What's It Mean for a Suburban Mom to Become Target of Food Police? In MN, Home Search, Questioning of Neighbors, Threat of Criminal Prosecution
Monday, December 20, 2010 at 12:13PM 
For consumers of nutrient-dense foods who have assumed that it's only farmers and managers of food clubs who are at risk in the growing good-food clampdown, the story of Rae Lynn Sandvig may help set things straight.
Sandvig is a suburban mother of four who lives outside Minneapolis, in Bloomington. She began drinking raw milk seven years ago, to counter some health problems, and soon she was buying five gallons every two weeks for her family. Gradually, like other raw milk drinkers, she graduated to grass-fed beef, organic veggies, wild Alaskan salmon, and other such foods.
As part of her enthusiasm for raw milk, she helped friends and neighbors gain access to milk by allowing Minnesota dairyman Michael Hartmann to park in her home's driveway every couple weeks to make deliveries. That all worked out fine, till last June, when Hartmann was accused by Minnesota public health and agriculture officials of being the source of milk that made five raw milk drinkers ill (the numbers gradually increased to about fifteen).
Then the Minnesota Department of Agriculture went on what I have described as a "rampage" of collective punishment, that included shutting down a Minneapolis buying club and another dairy farmer unrelated to Hartmann.
It also included going after Rae Lynn Sandvig. I should say that Sandvig has remained silent about her identity over the last six months in an effort to maintain her privacy, even though pieces of her experience have been made public. But now she's decided other people need to know what can happen even to ordinary people who become serious about obtaining nutrient-dense foods, and last Friday she spoke to me in her first public interview.
The whole nightmare began one morning in early June, when seven police and MDA investigators showed up at her house as she was finishing her shower, and presented her husband with a criminal search warrant.
They spent two hours going through the family's refrigerator and questioning her about whether she was reselling milk, meat, and other food. She says she was "terrified, horrified, traumatized" by the home search, breaking down in tears in front of the seven investigators and police rummaging through her kitchen.
The event seemed even more threatening when she learned an MDA investigator had visited the homes of three of her neighbors who had shared in the milk and beef Hartmann delivered, seeking specifics about her food distribution practices. She says the investigator threatened these consumers with subpoenas that would require them to testify unless they allowed him into their homes to answer questions and look into their refrigerators, and then sign an affidavit listing foods they had acquired via Sandvig. The neighbors have since clammed up to her, she says, but one told her the investigator was particularly interested in packages of meat labeled "Not for Re-sale" on which the farmer Meat that is slaughtered or processed in a non-USDA-inspected facility is labeled this way to prevent its retail sale.
Then, just a few days ago, Sandvig received a registered letter from the MDA accusing her of "assisting in the sale of raw milk from your home in Bloomington" and offering her an "opportunity to be heard" in an "administrative meeting...before the department decides what if any enforcement action it will take against you for operating a food business without a license," most notably "selling raw milk and selling food from unapproved sources." Possible outcomes? "Criminal prosecution or administrative penalties," the letter stated.
The meeting was originally scheduled for last week but is now being re-scheduled for January, Sandvig says. The Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund has agreed to represent her in the meeting and any proceedings.
There are lots of upsetting elements to this story, but what I find most disturbing is the questioning of neighbors. To threaten them with subpoenas unless they ratted on another neighbor, Sandvig, about how she acquires and distributes food is not unlike what goes on in totalitarian societies. There, secret police keep the populace in check by encouraging neighbors to report lawbreaking of any kind to the police. Lawbreaking, in such societies, generally include trivialities like what Sandig did, of dividing up meat or other foods she acquired in bulk, with neighbors.
Sandvig told me the experience has cast a pall on her relationships with those neighbors. One agreed initially to supply her with a copy of the affidavit the investigator pushed her to sign, and then renegged, ostensibly after consulting with an attorney who advised not sharing documents. As I said, this is basic secret police type stuff.
And now, the the so-called food safety legislation on the brink of passage in Congress, it seems likely we'll see more such behavior. The legislation passed the U.S. Senate last evening, and is due to come up in the House likely tomorrow, after which the President has committed to signing it. The legislation will allow the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to hire some thousand of additional investigators, as well as strengthen cooperation with state agriculture authorities.
There's more in an article I just wrote for Grist.
Reader Comments (54)
nj aka Ellen
for those genuinely interested, the book "And Not a Shot is Fired", by Jan Kozak,explains how we got here to this situation in Ham-merica, where power over everyday life has been usurped by UNelected, UNaccountable agencies / authorities with alphabet-soup monikers.
in the early 50s, In that treatise, the communists spelled-out what they intended to do.
but all is not lost : the anti-dote for communism is assertion of the right to private property
Act passive and rest on your rights and you will soon have none. When ignorred they just erode away....
Protest and public revolt should come quickly if there was a leader. Where is the leader????
The Jews are being marched off to the Nutritional Concentration Camps and no one acts to stop the Fascist Nazi CAFO PMO pigs.
Oh... how different things are in California. Stand and fight behind the mom....
What is wrong with you people? Do you need a California Raw Milk drinker to come show you how to take down Beret Boy and his bootjacked thug FOOD INC mob crowd?
Get some creative guts!!! overies and balls....keep America free by excercising your rights and freedoms.
Excuse me.....but it all just vomited out!! What ever happened to standing together and fighting together. Now is the time to act together!!! Stop being observers as people are marched off one by one!! They are picking you apart....ever heard of a "cell phone ring down crisis response". One call from a victum and 50 people should come to the an individuals aid in 30 minutes. Where is the organization???? the strategy??? the planning???
Forget being passive....it is time to show your teeth, your voices and your video cameras and get the media involved. This is not easy or free.....it is called being a US citizen.
Mark
I would have said, "bring it on". I can understand the strain this placed on her and her neighbors. Especially saying they will show her a form then changing their minds. I'd keep looking over my shoulder for that knife.
"and then sign an affidavit listing foods they had acquired via Sandvig. "
Was she re-selling foods? Or did people just pick it up at her place? If this is against the law, does that mean I cannot ask my "neighbor" to pick up some food at the store for me and pay her for the food and gas? This sounds like BS.
http://www.grist.org/error/404/ this is what I got for your link David.
We need leadership, and we need to all step up and defend the rights of others to eat food that they want to eat. But Mark, getting permission by creating another bureaucracy in the form of a 'raw milk board' isn't going to save our rights.
Otherwise, welcome to Amerika. With the passage of 510, I am pretty much thinking that we need to go overboard or underground. It's not going to be much fun, but starving slowly on your daily ration of GMO soybeans isn't much to look forward to either.
Food freedom or fight.
Good Q about whether Sandvig was re-selling food. On the milk, she was allowing her driveway to be used as a dropoff point, as I understand it. Then dividing up meat, and being reimbursed for her cost. The state in its documentation seeking a search warrant of her home last June suggested she was re-selling other products, like frozen vegetables and salmon. I didn't get into those subjects in any depth with Sandvig, since they are subjects that will likely come up in her upcoming meeting with authorities.
The link to the Grist article has been fixed. Sorry about that.
David
I do not suggest the same solutions for all states. Every reality is different. Some places are Occupied by Fascists and beg a different response.
We do need national standards if we ever expect to be respected
Mark
overtly "honest" businessmen who are covertly interconnected like
an organized crime syndicate.
For example, the Jews of the Media Monopoly report that Congress
is about to repeal a food labeling law that was a part of the
2002 Farm Bill. This law would require that country-of-origin
labels be placed on all food. The Jews report that the ink and
paper of these labels would cost the consumers a billion dollars
the first year. "It too expensive!" is the first line of
reasoning behind most Jewish political swindles. Whether the
expense is legitimate or imaginary, is of no consequence to their
goals. That it will cost you and me a billion dollars is what the
Jews of the Media report but their report is designed not to
report the truth but to support their fellow Jews.
America's ranchers and farmers demanded this law as a means of
giving our people the power to choose what kind of food that we
want to eat and as a way for Americans to patriotically decide
whether to support American farmers or to buy products grown in
foreign countries. Although this law was supposed to go into
effect this fall, the Jews of the food processing and meat
packing industries have opposed it from the very first day and
have been able to get our spineless Congressmen to delay
implementation of this bill. With such a law, the Jews would have
trouble manipulating world food prices and controlling the food
sources and markets. And so, they are opposed to what the
American farmers demand.
The Jews are opposed to indicating the country-of-origin labels
on foods because they are afraid that they will lose money as
well as power. And they are right. If Americans knew that they
were buying foreign products while letting our own farmers go
bankrupt, we would not buy foreign products. This is a form of
democracy that the Jews oppose because it thwarts their goals of
the One World Plantation and the New World Order by allowing the
People to control our own destiny without being told what to do
by the international conspirators. When the Jews control food
sources, they can control food prices as well as entire
populations. Like Joseph and the Pharaoh, the Jews dream of
bringing the people of the world begging at their feet for bread.
And they can do that through genetically engineered crops which
are programmed to fail all at once during a specified season and
through the bankrupting of the small farmer and rancher.
The Jews control the import-export food industry as well as the
food processing industries so they want people to buy imported
and processed and devitalized foods that are cheaply produced and
which have a high profit margin. And because the Jews control
the banking industry, they want farmers to go bankrupt so that
they can foreclose on farm loans, steal the farms and sell them
to corporate farmers. Large, corporate farms produce lower
quality food at a lower price, using seeds and fertilizers sold
by the Jews and so they produce higher profits for the Jews than
do small farmer-owned farms, especially small organic farms. So,
forcing the small farmers and ranchers out of business with cheap
imports, is of benefit to the Jewish bankers as well as to the
Jewish middlemen of the fertilizer, seed and food processing and
slaughtering industries.
And so, like organized crime gangsters, the Jews in the lobbying
industry are presently bribing and blackmailing your Congressman
into repealing the country-of-origin measure for the benefit of
the Jews in food processing, importing and banking. All of these
Jews benefit in the billions of dollars simply by NOT having a
country-of-origin label on American foods. And when you eat some
ground up cockroaches in a can of something from an unknown
country, even the Jewish physicians benefit.
All good points except for laying it all at the feet of a ethnicity is a bit too pat. Jews just happen to be people, and people just happen to have some predisposition to wanting more power and control. Some people particularly are power hungry control freaks, and it has nothing to do with ethnicity or genetics. We could easily supplant any group of ethnic extraction in the "it's all their fault" file and end up in a war that would make Ha Shatan very happy....Oh,right.. that's already happened. History repeating again.
We're dealing with people that are promoting and supporting out of control control mechanisms through 'legal' methods and it's the systemic destruction of inherent HUMAN rights that we have to fight, not racial or ethnic heritage.
All this before coffee, too. Have a nice day.
You're giving the Jews too much credit. I think that it's more a case of "when they're good, they're really good, and when they're bad, they're really bad."
Even if you are 100% correct and on-the-mark, though, it does our cause harm to allow ourselves to get caught up in hatred. That's what seeds the vicious cycle of the oppressed becoming the oppressors. We can't simply get rid of all the Jews, or all the lawyers, or all the bureaucrats; much as that might seem like a perfect sollution. We have to find another way.
I wholeheartedly agree with you! I am working with some folks where I live so that we are prepared! Gotta stand up to this crap!
nj aka Ellen M
The Sally Jackson cheese has been confirmed as the raw cheese that poisioned people.
http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2010/12/sally-jackson-cheese-confirmed-as-outbreak-source/
cp
Did you read the "evidence" in this investigation?I've never seen a bigger pile of B.S. before.I don't see any credible evidence that would stand in court.Of course they are relying on us being gullible enough to fall for that old trick of "indistinguishable" PFGE patterns to claim matching strains of bacteria.This is not evidence that has any credibility if challenged.All of the other "evidence" is clearly a joke.
in our case, Alice Jongerden was a classic example of a Christian hauled before a magistrate, waiting for the Holy Spirit to give her the appropriate things to say. She reeled off the history of how we went from 1 cow to 22, then asked the judge " when did private become public?" Of course the Fool on the Bench avoided adressing, let alone, answering, that = the crux of the whole case
The Schmidt decision about cowsharing had just come down in Ontario, the previous week. I handed it up to the Judge as our trump card = the last word on the subject in Canadian law. So-called "Madame Justice" Gropper literally rolled her eyes : dismissing it as irrelevant
regardless of who actually authored the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, we are caught up in one the precepts set out therein ... dissidents now entangled in Court. The most important thing we do to fend off the hatred of the race traitors who rule Ham-merica, is keep to keep on producing our heritage ... milk and honey
The REAL MILK is flowing in British Columbia, this morning, Praise God!
The line between commercial(public) and private does not exist in commercial courtrooms, that is why the judge rolled her eyes.Once you give the judge jurisdiction over you,everything becomes a matter of commerce.If you identify yourself by the legal name you are property,legally obligated to perform the duties they give you.We have to draw the line outside the jurisdiction of those courtrooms.We are only obligated under common law and so is "Madame Justice" by the oath she has taken.Did she take an oath?Will she obey her oath?WE need to abandon all fear and stand up for the law,come what may.
"The Jews" have nothing to do with it. David Gumpert is Jewish, after all. This is just a racist scapegoating strategy, much like blaming Mexican immigrants for wage stagnation, when the real culprit is Wall Street and NAFTA.
The culprits to blame, in the case of raw milk, are the Monsanto Dean Foods GMO CAFO PMO FDA corporate agri-business interests.
Mark McAfee is right. We need to be organized. SOLIDARITY must be the word of the day. Either we must hang together, or we will hang seperately.
"The Jews are being marched off to the Nutritional Concentration Camps and no one acts to stop the Fascist Nazi CAFO PMO pigs."
Whereas I appreciate the rather effective image he was trying to create, it appears that others have taken the ball and run with it in a much more ugly spirited way.
Damn straight, Bill Anderson! We must stand together!
cp, I read that blurb carefully, and despite being from Marler Clark, I did not see anywhere that people were "poisoned" by Sally Jackson cheese.
Such inflammatory language only makes you look malicious and, in my book, libelous. As Smy Opin said previously, sickened is nowhere the same as poisoned, which implies intent to harm.
Also, I would have more respect for your postings if you provided sources other than Marler's writings all the time. Otherwise, we can only assume that as his shill, your main task is to direct traffic to his sites.