John Sheehan, FDA’s head of Plant and DairyIt’s been more than six months since John Sheehan last met with Margaret Hamburg, the commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. She’s called the head of Plant and Dairy in for a rare Labor Day session to review a number of important developments in the government’s campaign against raw milk.
Margaret Hamburg: Last time we talked, John, things were going so well on the raw milk front. You had dairy farmers on the run in Wisconsin. You were revving things up to send a strong message against raw milk in Massachusetts. You headed off that legislation in Wyoming that would have allowed small producers to sell unlicensed food. The federal food safety legislation looked like a done deal. You had helped create one of the Centers for Disease Control 2020 goals to reduce the number of states making raw milk available. Your state-by-state harassment campaign seemed to be bearing fruit. I was so proud of you and your team at Plant and Dairy.
John Sheehan: Yes, we were on a roll.
Margaret Hamburg, commissioner of the FDA
Hamburg: Now, all of a sudden, I’m getting calls from some pols who are hearing from movie stars in Hollywood, that you’ve gone after a crackpot with a funny name…
Sheehan: Yes, his name is Aajonus Vonderplanitz.
Hamburg: That is funny. Say that again…
Sheehan: Aajonus Vonderplanitz. I had to practice saying it.
Hamburg: Wonder how he ever came up with that. But anyway, I’m told he supplies people with raw milk and weird fermented foods. And his supporters are sending around a video of various cops, including some FDA people, barging into this Vonderplanitz’s food warehouse in L.A. with their guns drawn, pretending they are Wyatt Earp or something.
I’m also hearing noises that your old boss, David Acheson, wants some kind of compromise over raw milk. He had a lot of respect around here, John.
Actually, it turns out we may not even get a chance to compromise because of this crazy federal suit about interstate transport of raw milk and food rights that’s been filed against me by this farmer lawyer group.
Sheehan: Yes, that’s the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund. I’ve finally got their name straight. Hurts me to say it, but guess we better get used to it. A judge in Iowa turned down our motion to get the stupid thing dismissed.
Hamburg: John, I’m most worried right now about this thing in Los Angeles. Any time you have California foodies and movie stars and politicians stirring things up, you run the risk of things getting out of control. Aren’t you afraid of turning this crackpot into a media star?
Sheehan: Well, when you read his background, and believe me, we checked this out carefully before we went in, you’ll see this guy is over the cliff, even for many of the raw milkies. He has his so-called members sign statements that they are fine with having pathogens in their foods. Who in their right mind would drink milk knowing there’s E.coli 0157:H7 or campylobachter in it? And worse yet, give it to their kids. But these people would. And he’s got a few thousand of them around the country agreeing to that stuff. Even more significant, he has forty or so farmers under lease agreements supplying people with food. This is getting big, Madame Commissioner. What keeps me up at night is that he’s a total loose cannon. He even talks about communing with coyotes, and having sex as much as possible.
Hamburg: What’s wrong with having sex…I mean, yeah, he does sound off the wall. But there are crackpots all over the place. Just surf the Internet, and you’ll find dozens and dozens. You’re a lawyer, John, you know you can’t just send the cops in after people because they’re weirdos. All you do is build them up, give them credibility.
Sheehan: I know. But we do have a plan.
Hamburg: I sure hope you have a plan. Right now, it’s not looking like a very good plan. Fill me in, please.
Sheehan: It’s a multi-pronged plan. We figured with the raid of the Vonderplanitz headquarters, Rawesome Foods, on June 30, we’d intimidate the raw milkies, send a no-nonsense message, that we’re serious about this, that we’ll go after their most experienced and committed resister. Maybe find a few pathogens in one food or another that we confiscated–stuff like listeria is all over the place anyway–and use that to scare off his suppliers. Then, our intention was to harass the hell out of the guy by using local regulations–health regs, building code violations, that sort of thing. Once we got that going, we’d then put out all the info about what a crackpot the guy is. He’s said it himself, in interviews, about how he’s craved orgasms since he was three, and wants orgasms all the time.
Hamburg: John, we all want orgasms all the time. Since when is that a crime?
Sheehan: But this guy says he does it, has sex between one and six hours each day.
Hamburg: Really…Now, that’s impressive (her eyes look off into space).
Sheehan: (Clearing his throat) We figured we could use this guy to show how extreme the raw milk movement is. Now, they’re not all that extreme, so we thought we could create some divisions–the more sensible ones would come down on the extremists, and then we’d have them fighting among themselves.
Hamburg: (Still staring off into space)…What was that you were saying, John?
Sheehan: The guy says he takes a daily enema, and once drank his urine for 41 days.
Hamburg: Yuk. Who’d want to have sex every day with someone like that?
Sheehan: We don’t know if he has sex with the same person every day.
Hamburg: John, what the hell are we talking about here? You got a half dozen federal, state, and local agencies, including the FBI, involved going after a guy who says he craves orgasms? Hey, I’m not a guy, but even I know guys say all kinds of crazy things in health club locker rooms, brag about all the sex they’re having, all the weird things they do to torture bugs or make trouble. For all we know, he’s making all this stuff up. And it sure doesn’t sound like he’s going around flashing himself from under a raincoat. I hope you have something more substantial we can go after him on.
Sheehan: We do know he’s bringing raw milk across state lines using all these lease agreements.
Hamburg: Well, there you go John. Prosecute him for selling milk across state lines.
Sheehan: But it’s not so straightforward because it’s not clear he’s selling it. He has these lease agreements with dairy farmers. I’ve had our lawyers look them over, and they tell me the agreements look pretty solid–they give the Vonderplanitz organization ownership control of the land and animals, and the milk and other products. The members own the dairy products, and are then paying someone to ship it for them to places like California.
Hamburg: Gee, John. Sounds like you’ve got yourself tangled up in your own underwear here. Either you go after the guy for being a weirdo, which is tough to do, when the judges and politicians are mostly doing kinkier stuff than Vonderplanitz, or you go after him for having routine lease agreements with farmers. Well, I’m going to let you figure this one out. I’ve got real work to do. Just make sure this crazy business doesn’t come back to bite us.
Sheehan: Yes, m’am. ?
It appears I gave you some good material to work with. 🙂
cp
Yes, great material. It upset me at first, but then I guess I got over it. Thanks much.
David
http://www.wilhelmreichmuseum.org/biography.html
In New York City, on August 23, 1956, the FDA supervised the burning of several tons of Reichs publications in one of the citys garbage incinerators, including titles that were only to have been banned. Among the materials burned were:
Orgone Energy Bulletin (12,189 copies)
International Journal of Sex Economy and Orgone Research (6,261 copies)
Emotional Plague Versus Orgone Biophysics (2,900 copies)
Annals of the Orgone Institute (2976 copies)
The Oranur Experiment (872 copies)
Character Analysis
Cosmic Superimposition
Ether, God, and Devil
Listen, Little Man
People in Trouble
The Cancer Biopathy
The Function of the Orgasm
The Mass Psychology of Fascism
The Murder of Christ
The Sexual Revolution
This destruction of literature constitutes one of the most heinous examples of censorship in United States history.
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/oif/bannedbooksweek/bookburning/20thcentury/20thcentury.cfm
The FDA loves sex….they just like to be the screwer not the screwee.
Mark
I think you clogged the blog.
No one wants to comment on Raw Milk, the FDA or Sex….
I'm sorry if I offended you and others. This post grew out of some interviews and articles about Aajonus Vonderplanitz's unusual personal journey that a reader linked to following my previous post. As you know better than most, this is a dirty business, and the authorities, including those at the highest levels, are playing for keeps, as in keep our food and our rights from us.
David
Oh, gosh. I've read Irving Stone's 1300+ page biography of Sigmund Freud, and about anything written about Abraham Maslow. It's been a few years though. I've come across Reich, but felt he was pretty loopy in comparison. Yung got a lot of followers, but he didn't float my boat either, because in the end, Freud abandoned his assertions on hypnosis, and many of his first hypotheses, moving on to new ones. If he were living today, he was scientific enough that he probably would have abandoned most of what he initially asserted. Most people don't understand this because they've only read clips about him or his theories in textbooks. They don't know he got sick of dissecting gray matter looking for psychological pathology, so started asking living people questions; and was one of the first people to do so. And it was this, not the id and the ego, that made him exceptional.
It is this kind of disgust and moving on from something unproductive that have made big advancements in our society. Take our system for dealing with pathological organisms for instance.
Honestly, though,…is there anyone who doesn't like orgasms? I mean, people might not comment, but is someone liking them a problem?
And what does it have to do with raw milk? Except maybe another way to try to discredit someone. See the initial quote. Our government agencies seem to have that as their motto.
Yet, in the end, we really are all responsible for our actions, whether or not there is love or war. Take note, government appointees, employees and politicians.
Have you ever met and spoken with Aajonus?
Mark
Has there been a discussion of the actual nuts-and-bolts of the lease agreements?
Amanda
Repost from the previous thread, on listeria. Perhaps this will spark some discussion. As an artisinal cheesemaker, I am particularily attuned to the importance of the enviroment or the terrain (the French call it "terrior" or "the taste of place") as it relates to the types of organisms which grow in dairy products.
—
Listeria thrives in modern ultra-sanitary dairy processing enviroments, where there is standing water everywhere, and natural diverse ambient microflora are routinely suppressed with chlorine and other sanitizers and chemical cleaners. Additionally, the very cold anaerobic conditions under which most modern dairy products are stored only mean that listeria will have no competition.
Traditional dairy products (mainly cheese) were stored and aged aerobically, in cool (not cold) humid (but no standing water) cellars, with a mulitiplicity of native micro-flora, and never saw chlorine or chemical sanitizers which supress the beneficial ripening organisms.
The best cheeses in the world are still made the traditional way, and with raw milk.
—
p.s. Its not surprise to me that a recent batch of an experimental pastuerized sheep's milk cheese made at an unnamed dairy plant in Wisconsin, and which went into a cheese cave and was schmeared (aka washed in a bacterial brine) in the same brine as 2 raw milk cheeses, tested positive for listeria, while the lab tests for the raw milk cheeses both came up clean.
The importance of having a population of diverse beneficial bacteria could not be more clear. Even if you are making pastuerized cheese, it is important to encourage the "terrior" or the beneficial micro-flora in your cheese production and curing enviroment.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20807110
Wonder why it took several years to nail this one down, when raw milk cheese non-outbreaks are "traced" in days ??
As far as I can tell, Listeria is an artifact of modern sterile and ultra-sanitary dairy and meat processing. It is a very poor competitor with most other microflora indigenous to raw milk and more traditional dairy processing enviroments.
"Recent European food safety alerts due to Listeria-contaminated cheeses more often concerned products made from pasteurized or heat-treated milk than from raw milk. The findings should be considered in prevention guidelines addressing vulnerable populations."
I wonder, would they recommend that the young, the old, immune-compromised and the pregnant should therefore avoid cheeses made from pasteurized or heat-treated milk, and stick to those made from raw milk?
Bill, I like your use of the word terrain to explain terrior. I don't think terrior translates to English very gracefully – always makes me think of terror.
And BTW, in your studies, did you ever come across the practice of using the whey from cheesemaking to wash the floor, as is done by some of very old European cheesemakers?
Apparently this practice floods beneficials into the terrain.
Why else would they allow Grade B milk to have a bacteria plate count of up to 1 million at the dairy plant when it arrives? In reality, it sometimes gets well above 1 million, which is above the concentration at which Staph begins to produce its entero-toxin. Though pastuerization kills staph, the staph toxin (the part of Staph which actually makes you sick) is heat stable and will survive pastuerization, yet some of those plants will make fresh pastuerized cheese curds and sell them that day.
How can they possibly be doing this safely? Why aren't people getting sick from pastuerized cheese curds made from this dirty Grade B milk? (not saying that all Grade B milk is dirty, btw…)
The explanation is simple — cheese cultures neutralize Staph toxins.
CA state food and ag code requires that all retail raw milk be Grade A Market Milk that meets and exceeds pasteurized milk standards but with out first being pastuerized.
When the dairymen in Humboldt and their creamery stood up at the Board of Supervisors meeting against the sale of raw milk…it is no wonder. They can not do it….they are the wrong grade and have very high bacteria counts.
If any one knows anything more about Humboldt Grade B rules let me know.
The board of supervisors ignorred the consumers and paid their homage to the diary industry only.
Mark
Talk about misleading, twisting facts and out right lieing.
http://www.crohns.org/governments/cfsan.htm
The Nazis had German US agents, the Dulles and the Bushes, infiltrate Hitler's Bank on Wall Street that financed the Nazis and the German war machine in the 1930's. They combined US intelligence and Nazi intelligence circa 1947 and convinced haberdasher Truman to have a war with North Korea, set up Israel, etc. to get a friendly GOP administration, IKE they called him, in the White House where the Dulles and Bushes reigned supreme and America has never been the same. Obama is one of them, responsible for the Gulf Sabotage explained in photos at http://www.HoaxOfTheCentury.com. Enjoy the last installment:
The Nazis In The White House Story: Part 17
Is Obama a Thai Buddhist President?
http://www.hoaxofthecentury.com/ThaiPresident1.htm
Lots of photos laying out 9/11, a Nazi operation featuring remote controlled aircraft that were substituted for the airliners that were dumped in the Atlantic Ocean.
The words we use to talk about a subject have the effect of controlling our thoughts.If we don't agree about the definitions of words then we really have a hard time discussing certain topics."Species" "pathogen" and" DNA fingerprint" are a few of the terms that we throw around when we talk about bacteria.The effect of using these terms is that we construct a view of microbes in our mind that has nothing to do with what is reality in the world of microbes.The view that microbes can be neatly separated into species,some of them pathogenic, and identified by DNA fingerprints,is an idea that has been constructed in some people's minds. It has nothing to do with reality.when we use these words ,we reinforce that mental idea.Getting everyone to use these terms when we talk about bacteria is a form of thought control.One way to react to this thought control is to go along with the idea and find a way to show that we can produce milk in a way that is "pathogen" free.Another way is to reject the fear of "pathogens" and say that we want those microbes in our diet.We might as well resign ourselves to having them in our diet because they are unavoidable.And,back to reality,if they are in our diet and they don't make us sick how can we label them "pathogens"?This where I agree with Aajonus.
Of course we have all had the experience of eating something and becoming ill shortly after.There are many explanations for this without falling into the pathogen frame of mind.Too much salt will cause illness,too much sugar etc. anything that upsets the community of microbes in your gut will do it.Sometimes your gut bacteria are not really the ones you want to have inside of you or at least I should say they are out of balance.Sometimes eating a probiotic food will upset your gut bacteria because the beneficial bacteria in the food are displacing some of the overgrowth of a non beneficial bacteria.Food can make you sick,but lets keep an open mind when we look for the cause.
That may be true. But, writing offensive blog posts like this one and inciting misogynistic and racist comments to follow is not a constructive approach to the problem, IMO.
Here's the latest update on the MN court case. It is disturbing that the farmer was told by customers that they thought his milk made them sick, but he took no action (instead, the state had to step-in when there were enough illnesses for this outbreak to catch their attention).
Raw-milk producer has hazy memory in E. coli case
http://www.startribune.com/business/102498279.html?elr=KArks7PYDiaK7DU2EPaL_V_9E7ODiUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aU7DYaGEP7vDEh7P:DiUs
MW
I wholeheartedly agree that the misogynist and racial comments are completely inappropriate. So is anonymous character assassination by inference.
It sounds like Mr. Hartmann isn't being helpful to his customers, the authorities, or himself. Above-board answers to questions would be the way to go, I think.
You shouldn't be too quick to judge all Grade B milk as dirty. There is some fine quality Grade B milk out there, cleaner than much Grade A, I might add. Its just for making cheese and butter, not bottling fluid milk. What's the point of having a Grade A license, so you have to pay extra money to the milk marketing boards and their ilk, when the milk isn't going into fluid milk products anyways?
As a raw milk cheesemaker, I'm actually partial to Grade B canned milk, rather than Grade A bulk tank milk, because the canned milk undergoes less agitation and pumping than bulk tank milk. There is less lypolytic activity and disruption of butterfat membranes when you handle the milk more gently.
Not to say all bulk tank raw milk is excessively agitated, but there are certainly advantages to canned milk.
Thank you for your explanations….
Miguel, mankind yearns to be able to explain why things happen and therefore classify things according to how mankind can best examine or understand them…sometimes this is a political classification and used in wars. Like creating ugly durogative names for our enemies so our young men can have some reason to hate them and kill them and still be able to sleep at night. Names, classifications and labels serve us as a society and define our morals and goals in so many ways.
As far as science is concerned….I must agree with you that there are many ways that mankind can choose to classify or name things. Aajonus uses his own definitions and that is fine with me. Some of his stuff I do not disagree with.
My point is this….how are we ever going to make progress and provide non-illness causing immune system building safe raw milk to our citizens if we disagree with some basic current definitions and classifications. We are smart people and we can figuer out how to make these definitions work for us and make some real progress.
Some of these classifications are very useful and show truth….Ecoli 0157-H7 has certain properties that makes it very dangerous to some subsets of our populations…this is scientifically and politically proper and correct at this time in history. So this is reality and in order to make progress we must use these benchmarks or look like a bunch of wackos….
No one will believe us if we say that pathogens are not really pathogens…or that bacteria can change into viruses in a second.
Lets all agree that scientists really know very little…and that the best basis for health is based on historical data collected by people like Dr. Price. His observations were based in reality and based on nutrition. Wisdom and nutrition that had developed over thousands of years. Wisdom that worked. Unlike modern science that has created nutritional and health hell in just the last 75 years of earthly existance, with all their super-science.
As far as Sheehan is concerned….the testimony that he submitted in Maryland is sick and twisted. He combines pasteurized dairy outbreaks with raw milk at his convenience and leisure. He is a political pawn and a lawyer sent to kill raw milk by industry that does not want the truth of raw milk exposed.
My advice to all is this….little by little more and more evidence will emerge and Sheehan will passed away and so will his dogma. Raw Milk is enternal…Sheehan is just a blip in the dying bankrupt modern CAFO dairy debacle.
A great example of this is his comment on Lactose Intolerance. He will choke on his words as Standord researchers kick is ass so hard that he will not sit in Washington very much longer.
He will still not address the issue of Two Raw Milks in America. He will still not address the fact that 50,000 people per week in CA do not follow his FDA directive and drink raw milk anyway and no one is dying. Instead they are thriving. As we grow he declines and deminishes into irrelevance.
It has been 2 years since the last NCIMS conference when I spoke on raw milk. I will be trying to attend the upcoming conference and again plea for change and remind them that the FDA has for more than 2 years not responded to the Citizens Petition that was submitted. I will again get in their face ( nicely ) to show the true raw milk evidence. People are leaving pasteurized milk and people are falling in love with milk all over again and drinking clean safe raw milk.
We will again go to the belly of the NCIMS dragon and speak truth to power as that power is eroding and weakening. Progess is made little by little…..and then when we look back over years of effort…great progress has been made.
Mark
The 60 day aging rule for cheese needs to be challenged too, though I'm not sure if NCIMS would have jurisdiction or influence over that or not. Any ideas Mark?
No one will believe us if we say that pathogens are not really pathogens…or that bacteria can change into viruses in a second. "
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19879621
"Abstract
Escherichia coli O157:H7, a causative agent of hemolytic uremic syndrome, can enter into a viable but nonculturable (VBNC) state when under stress. To date, it is unknown whether VBNC cells produce Shiga-like toxins (Stx). To address this question, we confirmed the expression of the stx1 and stx2 genes and the production of Stx in VBNC E. coli O157:H7 cells."
99.9% of bacterial strains are VBNC(viable but non culturable).Only the culturable bacteria have been studied and categorized and even they often exist in a VBNC state and so are undetectable without a lot of time and trouble.Can we really show that the milk is safe by doing these rapid tests for "pathogens"? If I did believe that keeping "pathogens" out of the milk was the answer ,I would have to admit that I cannot possibly test for all of the potentially pathogenic bacteria.It is very hard to create a test for a microbe that has never been identified or studied before.
If we choose to live by their definitions,we are going to spend all of our energy jumping through more and more senseless hoops.It's not science it's just politics.
Any thoughts about this in the spirit of cutting and pasting from the Internet?
It may be a right but that doesn't make it right:
Farmer Mike Hartmann, who sold raw milk linked to an outbreak …said he couldn't remember his home address and the address of his dairy farm and why he claimed in a dispute with the state nine years ago not to own the farm he now says he's owned since 1974.
Testifying for a second day in Sibley County District Court, Hartmann revealed that two customers — one with a sick child — contacted him about the safety of his raw milk around the time of the outbreak in May, but he hadn't mentioned it to state officials.
He also said he'd spoken to several other customers to find out whether any got sick from drinking his raw, unpasteurized milk. But when pressed, Hartmann couldn't remember the people's names or the last time he'd talked to them.
"Know your farmer, know your food"
MW
Just like I said….the more we know, the more we know that we know less. We must be humble as we work with nature and her awesome strength.
Knowing her rules as best we can is the best we can do.
John Sheehan really lied big-time…. He testified that 23 people had died in CA from raw milk years ago…yet the CDC has no record of any of these raw milk deaths. The CDC does not miss raw milk deaths. They catch each and everyone and there have been zero from fluid raw milk in 37 years.
Sheehan is a lawyer and he works for the FDA…..enough said.
Bill, I am rethinking my approach to the NCIMS. I have it from a very reliable source that the decisions made at the NCIMS are not based on science and science will be disregarded. Decisions at NCIMS are political and not based in science or facts or research. So changing the 60 raw cheese aging rule would be basically impossible. The FDA has been trying to extend 60 days for raw cheese to a longer period for years. The NCIMS is a political instrument of BIG Dairy and even Bigger and Meaner Processors…FOOD INC…Deans Foods etc. Big money bigger lies.
Mark
http://www.cheesesociety.org/
This is who we'd need to talk to work on applying political pressure to NCIMS. The American Cheese Society is friendly towards raw milk. The best of show winning cheese this year was made by a friend of mine. Pleasant Ridge Reserve — a raw milk farmstead gruyere style cheese, produced on a farm that is about an hour west of Madison, WI. And the American raw milk cheesemaker's association is an offshoot of the ACS.
I believe miguel's use of cut and pasting constitutes "fair use". He is only trying to get us to see that if all we know about microbes is about those we manage to culture, we don't know very much at all. A recent NYT article cited in this blog showed hitherto unknown microbes colonizing our bodies using PCR. Those microbes could never be grown in a culture medium. Time was it was very hard to culture Mycobacterium. That didn't mean leprosy, tuberculosis, and Crohn's disease didn't exist – nor did it mean that Mycobacteria didn't exist in both pasteurized and raw milk. Moreover, miguel's point is that bacteria may not exist as distinct species, but perhaps as a continuum. There is evidence of this in the phenomena of quorum sensing, where decentralized groups rapidly coordinate to make a decision (I'd like to think Dave M. would be a fan of this concept).
How is Miguel's cutting and pasting any different from what the regulators, health authorities, and big dairy do with statistics about raw milk illness?
As a cheesemaker, I understand the importance of microbiological control. If I innoculated my cheesemilk with a large population of coliforms or pyscotrophs, the cheese will go rancid because of those organisms.
But this is not an affirmation of germ theory. I have, in essence, innoculated my milk with a poor enviroment. More important than microbiological control, is to have the correct terrior in the cheese, from the field to the cave to the consumer.
Could MW's complaint about "fair-use" stem from the fact that Miguel always posts information that The Powers That Be would prefer remain undisclosed?
http://www.startribune.com/local/102399924.html
"Hartmann wants the food back, while the state alleges that his dairy operation was unsanitary and that therefore the food is adulterated and should be destroyed. Hartmann has also filed a counterclaim against the state, saying it has violated his constitutional right to sell his wares and asking for compensatory damages."
"Hartmann said in court Tuesday he knew something was amiss on a day in late May when seven or eight squad cars pulled up at his farm and a sheriff served him with a search warrant.
He said he asked what potential crime had been committed at the Gibbon dairy operation, but the sheriff didn't know. Neither did two state inspectors accompanying the sheriff, he said.
Eventually, Hartmann said, one of the inspectors went to a car and came back five minutes later and said "you're operating without a license." The state still maintains that, but Hartmann claims he doesn't need one as a farmer who sells direct to consumers. "
Michael Hartmann already won this case a few years ago.The Minnesota supreme court decided in his favor over the licensing issue.Without a license the state does not have the contract with Hartmann that they are trying to enforce.
The state is operating outside the law and Michael Hartmann is trying to get them to return the food that they took unlawfully.As for his memory being poor,the state is trying to gather information to use against the other people involved.He is wise to avoid giving them any information.