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raw milk

Food for thought

Santa Clara Topiary

The older I get the more I experience the Whoosh factor: one minute I’m staring at West Coast rain, and the next it’s a sunny morning in Silicon Valley, and I’m part of a 1,700-strong hive of health at the Santa Clara Conference Center. We’re buzzing round stands promoting magnetic beds, fermented cod liver oil, natural cosmetics, books on healthy stomach acid and fermentation and nutritional cures for mood disorders. There’s a seafood stand doing a brisk trade in Alaskan salmon roe, a couple of guys selling crispy nuts – raw almonds which have been soaked and dried according to principles laid down by Sally Fallon Morrell, our queen bee if ever there was – and someone offering tastes of a new product made with ratfish oil.

Soon my hands are warmed by my cup of beef broth and I’m balancing a bowl of full fat sheep’s milk yogurt with frozen blueberries. I have some organic fruit and cheese in my pocket for later and am considering how I can manage to juggle a couple of boiled eggs before grabbing a bottle of raw milk to wash it all down. In my bag I have a small jar of coconut oil, some pecan nut butter and a small package of granola made from pre-soaked grains and coconut.

Such was the sweet beginning to my first Weston A Price Foundation conference. Those breakfast items were purchased for Moolah, tickets sold in support of the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, which exists to help those persecuted by the FDA for living the WAPF dream of eating nutrient-dense foods, including raw milk.

And eat we did over those three days. If I saw one person raising a piece of sourdough wholemeal rye topped with half an inch of butter to their lips, I saw a hundred, at every meal. The lunch and supper buffets were groaning with pastured meats, whole fat cheese and sour cream, fresh green salads, liver sausage and fermented foods of all descriptions. We had sauerkraut pretty much every meal, plus kimchi, fermented apple butter, lightly pickled beets and kombucha. (In keeping with the foundation’s food principles, there were no refined carbohydrates or sugar or caffeine.) Several times the meal lines stalled while the kitchen scrambled to keep up with demand. At every table there was a shaker of Celtic sea salt with which we could lavish minerals as well as flavour onto our food. More than one mealtime conversation embellished the theme of “how great is it to be able to trust conference food?” And it was good.

And given all that food, what was really unusual here was the size of the participants. There was another event going on at the same time in the centre, a spirituality conference: the participants there were strikingly like most large gatherings of Americans that I’ve been to: a good proportion were morbidly obese, most were at least chunky. The Weston A Price people were proportioned more like Canadians or Europeans: not many would have been described as heavy, very few obese, and most were either slender or fit. And this wasn’t because they were all in the first flush of youth: middle age was the norm. Living proof that fat doesn’t make you fat.

I’ll follow this entry up with more about the talks I attended that left my brain buzzing even while my body hummed with contentment.

Raw and milky

I’ve been easing off the dairy products lately, though my cheese drawer still groans with long-lived goodness. One of the items that will always remain there is a hefty chunk of Parmigiano-Reggiano, a staple in my kitchen, as in many others I’m sure. It would probably startle many North Americans to discover that this is a raw milk cheese. Our governments allow it because it’s been aged over 60 days. It’s also salt-cured, which is a preserving process in many food products that helps to ensure food is safe by driving out liquids that can harbour pathogens, and making a generally unpleasant living environment  for them.

One of my classmates at Unisg was Australian and she shocked us by revealing that the Australian government allows no raw milk cheeses at all, including Parmigiano-Reggiano! This is still the case, and there are rumblings that the 60-day threshold in the US could change. Here in Canada only Quebec cheesemakers are allowed to make raw milk cheeses: I have not heard of reports of an increase in sudden deaths in that province since the regulations were changed in 2008.

In the Rest Of Canada, as we are known, we have watched a long and painful battle between Michael Schmidt, who wants to share the right of informed citizens to drink raw milk (or turn it in to cheese I suppose) and the government turn sour; he’s currently on a hunger strike to protest the reversal of his earlier court victory upon appeal by the province of Ontario, after heavy lobbying by the province’s milk marketing board.

Into the fray comes Slow Food. Although they do not seem to be following the Schmidt case, they are tracking developments in other countries, including Australia, and have set up a Raw Milk website to promote the cause, which they take up largely for the sake of cheesemaking. Slow Food is, after all, the champion of good food: raw milk cheeses are simply better than pasteurized in many ways, including flavour and texture.

Raw milk contains microflora and natural enzymes that allow for more complex flavours and textures in cheese. Pasteurization destroys these as well as vitamins A and D which must then be added back to milk products in artificial form. Minerals such as calcium and iron are altered by pasteurization, as are the fats, and the digestibility of the final product. One of the arguments against the findings of the China Study was that it failed to make a distinction between pasteurized and unpasteurized milk products.

For drinkers of raw milk, there seems no respite from the government ban. In order to drink raw milk you need to own your own cow, and tell nobody. For the immune-compromised, it’s probably not a good idea to drink it, but among the healthy adults who prefer it, there are many arguments in its favour (as long advocated by the Weston A. Price Foundation). I drank it while in Italy, where the law allows people to make their own choice, by filling the milk bottle themselves (in my case from a dispenser provided by a local dairy that also sold cheese and other food products in a shopping mall). Despite the official warning signs posted on the machine, I watched a heavily pregnant woman fill her bottle; the presence of a small child with her suggested she may have survived a raw-milk fuelled first pregnancy already.

It is, as raw milk supporters would say, a puzzle why raw milk should be targeted when so many government-approved toxic substances are already on our tables. There is no ban on fracked tapwater, for example, nor on processed foods high in salt, sugar and fats which are proven to cause catastrophic health problems.

Milky justice

Last week’s Ontario court case decision on the Michael Schmidt/raw milk issue – which has been dragging on since Schmidt had his farm raided in 2006 – has lactivores bubbling over with questions. Schmidt had been charged with illegally selling unpasteurized milk to people who chose to drink it, and exercised their choice by the only means legally open to them, by subscribing to a ‘cow share‘ enterprise. This means buying a share of a cow and contributing to its upkeep, in return for which receiving a quantity of raw milk. There is a similar system – Home on the Range Dairy – in BC which has been subjected to a sustained attack by our own public health buttinskis in recent weeks.

One part of the public health attack has been to publish a misleading press release that mentions the presence of fecal matter in the dairy’s milk. What the release fails to mention is that fecal matter is present in just about everything we eat, drink and touch, including soft drinks, spinach, government-inspected beef, and public health-approved pasteurized milk and milk products. It can certainly cause serious health problems, but the important distinction where testing is concerned is the fecal count, not the mere presence of fecal matter, and the press release is curiously shy of mentioning this. Nor do the public health officials claim to have tested for or found E. coli, which is, according to the Food Safety Network, the best way of testing for fecal contamination. In fact the whole manner of testing in this instance is considered highly biased.

Raw milk is a murky subject, much debated. It is hard to separate the views of the pro-pasteurization side from their vested interests in industrial scale production – which can by their very nature cause so many health problems that some kind of public protection is certainly called for. Most of the pro-raw milk defense comes from the Weston A. Price Foundation, which is not universally revered, but does have many sane and healthy supporters. There are genuine causes for concern about raw milk, as there are for production of any animal food likely to be consumed by people with delicate immune systems.

My personal experience with raw milk was in Italy, where the law allowed me to purchase raw milk from a machine in a shopping mall – the provision being I had to fill the bottle myself. There was a large sign posted on the machine warning pregnant women that raw milk could be dangerous, but I saw at least one near-term consumer ignore this. The milk was fabulous, rich and flavourful and made impressive custards and puddings. When we visited Epoisse producers in France, we were given a tasting and demonstration at which it was explained that the runniness of a ripe Epoisse is due to EU and North American market requirements that they use pasteurized milk. When the cheese is properly and traditionally made with raw milk, the paste shouldn’t collapse, but be soft and firm. Pasteurization also kills off many of the microflora that give any artisanal cheese depth, texture and flavour.

So. Canadian raw milk consumers are rejoicing in what seems like a great victory in the Schmidt case, but is in fact only a local affirmation by the Ontario Court of Justice that he operated within the law in Ontario. It’s unlikely the ruling will give strength to either side of the pasteurization argument, as the presiding judge made clear in his closing remarks:

I wish to make it perfectly clear that my decision to acquit the defendant on all charges-
* In no way stands for the proposition that henceforth it is legal to market unpasteurized milk and milk products in the Province of Ontario;
* In no way purports to undermine or invalidate the milk marketing legislation in this Province, which has been held to be valid legislation byt he Ontario Divisional Court in Allan v. Ontario (Attorney General) (supra);
* In no way supports either side of the debate on whether the consumption of unpasteurized milk or milk products is healthy or constitutes a health hazard 

CBC has a poll you can take to share your opinion on whether or not people should be allowed to drink raw milk. Take it here.