Once a war gets going, the combatants often forget what sparked the whole thing. Usually, when they do remember, it turns out to be something pretty minor in the context of the fight at hand–some insult or suspected aggression. And if you probe the actual incident, you find that events weren’t anything close to what was initially claimed by the war’s initiators.
The Michigan raw-milk war now ongoing is turning into a perfect case in point about mistaken causes. The spark supposedly was lit last spring “with a report from a local health department about children who had become sick,” presumably from raw milk, Katherine Fedder of the Michigan Department of Agriculture told me when I first questioned her a week ago about the seizure of Family Farms Cooperative’s products and the search of Richard Hebron’s home and the Morgan & York storage facility. In addition, mention of the sick family was made in the search warrant used to justify the invasion of the Hebron’s home. I’ve been wanting to explore the actual circumstances of the sick children since this war broke out, and earlier this week, I got the opportunity when I spoke with the mother of the family that became ill.
I felt like a detective as I listened to Kathryn Corey of Ann Arbor tell me the the step-by-step chronology of her family’s illnesses. She said the family has gone through a great deal of soul searching and agonizing in an effort to reconstruct exactly what happened. I think we can all appreciate the difficulty of trying to remember exactly what we ate or drank on what dates even a few days after the fact.
It all seems to have begun last April 13, the Thursday before Good Friday, and the weekly co-op delivery to Ann Arbor. The Corey familly ran out of the raw milk purchased the Friday before, and her husband, Joe, went to a local Kroger to pick up a half gallon of regular pasteurized milk. The father and his young son drank some of the milk that evening as part of a snack, and during the night became ill–the child vomiting and the father having diarrhea.
On Friday, Joe and son were recovering from their illness, and picked up their raw milk delivery in Ann Arbor. On Easter Sunday evening, the family ordered some Thai takeout. Later that evening, Joe, wanting to finish the pasteurized milk, poured some for himself and his daughter. That evening, Joe became ill again, and now his daughter was sick as well.
When the daughter continued vomiting for several days into the next week, Katherine called the family physician. By later in the week, both father and daughter were better. Joe concluded that the Thai food must have made him and his daughter so sick, so he called the public health department to complain. The health officials couldn’t find evidence of anyone else who had become sick from the Thai food, so they inquired into the family’s eating history. That is when the matter of raw milk came up, and the health inspectors apparently concluded it must have been the raw milk that made the three family members (father, son, daughter) ill.
There was just one flaw with that conclusion, says Kathryn. She never became ill. And it turns out she was the only family member who never touched the pasteurized milk from Kroger. She continued to drink raw milk throughout the entire episode (except for a day when they ran out). Moreover, the family has been consuming the raw milk for a year-and-a-half without any other problems.
After all their discussions, the Corey family feels pretty certain that the culprit was the PASTEURIZED milk, not raw milk. Unfortunately, it never occurred to the father to hold onto the tainted milk; by the time he realized it was the likely culprit in the family illnesses, he had poured out the little milk remaining and thrown away the carton.
Ironically, it was the complaint to health officials that eventually set off the investigation and sting operation against Richard Hebron October 13, six months after the initial illnesses. I wonder if the MDA will now investigate the dangers of pasteurized milk, and maybe conduct a sting operation against Kroger.
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