A favorite tactic of jailers is to make prisoners clean up their mess after rebellious behavior. The idea is to humiliate them, in hopes they won’t ever again contemplate standing up to their jailers. You get that feeling of the inmates being humiliated when you watch a video of Georgia consumers earlier this week being forced to pour out the milk they previously paid a South Carolina dairy $5 a gallon for.

Sure, the consumers are being defiant, but the message of humiliation and exasperation pervade.

Mark McAfee of Organic Pastures Dairy Co. had advised Eric Wagoner, the organizer of the buying club that shipped the milk from South Carolina to buyers in Georgia, to video the execution of a Georgia Department of Agriculture order that confiscated raw milk be destroyed by Wagoner, supposedly in violation of federal prohibitions on interstate raw milk sales (following my Oct. 15 post describing the confiscation). As you can see from the video, a number of consumers took him at his word, and the YouTube video is one of several recordings made of the event. (I hope to have additional footage upcoming.)

As a number of us have said on previous occasions here, a picture is worth a thousand words. While this video is rough, it communicates more vividly than anyone can in words the implications of government interference in our nutritional lives.

Watching the busybody regulators monitor the dumping of food that hard-working people previously paid for can only be described as pathetic. Hopefully it will communicate the craziness of a mentality in which government do-gooders go to outrageous extremes to protect us from ourselves.

The question of whether anything illegal was occurring is unclear, backed up by the fact that Wagoner had been delivering raw milk on behalf of Georgia consumers for five years without interference. No, this was most likely an order executed by the Georgia Department of Agriculture at the behest of their handlers at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which wants to close off every possible avenue for consumers to obtain raw milk; in this case, the target is buying clubs, which are organizations that help facilitate delivery of milk from farms directly to consumers, saving them the time and carbon-based energy of fetching it.

There was talk at the milk-pouring on Monday of trying to change Georgia’s prohibition on sale of raw milk for human consumption. I hope consumers follow through, and keep the discussion going. The more the public learns about their government’s obsession with raw milk, the better.

***

There’s some interesting discussion over at the Marler blog following up on his posting that condemns the Weston A. Price Foundation and me. Food poisoning lawyer Bill Marler argues at one point that because I have an important book about raw milk coming out, I should condemn the Weston A. Price Foundation and other raw milk proponents for their positions on contamination of raw milk. I point out that raw milk proponents might disagree on various aspects of the contamination issue, but all agree that the government has no business telling us what foods we can or can’t consume.

I have said repeatedly that raw milk can become contaminated, and that raw dairies should be committed to the highest standards of safety. As I ask on the Marler blog, now that I’ve said it again, what happens next? Do the authorities get off our backs and allow us to drink our milk? No, the feeling I get is that the more you agree with them, the more louder they want you to say it and the more conditions they raise. It never quite comes to a conclusion.