CA Raw Milk Hearing: Another Dead End or Cracks in the Foundation? More Speculation About Illness
Tuesday, April 15, 2008 at 12:56AM I am on my way to the California Senate hearing about raw milk safety. It's a long trip for me, from the East, and I've been wondering since I began making the arrangements a couple weeks ago whether it is really worth doing. Will it be serious and substantive, or just a pro forma kind of event? There have, after all, been all kinds of legislative dead ends, such as in Maryland and Pennsylvania, along with the hearing in California that seemed destined to roll back AB 1735, only to fail.
I still don't know what's going to happen in California, but as it draws closer, I sense it could be more important than originally anticipated. The little spat between Sen. Dean Florez and the California Department of Food and Agriculture is something new. Not many legislators have been willing to take on the agriculture regulators so openly, and defiantly.
It's not clear his open chalenge will yield substantive results. The CDFA people are quite adept at manipulating the political process, and using scare tactics to get their way. They may well be angling with political supporters to isolate and embarrass Sen. Florez by not showing up for the hearing, and emerging unscathed.
Yet even the most cynical state legislators tend to have at least some respect for the institution they belong to. For CDFA to ignore a key legislator's repeated requests to testify at an open hearing could be interpretedas a slap at all the legislators.
There are also signs of percolating activity in New York, the other hotbed of official anti-raw-milk enforcement. There a legislator has introduced legislation to legalize retail sales of raw milk; that proposal is in committee. Thans to Stu McCarty of NY's Weston A. Price Foundation for the alert--he says he learned of it at a "listening session" conducted by New York's Department of Agriculture and Markets, where the commissioner, Patrick Hooker, acknowledged that changes are neded in NY to give consumers more choice.
But he said any changes must await the outcome of the administrative and court cases involving Meadowsweet Dairy LLC--which could be code for saying that if NY Ag and Markets loses, it will become more flexible by necessity, and if it wins, it's more of the same old song.
Between the courts and the legislatures, some glimmers of reason, and light, my be emerging.
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I'm always impressed by the level of knowledge displayed in discussions on this blog about food-borne illness, and the conversation following my original post abot Sen. Florez last week is no different. The wide gulf in analysis says two things t me: how complex the subject is, and how much we have to learn before it is fully understood. (And Amanda, I'm sorry I came across as dismissivein disagreeing with you a while back--not my intent.)
To offer just one more example of the disparities, the Boston Sunday Globe Magazine published a letter regarding my article on raw milk threeweeks ago, in which thewriter, claiming a background in epidemiology, suggests tht because raw milk is so expensive, people don't consume enough to get sick. A bit of a stretch, I'd say.
Reader Comments (8)
Regarding how much raw milk is consumed, given its high price, I have an interesting data point: In March, 2004, I began the "milk cure", drinking 6 to 8 quarts of fresh, unprocessed milk per day, and continued to live on nothing but raw milk, cream and colostrum for the next 100+ days, except for small amounts of fiber supplementation. My health soared! Since then, I continue to live largely on raw milk, consuming between 70 and 90 pounds per week, while consuming less than a pound of other food per week, on average. This is now over four years... I feel great! I am interested in whether anyone has ever attempted to live exclusively on pasteurized milk, and what the results were - when I tried to substitute pasteurized milk, I found that my body could not tolerate more than about 1/2 gallon of pasteurized per day. I'd love to challenge a pasteurized milk advocate to try a similar experiment with their "nutritionally equivalent" food...
As to Jeromes point about the surging price of milk thats true but also untrue. The price of milk has in silver eagles remained nearly the same for the last 100 years, today I can buy appx. 3 gal. of raw milk for a 1 oz. silver eagle coin. That same 3 gal. of raw milk would cost at least $18 Federal Reserve paper fiat notes. Sorry I got off track thats another story.
Lets hope we have a positive out come. Looking forward to reading your report David.
Don
I'm thinking specifically of carbohydrates - did you crave them? If so, and if the cravings stopped, how long did that take? I read somewhere that it takes 18 months without carbs to lose the cravings.
Also, if you don't mind sharing, what motivated you to go on the milk cure?
As soon as I began drinking the milk (Organic Pastures in glass), all of my cravings for other foods went away. I was amazed! Even my cravings for caffeine in the AM, and wine or beer in the PM, disappeared, and within a week of living on milk I re-awakened after a month of post caffeine withdrawal fog.
I had no cravings for carbs, as I had cut carbs to 20g or less per day the previous August. I found that carb cravings left after just a few weeks, provided that I did not indulge in any. If I indulge in them, they still give me the "get mores". One of my fears around starting the milk diet was that I was going to greatly increase my intake of carbs - I went from under 20g per day to 357g per day. I was afraid that this would re-awaken my carb cravings and destroy my ease , but, instead, I felt even better. Later I learned to add cream to the milk to bring the butterfat up into the 5-6% range, and raise my percent of calories from fat to a more enjoyable 70%+.
I agree with Don, that the price may be called high, but it is, in fact, low, in terms of the value I have received.
I hope something good comes from today's hearing, but I believe that we will more likely be treated to a show, while the real decisions continue to be made in secret, by a power elite that wants us weak and dependent. I suspect that one of the reasons that fresh, unprocessed milk is dangerous to them is that it helps awaken one's willingness to look at the scary truth about how power really works in this world.
Scheduled start time is 3PM Pacific time, but may start later working around an earlier hearing.
Bob
It seems odd that the authorities are making such a point about this when public pressure is growing overwhelmingly in the direction of being able to choose what one wants to eat from one's local farmer without any obstructive paternalism on the part of our government employees. They should be slightly less than our partners, since we're the ones who pay their salaries, but they should do as they're directed.