bill Marler, for example, makes public health the central argument and has a field day with Weston A. Price arguments.*
Vince Hundt, meanwhile, has the hotter hand. This dairy farmer swiftboats the public health argument by taking it out head on. From Joe Orso’s November 9th column in The La Crosse Tribune:
“Hundt pointed that out this past week yet another outbreak of industrial agriculture feedlot E. coli killed two people and caused the recall of USDA-inspected meat.”
If we have a ban on raw milk because it’s unsafe, according to food safety experts, shouldn’t we then ban feedlot beef, too? Or mass-farmed lettuce? Or peanut butter? This is a great argument, especially with “big ag friendly” groups like the Wisconsin Veterinary Medicine Association and Wisconsin Farm Bureau lining up against raw milk legalization. At a time when small farmers are getting hammered by the current dairy crisis, forcing Big Ag back in its corner is essential.
And Rep. Chris Danou (D-Trempeleau), who introduced the House bill to legalize raw milk, is mirroring Hundt’s attack, arguing “that the state allows adults to buy cigarettes but bans raw milk as a health risk.” (La Crosse Tribune).
In this line of attack, the public health argument is doubly hypocritical because, after all, raw milk is still milk — healthy and arguably necessary to many diets, regardless of its probiotic qualities. Why ban a healthy food when we don’t ban unhealthy and demonstrably dangerous products? I mean, cigarettes? You can’t pasteurize all the health risks out of cigarettes but they’re still perfectly legal.
And once you open that line of attack, it’s jazz, man. Did we say it’s like banning cigarettes? No, the Wisconsin Farmers Union says raw milk is not like cigarettes which harm the people around the smoker.
Boom boom pow. Stay away from the probiotic pasteurization-ate-my-dog stuff and go after the individual choice and hypocrisy of state regulation. That’s the way to argue for raw milk.
* For the record, Bill Marler supports the very kind of legislation being proposed in Wisconsin, a law that would only allow sales off the farm and that would require regulation by the State.
Every time you read an article or watch a news story about raw milk they interview a dept. of health employee who states in one way or another you’ll die from food poisoning. Now I am no doctor will never claim to be unless it gets me free tickets to a concert. But, I have been alive for 27 years and have been drinking raw milk for 26 of them. Consuming raw milk has not killed me or even made me sick that I know of. The exception to that was the time our bulk tank was overflowing and I drank way more milk than anyone ever should in a 5 min time span but I digress. Based off my experiences with raw milk I think that drinking it might actually make a person less likely to get violently ill from food poisoning. Raw milk has many different types of bacteria in it some beneficial some not. When you expose your body to bacteria it illicits an immune response to fight off the offending bacteria. The bodys immune system will remember the bacteria and will be able to fight it off more efficiently the next time you are exposed to it. The government might be making everyone more likely to be sickened by protecting them from unprocessed foods rather than safer.
Disclaimer: Not all raw milk is the same and I do not promote drinking it without slowly acclimating your body to it. Raw milk should only be purchased from farms with a proven track record of very low SPC, LPC, and PI bacteria counts.