The Complete Patient

Mark McAfee is preparing to move on to “Plan B”—the legal phase to block California’s campaign to get rid of raw milk. That will most likely involve a suit sometime in the next few weeks to obtain an injunction against enforcement of AB 1735.

The biggest benefit of a court action is that it would require the California Department of Food and Agriculture to testify in an open hearing, and that may present the agency with a serious problem: How will it explain the fundamental contradictions in its interpretation of AB 1735?

In the meantime, California officials have delivered the message to Mark that they aren’t interested in “Plan A,” the compromise option whereby pasteurized and unpasteurized milk co-exist. Mark says he was rebuffed in an effort to set up a meeting with the Assembly’s agriculture committee chairperson, Nicole Parra; a committee consultant called him back minutes after Mark called requesting a meeting, admonishing him not to bother her.

As I stated yesterday, I’ve been similarly sandbagged in trying to obtain comment from the CDFA, as well as with a committee consultant. I received an email from a consultant stating that “in light of the threat of litigation,” no comment would be forthcoming. See, it’s all Mark’s fault that that the dialogue has ended—for threatening litigation.

“The battle lines are drawn in the sand,” says Mark.

Among many issues (restrictive laws, no hearings, restraint of commerce) is the small matter of how the coliforms in raw milk are measured. The legislation passed by the California legislature doesn’t answer that question, but the CDFA's press release announcing the standard is totally confused. It begins by saying that raw milk “may have a count of no more than 10 coliform bacteria per milliliter in their final product…” (italics added).

Further down, the release states that “routine farm inspection samples of bulk milk(italics added) collected during the last year show the two dairies (Organic Pastures and Claravale) would have met the new coliform standards 75 percent of the time.”

So which is it, CDFA? The difference is huge, as Mark points out in a letter he sent yesterday to the agency.

“Specifically, I need to know what legal statute or regulation permits and authorizes CDFA to test finished raw milk products for coliforms. Nowhere in AB 1735 does it say that CDFA is permitted to test coliforms in finished products. AB 1735 only permits the testing of raw milk for direct human consumption for coliforms. It does not authorize or suggest where that test may be performed. Please clarify that authority and how it came to pass that finished products would be tested.”

He says he’s had a private lab test both Organic Pastures' bulk tank and finished product. “Our bulk tank tests pass regularly. The data we have compiled show that with a perfectly clean system the bottling process increases coliforms on an order of magnitude of more than 15 times higher. Average bulk tank coliforms are 4.3 over the last few weeks but the average finished product is 66.”

CDFA has painted itself into a bad corner here. My guess is that the agency is demonstrating such confusion about the coliform readings for a simple reason: It is so focused on getting raw milk off the market it’s forgotten the excuse it was using to accomplish that goal.

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Pretty cool that Rep. (and presidential candidate) Ron Paul got up in the House of Representatives earlier this week and proposed a law permitting interstate commerce of raw milk (his photo above).

Now granted, Ron Paul has introduced lots of proposals (doing away with the Federal Reserve, putting the U.S. back on the gold standard) that never saw the light of day.

But the simple fact that he introduced this when he did, while running for president, in the midst of the California controversy, suggests he was hearing from enough people that this was important. Even if it goes nowhere, it’s notable that a national politician has stood up in Congress and said that this issue warrants attention.

Steve Bemis has some excellent info following my post on how to encourage followup to Ron Paul's initiative.