The Complete Patient

James Stewart, manager of Rawsome Foods in Los Angeles' Venice district, has been having a nightmare--"that they'll come and bulldoze this property."

"This property" consists of one forty-foot and two twenty-foot shipping containers that have been refurbished into a funky food distribution center used by the 1,500 members of Rawesome, which is a private food club.

He's been studying the August 18 "Substandard Order" received from the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety, and for the life of him, can't figure out what the exact appeal process is, or the date by which he needs to file an appeal. Nor can he get a straight answer from the department.

"Today could be the day--we could be shut even though we've done nothing wrong," and even though there hadn't been a peep from any city agency in the two years that the structures have been on the vacant lot. Stewart says he was led to believe that, because the containers are temporary, they aren't subject to the same building regulations as a permanent structure.

In the meantime, Rawesome has continued to serve its members, opening yesterday as scheduled.

Now, Stewart appreciates that the "Substandard Order" isn't about building codes or safety, It's about politics, and The State made a strong political statement with its guns-drawn raids June 30 (on Rawesome and nearby Rawesome herdshare farmer Sharon Palmer) that included practically a batallion of food and health regulatory agencies at the city, state, and federal levels. "I'm under full attack," he told me.

In addition, he's been trying to provide advice to Morningland Dairy (discussed in my previous post), which has been forced into a recall of all its cheese for supposed listeria--but really being penalized for supplying Rawesome. Stewart and others point out that the agents who confiscated the cheese placed it into coolers without ice, and then nearly two months later came out with a finding of listeria. The cheese seems not to have been refrigerated after leaving the Rawesome premises, and who knows how it was kept in the intervening weeks.

But, of course, all that is beside the point. The point is that what's going on here is, as I said in my comment following my previous post, amounts to a political gangbang. It was launched with a Los Angeles public health closure order. Followed up by the harassment recall of Morningland Dairy, a supplier to Rawesome. Followed up by the Los Angeles Building and Safety "Substandard Order".

You'll notice that in all this harassment, there's nothing that has anything to do with the substance of the real issue here: Can consumers and farmers arrange private contracts covering food? There's a reason The State doesn't want to deal with that issue: Private contracts are a bedrock of everyday commerce in the U.S., so judges are likely to support such arrangements. The State doesn't like to lose. 

There's some interesting debate about conspiracy theories following my previous post. It's easy to see conspiracies galore in what's happening with Rawesome. I guess the question that comes to mind is this: Is James Stewart being paranoid when they really are coming after him?

Cheesemaking at Morningland Dairy in Missouri. Gradually, the various follow-up assault roles of The State agencies involved in the raid on Rawesome Foods are becoming clear.

A few days ago, we learned that the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety was assigned to harass Rawesome about building safety codes.

Now we learn that the California Department of Food and Agriculture has been assigned to do lab tests of all the food stolen, er, seized, in the June 30 raid. That information came to light a via a press release issued by CDFA saying its lab "detected" listeria monocytogenes in two varieties of raw-milk cheese from a Missouri producer, Morningland Dairy.

The dairy, which has been selling raw cheeses nationally for thirty years, has never had an illness from its cheeses, its general manager, Denise Dixon, told me. Indeed, the FDA, in a separate press release, in which it said the Morningland cheese was taken from Rawesome, states that no one has become ill from the supposedly contaminated cheese. (The FDA censors reviewing the draft press release must have missed that statement.)

The matter of listeria monocytogenes in foods has become a contentious issue in the raw milk world, especially in New York state, where agriculture officials have made numerous findings of listeria monocytogenes in raw milk over the last five years, without any individuals becoming ill. Within the scientific community,there has been much debate over the last twenty years over whether trace amounts of listeria monocytogenes really are any kind of health threat, since the bacteria are considered pervasive, and illnesses quite rare.

In the meantime, tiny Morningland Dairy, with six employees, has essentially become caught up in the dragnet growing out of the assault on Rawesome Foods by State agents with guns drawn. Now that they carried out such a huge hit on a small private organization, the agencies are under pressure to show "results." So the city of Los Angeles started with health code violations and moved on to building violations; California is devoting huge resources to examining all the food and finally, to the agents' collective relief, I am sure, has a "bingo" in finding a few listeria cells in Morningland cheese.  And Morningland has been pressured to recall all its cheese from the first of this year, and prohibited by Missouri officials (presumably recruited by FDA) from shipping any cheese--in effect, shut down. In the authoritarians' view, just a minor casualty on the road to sterile food.

Now, as I understand it, the huge DeCoster egg operation that has sickened 1,200 people with contaminated eggs since May, continues operations.

As I also understand it, the members of Rawesome each signed a statement saying they not only accept that there might be pathogens in their foods, they welcome it.

Moreover, can we even believe the test results that might come out of such a clearly corrupt process? Is that what Regulator was trying to say when he/she posted the FDA's press release following my previous post?

***

As many of us are aware, the ever-harsher crackdown on nutrient-dense foods is a harbinger of a general move toward tyranny. Unfortunately, it seems nearly inevitable that The State's authoritarian fist will become ever more visible to ever more people.

Which brings me to trains and buses. When certain things happen in this country, I sometimes think of scenes from Nazi-controlled Europe, where members of my family perished, and try to tell myself that I'm being alarmist. Things could never get that bad in the U.S.

There's one scene from the book I wrote about my family's experiences, "Inge: A Girl's Journey Through Nazi Europe", that came to mind yesterday. The scene is a train about to leave Toulouse in Nazi-ruled France, which my teenage aunt, Inge Joseph, had just boarded with four of her friends in 1942, seeking to escape to Switzerland.

"Finally, we boarded the train. All five of us were able to sit in one compartment. Our plan was to take turns walking the corridor every hour in order to see whether passengers were being checked for 'cartes d'identites' (identification cards), which we did not carry. As foreigners, we would have required special traveling permission, but this was seldom granted, and especially not if the destination was the Swiss border! Our plan in the event of an identity check was to hide in the toilet of an already-checked car..."

Then there's this story on the front page of yesterday's New York Times.

"The Lake Shore Limited  runs between Chicago and New York City without crossing the Canadian border. But when it stops at Amtrak stations in western New York State, armed Border Patrol agents routinely board the train, question passengers about their citizenship and take away noncitizens who cannot produce satisfactory immigration papers. 'Are you a U.S. citizen?' agents asked one recent morning, moving through a Rochester-bound train full of dozing passengers at a station outside Buffalo. 'What country were you born in?'

"When the answer came back, 'the U.S.,' they moved on. But Ruth Fernandez, 60, a naturalized citizen born in Ecuador, was asked for identification. And though she was only traveling home to New York City from her sister’s in Ohio, she had made sure to carry her American passport. On earlier trips, she said, agents had photographed her, and taken away a nervous Hispanic man.

"He was one of hundreds of passengers taken to detention each year from domestic trains and buses along the nation’s northern border. The little-publicized transportation checks are the result of the Border Patrol’s growth since 9/11...

 " 'I was actually woken up with a flashlight in my face,' recalled Mike Santomauro, 27, a law student who encountered the patrol in April, at 2 a.m. on a train in Rochester. Across the aisle, he said, six agents grilled a student with a computer who had only an electronic version of his immigration documents. Through the window, Mr. Santomauro said, he could see three black passengers, standing with arms raised beside a Border Patrol van..."

When I look at the photo accompanying the New York Times article, I wonder, when will they begin asking and searching more. Maybe inquiring into religious beliefs, matching names against lists according to political leanings, inspecting the food we are carrying. Less and less do I feel as if I am being alarmist. 

I spent last evening reading through a week's worth of emails. I had figured late August would be a good time to take a week off, as in completely off everything--not only email, but cell phone, Internet, radio, television, etc., etc. More about what I did on my summer vacation another time, but obviously, the pace of legal developments around raw milk, and food rights, did not abate. Far from it.

The struggle for access to nutritionally-dense food has evolved itn a multi-front war, and the action is becoming hot and heavy, with little respect for vacation timetables...or individual rights. Counteroffenses are being fought, where skilled attorneys are willing to take up the struggle. Here are three key developments over the last week:

-- The government opts for a harassment strategy--for now--in the Rawesome Foods case. The Rawesome Foods case in the Venice section of Los Angeles bears very close watching in the food rights war. Remember, the June raid on Rawesome included law enforcement representatives from all government levels--local (Los Angeles District Attorney and Department of Public Health), state (California Deparment of Food and Agriculture), and federal (U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Federal Bureau of Investigation). It was a totally coordinated surprise assault, with agents' guns drawn. In other words, the full power of The State apparatus being brought to bear to eliminate one community's access to raw milk, raw honey, fermented foods, pastured eggs, and so forth. So you have to assume that any follow-on action will continue to be carefully coordinated at all State levels, with approval by all parties.

The big question following the raid was what The State's follow-on action would be. A California challenge to the food club's lease arrangements? An FDA challenge to the interstate shipment of raw milk? No, The State has opted for a simple local tactic: harassment, in the form of a building code challenge.

Here is how Aajonus Vonderplanitz, a founder of Rawesome, explains the latest development: "The government is trying every means to close us so that we cannot provide our members with their own healthy food that we have worked so hard to make available. Because they have not been able to close us on health-issues and our Right to Association, they are trying building-safety-violation tactics. The Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety (LADBS) has issued a closure notice...Since this is not a residence or public food venture, this entire issue is probably moot and can be dismissed by a judge when applying for an injunction against LA City.

"To buy time, I am reluctant to ask for an appeal because that may give it jurisdiction that they do not have because we are not selling anything (as stated in its notice) and we are not open to public. Right to Choose Healthy Food/Rawesome has a charity-based agreement with the owners of the property to use the lot as a distribution center and our members have agreed that the buildings that exist are adequate for their needs as per membership agreement (see attached)."

Vonderplanitz concludes with an appeal for "all willing attorneys to help us fight this fast." I know Rawesome has some attorney members who were outspoken in their outrage immediately after the raid. Hopefully one or more of them will take up the appeal. If anyone else is interested, get in touch with me for contact information to reach Vonderplanitz.

2. Massachusetts retracts the Cease-and-Desist order against Brigitte Ruthman's single-cow herdshare. As Vonderplanitz indicates, the war is at a stage where skilled lawyers are more important than ever in fighting the government assault. Ruthman has engaged a lawyer, and in response to her request for discussions, and threat to file suit, the Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources has rescinded the order hand-delivered by an agriculture inspector to the dairy farmer last month.

The letter and MDAR response are worth reading. Essentially, Ruthman threatened to file suit unless MDAR engaged in discussions on the herdshare question, and MDAR quickly responded by withdrawing the cease-and-desist and agreeing to discussions. The MDAR's letter, however, insists that its position in going after the herdshare is the correct one--even citing the New York case involving Meadowsweet Dairy to back up its claim. Still, should negotiations fail, the suit can be filed.

3. The FTCLDF survives round one in its suit against the FDA, and wins points in the process. At first glance, it appears as if the federal district judge is providing only a slender opening to the FTCLDF by suggesting in his 56-page decision that the legal organization file a citizen petition to the FDA over the interstate ban on raw milk sales. Of course, everyone knows the FDA wants to continue enforcing its ban. But the judge leaves open continuation of the suit should the FDA do the expected.

Moreover, the judge indicates in the decision that he doesn't approve of key aspects of the FDA's argument. As one example, he uses the case in which Eric Wagoner and other Georgia consumers were forced to dump raw milk transported from South Carolina last September to take issue with FDA claims it hasn't enforced the interstate raw milk ban on individual consumers.

He states: "The direct purchaser plaintiffs also contend that the FDA's direction that plaintiff Wagoner destroy the raw milk that he had purchased for himself, along with all of the other raw milk that he was transporting from South Carolina to Georgia for distribution to members of his virtual farmers' market, demonstrates that there is not only a credible threat that the FDA will enforce the regulations against a direct purchaser plaintiff, but that the FDA has actually done so. On the present record, the court must take as true the plaintiffs' allegations that Wagoner was told to destroy the raw milk that he was transporting across state lines for himself, because he had purchased it for himself, as well
as the raw milk that he was transporting across state lines to distribute to others. The FDA has made no attempt to present evidence that it neither ordered Wagoner to destroy the raw milk, state officials did, nor ordered Wagoner to destroy the raw milk because he was attempting to transport some of the raw milk across state lines for his own consumption. Thus, on the present record, the direct purchaser plaintiffs have made sufficient showing that they face a credible threat of injury to have standing."

In a number of other places, the judge seems similarly skeptical of the FDA's assertions. Perhaps most important, he seems to take the case seriously. That's not good news for the FDA.

Although there are some encouraging developments over the last week, it's important to remember that our government is quite adept at waging war. And key elements of the government establishment are lusting for action--how else do you explain Los Angeles bureaucrats spending time in late August going after a tiny food distributor? Slash-and-burn, shock-and-awe, diversionary tactics--they're all part of the repertoire. It promises to be a long-term struggle.
***

While I view the struggle as a war, Wisconsin buying club owner Max Kane, who has been the subject of several direct assaults, likes to view the enemy as akin to a mafioso family. He's assigned mafia roles to key officials of the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection in a new video that opens in dramatic fashion. This one is devoted to examining the three raids intended to shut down Wisconsin raw dairy farmer Vernon Hershberger. (If you have trouble viewing the video here, you can see it here on YouTube.)

***

Thanks again to Steve Bemis for an excellent blog post last week.

I am away this week. Steve Bemis has written a guest blog post. Steve is a Michigan lawyer active in local agriculture and food-rights issues, and a member of the board of the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund. He comments here about the larger questions that rarely get addressed concerning food-borne illness.

You may be familiar with the elephant-in-the-living-room teaching moment.  The group leader helps to expose the "elephant" as the overwhelming previously-invisible presence influencing the group's process.  It's the assumption that noone speaks of either because it's too obvious, or everyone believes it, or no-one wants to talk about it - usually, a combination.

One elephant in the raw milk discussion is this: why doesn't everyone get sick when there is a cluster of apparently food-born illness?  Through studies which tilt heavily to the circumstantial and often far away from hard science, epidemiologists (usually over-worked and under-funded health department employees) wage an ex-post-facto effort to find a pathogen to blame.  This search is based on the premise that an external agent (germ) has invaded.  Other possible scenarios are given short shrift, and a more sophisticated understanding of how food-borne illness occurs, gets lost.

Assuming they conclude a pathogen was responsible, we may expect a snort from the invisible elephant: why didn't everyone get sick?  Answering the elephant's call is hindered by at least two factors. The first smacks of elitism:  my gut is healthier (or at least, different) than yours.  A second is the cornerstone beliefs of Western science and culture: science can find answers and we can fix almost any problem. Lost critical systems in your moon-mission?  No problem, we'll bring you around the dark side and home again.  Indians bothering you?  No problem, John Wayne will fix things up.

Setting aside elitism, however, the question remains. Assume the majority of raw milk drinker guts are healthier and they don't get sick in an outbreak, why is this?  At least one hypothesis suggests itself (unstudied as far as I know), namely through some unknown combination of factors, even some long-term raw milk drinkers will get sick.  The test for this hypothesis might be to feed the supposedly offending milk to a control population of non-raw-milk drinkers, and see how many of them become sick.  

Such studies have obvious ethical problems, typical in many human studies, although in at least one published incident report, regular drinkers of raw milk (presumably, pre-pasteurized) were shown to have significant antibodies to campylobacter and did not get sick. Another possibility is that the concentration of pathogens may vary greatly in a body of fluid, with greater concentrations possible in a given "slug" of product, thus upsetting even a healthy gut. 

It seems that medical researchers are beginning to creep up on these issues.  Recent suggestions that gut diversity is important to overall health have been escaping academia and the medical establishment. As well, there is the European study of children which showed significantly lower incidences of allergic reactions (hay fever, asthma) in those drinking raw milk.  Clearly more work is needed, and now appears to be under way as Western science attempts in its own way to isolate, quantify and thereby understand.

All food comes to us from the soil, through plants and animals.  So the analysis of gut health is far from simple.  The variables are likely infinite (not to mention the ethics of studies), and so to concentrate on one is myopic making little sense on the broad canvas of life.  Rather than militaristically targeting one "pathogen" after another -- causing untold collateral damage in the process -- it seems our challenge is to understand the wealth of diversity in which we live, to get the most healthful result by teasing out the best soil enrichment, plant selection, animal husbandry, and kitchen techniques for healthful eating and living.

I wonder as I watch my dogs supplementing their diet occasionally with rabbit and deer droppings--less so since beginning to feed them small amounts of raw meat and vegetables -- or quenching their thirst from the well-used birdbath, how really important it may be to have a bit of dirt on one's plate, or in one's glass.  Indeed, if one lived, even today, in parts of the ancient world or in ayurvedic India, the elephant in the room (or, for that matter, the sacred cow) would not need a group facilitator to be noticed.

We've seen a steady stream of articles about raw milk in the major media over the last few months. And many of them include some variation of this statement from the CDC about raw milk's dangers, such as was contained in an article in The Economist:

"Public health advocates dispute the health benefits, though, and say that raw milk is inherently risky, especially for children, old people, and anybody with health problems. Between 1998 and 2008, according to the Centers for Disease Control, some 1,600 people became sick after drinking the stuff. Nearly 200 were hospitalised and two died..."

Each time I see those numbers re-stated, I find myself shaking my head. They can't be right, I sense. I decided a few days ago to try to get into them and, lo and behold, they are high, at least if you compare them to numbers CDC has previously issued about raw milk illnesses. Plus, they are misstated in a very important way when it comes to so-called deaths from raw milk. It's a little complicated, so bear with me.  

1. Total number of illnesses 1998-2008. If you take the certified CDC numbers provided to the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund's Freedom-of-Information Act request in 2007 (covering 33 years 1973-2005) and isolate the period 1998-2005--you get 1,046 illnesses.

Then, you go to the official national CDC outbreak tables (Foodborne Outbreak Online Database) for the period 2006 and 2007. Those tables are supposed to be the most up to date, but they don't go beyond 2007, so it's not clear where the CDC is getting its 2008 numbers from. Those two years (2006 and 2007) showed 172 additional illnesses attributed to raw dairy, for a total of 1,218.

So for 200,8 I went to a set of tables maintained by Cornell University, which draw on newspaper articles, and is pretty close to CDC for other years, and it showed 36 illnesses for 2008.

So, using the CDC's own data for 1998-2007 (and Cornell for 2008), I came up with a total of 1,254 illnesses. This is nearly 30% fewer than the 1,600-plus reported in the Economist and other papers.

2. Hospitalizations. Going through the CDC foodborne illness tables, I come up with about 25 hospitalizations, not the 200-plus CDC claims in the media. That includes one case of 12 hospitalizations from queso fresca cheese in 2003 in Texas--cheese almost certainly made from milk not intended to be served raw.

3. Deaths. Here is where I believe CDC is being most seriously misleading. It says there have been two deaths from raw milk, as if to suggest two people gulped down raw milk and dropped dead. The two deaths, it turns out, (according to the CDC's table I linked to above) both occurred during 2003. One was in California, and one in Texas (the same case as the 12 hospitalizations I mentioned previously). Both were from queso fresca cheese and, as I said before, almost certainly came from conventional milk intended for pasteurization. I say that because queso fresca is most typically made in the Hispanic communities, and generally from milk bought informally from farms that normally send their milk for pasteurization.

The reality is that there have been zero deaths from milk intended to be sold unpasteurized for the 1998-2008 period (versus 3 deaths from pasteurized milk in Massachusetts in 2007, according to the CDC table). And from all I can tell, zero deaths from raw milk going back to at least the mid-1980s--a period of at least 25 years.

Maybe the people at realrawmilkfacts.com can help unravel the discrepancies, since the site has all kinds of studies and statements from the CDC and FDA saying raw milk causes huge numbers of illness. Or possibly Milky Way can help, since MW posted some data on illnesses for 2010 following my previous post.

But as several people noted following my previous post, and have pointed out repeatedly, the government has a double standard for raw milk versus other foods. The current debacle over contaminated eggs is just another example--a recall of eggs from a large producer rather than a shutdown of the offender. The big problems in our food system have nothing to do with small producers of raw milk, but much more to do with the factory producers. But the authorities seem unwilling to stop at anything to disparage raw milk, including providing misleading data.