I appreciate the comments on my most recent “giving-thy-neighbor-raw-milk” posting. I suspected my view wouldn’t be hugely popular.
Elizabeth McInerney makes a very convincing argument that NOT making raw milk available is a disservice because it has the effect of continuing practices that promote disease. I appreciate Linda Diane Feldt’s distinctions between what is and isn’t “wild” food.
There were actually some arguments that had occurred to me that weren’t made here. For example, there is that statistic cited in the Time Magazine article about raw milk that up to one-third of dairy-related illnesses come from raw milk, suggesting that more than two-thirds of dairy-related illnesses come from pasteurized milk.
All of the foregoing being said, I stand by my decision in the neighbor situation. I think there is a distinction to be made between what I believe, and how I implement my beliefs. The difference between feeding my neighbor’s child spinach and feeding him raw milk is in perception. Spinach is perceived as being a conventional every-day food. Raw milk is perceived as being unusual (i.e. risky) because it hasn’t been turned into a conventional every-day food (via pasteurization).
Some day (in the not-too-distant future, I expect) that perception will change. But until it does, I’m going to exercise caution in educating my neighbor via personal experience. I can tell her how beneficial I think raw milk is, even forward her web site information about it, and encourage her to obtain some. But that is still different than actually giving it to her and advising her to serve it to her son because it will potentially help his immune system.
That gets to another point, brought up by Steve Bemis, who points out that Organic Pastures’ milk wasn’t really to blame in the children’s illnesses I described…and furthermore, implying that raw milk is never to blame in such illnesses. I followed the Organic Pastures episode closely and I’ve spoken with Mark McAfee at length as he’s explained various possible reasons for the fact that several children who consumed his raw milk became ill.
The fact is that the E.coli 0157:H7 found in Lauren Herzog and other children (though no specific bacteria was found in Chris Martin) was different genetically from the E.coli found in those sickened by spinach. Mark has come up with different theories about why the children became sick and they all sound plausible, but the reality is that no one knows for sure, and we may never know for sure. (See my December posting on this subject.) Now maybe there is some new data, but I suspect that will not completely resolve everything.
Mary McGonigle-Martin even proposed a new theory I hadn’t heard before from Mark or anyone else: that the extreme heat of the late summer activated growth of the E.coli.
My point about “wild food’ was simply that there may be naturally occurring events in certain unprocessed foods that alter them in ways that can sicken some people. It could be a cow’s illness, passed along in the milk. Or some chemical event in the milk, perhaps brought on by extreme heat. I guess I don’t accept the argument that raw milk itself will never make a person sick. Not that that fact makes it bad. It gets back to the argument several people make about the expectation that has evolved that somehow our food supply can, and should, be made risk free.
For raw milk, there is likely a slight risk, probably smaller than getting sick from restaurant food, of illness. It just comes with the territory. Here is how Mary expressed it in her email to me: "I’m a health fanatic. I believe in raw milk. I gave my son raw milk because I thought it would be good for him. I believe Mark runs the cleanest dairy humanly possible. But the fact is, my son still got e-coli. There is a risk when drinking raw milk. People need to know this. I think the greatest risk is in the summer months when the temperatures are at their highest. E-coli multiplies in the heat. Maybe there needs to be a warning on the labels about the risk during the summer months."
The problem for me vis a vis my neighbor stems from this expectation issue. If my neighbor expects a risk-free food system, and her son by some slight chance becomes ill after drinking the raw milk I have supplied, there could be a problem. Such people then tend to look for scapegoats—the farmer, the packager…the neighbor. Yes, these people may be unjustly seeking perfection in an imperfect world, but that is the reality. I still have to live with my neighbor, and I’d like to live peacefully.
So I guess this is a longwinded way of trying to explain where I think idealism and reality may diverge, and that there are nuances to the education process we all agree is so important.
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