Cheesemaking at Morningland Dairy in Missouri. Gradually, the various follow-up assault roles of The State agencies involved in the raid on Rawesome Foods are becoming clear.

A few days ago, we learned that the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety was assigned to harass Rawesome about building safety codes.

Now we learn that the California Department of Food and Agriculture has been assigned to do lab tests of all the food stolen, er, seized, in the June 30 raid. That information came to light a via a press release issued by CDFA saying its lab “detected” listeria monocytogenes in two varieties of raw-milk cheese from a Missouri producer, Morningland Dairy.

The dairy, which has been selling raw cheeses nationally for thirty years, has never had an illness from its cheeses, its general manager, Denise Dixon, told me. Indeed, the FDA, in a separate press release, in which it said the Morningland cheese was taken from Rawesome, states that no one has become ill from the supposedly contaminated cheese. (The FDA censors reviewing the draft press release must have missed that statement.)

The matter of listeria monocytogenes in foods has become a contentious issue in the raw milk world, especially in New York state, where agriculture officials have made numerous findings of listeria monocytogenes in raw milk over the last five years, without any individuals becoming ill. Within the scientific community,there has been much debate over the last twenty years over whether trace amounts of listeria monocytogenes really are any kind of health threat, since the bacteria are considered pervasive, and illnesses quite rare.

In the meantime, tiny Morningland Dairy, with six employees, has essentially become caught up in the dragnet growing out of the assault on Rawesome Foods by State agents with guns drawn. Now that they carried out such a huge hit on a small private organization, the agencies are under pressure to show “results.” So the city of Los Angeles started with health code violations and moved on to building violations; California is devoting huge resources to examining all the food and finally, to the agents’ collective relief, I am sure, has a “bingo” in finding a few listeria cells in Morningland cheese.  And Morningland has been pressured to recall all its cheese from the first of this year, and prohibited by Missouri officials (presumably recruited by FDA) from shipping any cheese–in effect, shut down. In the authoritarians’ view, just a minor casualty on the road to sterile food.

Now, as I understand it, the huge DeCoster egg operation that has sickened 1,200 people with contaminated eggs since May, continues operations.

As I also understand it, the members of Rawesome each signed a statement saying they not only accept that there might be pathogens in their foods, they welcome it.

Moreover, can we even believe the test results that might come out of such a clearly corrupt process? Is that what Regulator was trying to say when he/she posted the FDA’s press release following my previous post?

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As many of us are aware, the ever-harsher crackdown on nutrient-dense foods is a harbinger of a general move toward tyranny. Unfortunately, it seems nearly inevitable that The State’s authoritarian fist will become ever more visible to ever more people.

Which brings me to trains and buses. When certain things happen in this country, I sometimes think of scenes from Nazi-controlled Europe, where members of my family perished, and try to tell myself that I’m being alarmist. Things could never get that bad in the U.S.

There’s one scene from the book I wrote about my family’s experiences, “Inge: A Girl’s Journey Through Nazi Europe”, that came to mind yesterday. The scene is a train about to leave Toulouse in Nazi-ruled France, which my teenage aunt, Inge Joseph, had just boarded with four of her friends in 1942, seeking to escape to Switzerland.

“Finally, we boarded the train. All five of us were able to sit in one compartment. Our plan was to take turns walking the corridor every hour in order to see whether passengers were being checked for ‘cartes d’identites’ (identification cards), which we did not carry. As foreigners, we would have required special traveling permission, but this was seldom granted, and especially not if the destination was the Swiss border! Our plan in the event of an identity check was to hide in the toilet of an already-checked car…”

Then there’s this story on the front page of yesterday’s New York Times.

“The Lake Shore Limited  runs between Chicago and New York City without crossing the Canadian border. But when it stops at Amtrak stations in western New York State, armed Border Patrol agents routinely board the train, question passengers about their citizenship and take away noncitizens who cannot produce satisfactory immigration papers. ‘Are you a U.S. citizen?’ agents asked one recent morning, moving through a Rochester-bound train full of dozing passengers at a station outside Buffalo. ‘What country were you born in?’

“When the answer came back, ‘the U.S.,’ they moved on. But Ruth Fernandez, 60, a naturalized citizen born in Ecuador, was asked for identification. And though she was only traveling home to New York City from her sister’s in Ohio, she had made sure to carry her American passport. On earlier trips, she said, agents had photographed her, and taken away a nervous Hispanic man.

“He was one of hundreds of passengers taken to detention each year from domestic trains and buses along the nation’s northern border. The little-publicized transportation checks are the result of the Border Patrol’s growth since 9/11…

 ” ‘I was actually woken up with a flashlight in my face,’ recalled Mike Santomauro, 27, a law student who encountered the patrol in April, at 2 a.m. on a train in Rochester. Across the aisle, he said, six agents grilled a student with a computer who had only an electronic version of his immigration documents. Through the window, Mr. Santomauro said, he could see three black passengers, standing with arms raised beside a Border Patrol van…”

When I look at the photo accompanying the New York Times article, I wonder, when will they begin asking and searching more. Maybe inquiring into religious beliefs, matching names against lists according to political leanings, inspecting the food we are carrying. Less and less do I feel as if I am being alarmist. ?