A Year After Michigan’s Raw Milk Sting Operation: What Has Changed?
Friday, October 5, 2007 at 11:20AM 
We’re coming on the one-year anniversary of the sting operation against Richard Hebron and the Family Farms Cooperative, and I thought it would be appropriate to consider how things have changed over the past year. That event was a watershed event in bringing the subject of raw milk into the public consciousness, along with the related subjects of sustainable farming, buying local, and the impact of whole foods on health.
The story of the sting operation against Richard Hebron (pictured here) and the Family Farms Cooperative is now well known. On Friday morning October 13, 2006, as Richard cruised down Interstate 94 on his way into Ann Arbor, a Michigan State Police cruiser pulled his truck over, and ordered Richard out and to put his hands on the hood. They patted him down, and directed him to drive a mile up the road, to a rest area, where Michigan Department of Agriculture agents took his cell phone and began off-loading the 453 gallons of fresh raw milk he carried in coolers, along with kefir, butter, and eggs—and his wallet.
An agent called a fellow agent and gave the go-ahead for the next part of the operation. MDA and state police agents greeted his wife, Annette, with a search warrant. They executed a second search warrant on Morgan & York, the gourmet food store from whose shed Richard distributed food to co-op members.
“I felt like I was being treated like a drug dealer,” Richard said.
After months in legal limbo, which could have led to felony charges, Richard was let off with a $1,000 fine and an agreement to build an assembly building on his farm, to store meat and package products.
Today, Richard is well into the construction of that facility, he told me a couple days ago. While it will cost about $60,000 and strain his finances, he says it will help his overall operation.
What about the more widespread impact of the event? I see two main outgrowths:
1. It popularized raw milk beyond what any sort of advertising or planned promotional campaign might have done. As just one example, the Family Farms Cooperative today has about 800 members, versus 600 members a year ago. Other cowshares and farms involved in raw milk report similar sorts of increase in demand for raw milk, and some have waiting lists of interested consumers.
2. It encouraged farmers to stand up for their rights. Before Richard was stopped, my sense is that most farmers cited by regulatory authorities suffered in silence, afraid that speaking up would make the officials come down harder. That just made the regulators crack down more, and I think the sting against Family Farms Cooperative was carried out in the belief that no one would speak out. While the regulators haven’t gone away, and are still coming around with search warrants and the like, I sense they are being a little more circumspect.
Richard recalls this story: “Joel Salatin has been my mentor all along the way. He told me at the time, you have to have a good outcome on this. The eyes of the nation are on you. I took it to heart. We had the support of our members.”
I’d say he did have a good outcome.
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NOTE: I'll be away a few days...out of reach of Internet connections and phones (whew!). So my next posting will be Monday.
Reader Comments (14)
Scientists think appendix creates, protects germs
Some scientists think they have figured out the real job of the troublesome and seemingly useless appendix: It produces and protects good germs for your gut.
That’s the theory from surgeons and immunologists at Duke University Medical School, published online in a scientific journal this week.
For generations, the appendix has been dismissed as superfluous. Doctors figured it had no function. Surgeons removed them routinely. People live fine without them.
And when infected the appendix can turn deadly. It gets inflamed quickly and some people die if it isn’t removed in time. Two years ago, 321,000 Americans were hospitalized with appendicitis, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The function of the appendix seems related to the massive amount of bacteria populating and human digestive system, according to the study in the Journal of Theoretical Biology. There are more bacteria than human cells in the typical body. Most of it is good and helps digest food.
But sometimes the flora of bacteria in the intestines die or are purged. Diseases such as cholera or amoebic dysentery would clear the gut of useful bacteria. The appendix’s job is to reboot the digestive system in that case.
The appendix “acts as a good safe house for bacteria,” said Duke surgery professor Bill Parker, a study co-author. Its location—just below the normal one-way large intestine in a sort of gut cul-de-sac—helps support the theory, he said.
Also, the worm-shaped organ outgrowth acts like a bacteria factory, cultivating the good germs, Parker said.
Many kudos to Steve Bemis for helping Richard out in the MDA matter, and insuring a quality real milk supply for those of us in SE Michigan! :-)
Funny you should mention the appendix. Thanks for posting that. I met my husband at Duke University (he was an asst. professor and Dir of Graduate Studies in the Pathology Dept of the Duke Univ Medical Center and I worked in the Duke Univ Graduate School administration. He was happy to escape from Duke, but that is another story. But I would like to know the source of that article so I can look up the study in greater detail.
You see, Thursday night after dinner (leftover lamb kebabs, eggplant/tomato caponata, homemade chevre from raw goat milk, plus tossed salad. My husband had some pain on his left side of the abdomen as well as rumbling noises. He didn't sleep well and on Friday morning the pain was also on the right side. We knew it wasn't food poisoning because all three of us ate the same dinner two nights in a row, even the raw chevre. He wasn't nauseated, but his colon seemed to have shut down, with pressure "to go" but nothing coming out. His doctor was unavailable so I took my husband to Urgent Care right away. That afternoon he was diagnosed with acute (but unperforated) appendicitis as well as diverticulitis, which according to his surgeon, is a medical rarity to happen simultaneously.
Uh, no, before anyone asks, we did not volunteer that we consume raw dairy, especially since nothing indicated food poisoning.
His appendix was removed (with laparoscopy) late in the afternoon but he is still in the hospital on an IV antibiotic cocktail for the diverticulitis (probably he'll come home tomorrow; he is bored stiff and feels fine now and looks like a million buck with the saline hydration plumping up his skin). Also, by strange coincidence, his younger sister in Norway (age 46) has had two appendicitis flare-ups this year (for reasons unknown to me, it was not removed because it is "encapsulated"); now that it has recurred, she faces a more extensive surgery next month with bowel resection. Their mother had her appendix removed when she was a teenager.
I'm right in the middle of reading Gary Taubes new book, Bad Calories, Good Calories; Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease. The chapter I was reading in Urgent Care was all about how the British colonial doctors of the 19th and early 20th centuries noticed that the colonial whites got appendicitis, diabetes, obesity, dental decay, cancers, hemorrhoids, and heart disease but the native populations did not. Did not, that is, until they started eating the diet that the colonials ate: refined foods that transported and stored well, such as sugars, molasses, white flour, jams, etc. Many doctors also noticed that Americans of African descent and urban "westernized" Africans got the "western" cluster of modern diseases but the rural African populations that remained on a traditional local diet did not, ruling out genentic causes. The theory was that appendicitis (because it usually occurs in children and young adults) is an early manifestation of the tooth decay, periodontitis, obesity, heart disease, cancer, diabetes disease cluster.
So my little brain is working overtime trying to figure out what predisposed my husband to not only appendicitis but also diverticulitis, seemingly out of the blue. He thinks the diverticulitis pain started first, many hours before the appendix pain. Since early 2004, he eats very little sugar (except a bit in dark chocolate), and almost no grains (though he does have a butter croissant about 2 times a week at work sometimes). Except for that croissant any grains he has is usually whole grain (sometimes I put a little sprouted quinoa in soups and stew, but very little). But otherwise he eats much like I do, protein at nearly every meal, some traditional fats and lots of non-starchy veggies, as well as aged raw bought cheese and the fresh raw cheeses I make. He does eat more fruit than I, and this week he had some Italian plums (the kind that are dried for prunes) and pears, both are high in pectin.
The other odd thing is that he had a his 50 yr colonoscopy not too long ago and I checked the report and drawn picture; no mention of diverticulosis or remarks other than about the two polyps that were removed. I thought diverticulosis took a long time to form, not less than two years, especially on a low sugar, low grain diet (but adequate on fiber because of veggies). But until 2004 he did eat considerably more grains (refined and whole) and sugars as well as less protein and fat, which is why he had to make a change and lose 35 pounds. He stopped getting frequent headaches and indigestion with the low carb diet, too.
The only other unusual thing is he had his teeth cleaned at the dentist on Thursday afternoon, just a few hours before the pain started. We are both wondering if there was some transference or dislodging of peridontal bacteria from his mouth to his gut in a harmful way.
Needless to say, he's going to get a lot of probiotics when he gets home (the nurse wouldn't call the doc on Sunday to ask permission to give probiotics to him and I doubt this surgeon coudl advise knowledgable either way). I've got some chicken bones simmering now for broth and some plain yogurt waiting. It's been a heck of a weekend, but I think the worst is over.
I found the article in our local newspaper, The Californian (Riverside California). I through the article away, so I don’t have anymore information for you.
When Chris came home from the hospital, he was prescribed a probiotic with 140 billion “good” bacteria per packet. It’s recommended for people who have suffered from colitis. There is also another product called Synbiotic Intensive. Each packet contains 70 billion. This is the product suggested after taking antibiotics. It might not hurt to add this to your husbands diet along with raw milk, etc…
I have a great naturopathic doctor. Her practice started out in San Diego. She then moved to the Temecula area (huge autistic population) and now she’s back in San Diego. Her website is www.drnicola.com
Mary
Other than getting him back on nourishing foods, our main issue now is whether he will travel internationally in two weeks. He was supposed to travel next week and he is having a hard time accepting the thought of staying home (he is one of the meeting organizers and was to be keynote speaker at one of the two meetings). He still wants to go, but later for the end of the meeting, which will only give him an extra 5 days at home before leaving. I don't know how long it takes for the gut to get back into shape, and he's still taking the antibiotics for a while. And California to Greece is a long way to go with limited food options. Arrrghhh! If anyone has any good suggestions on why he shouldn't travel (so far) yet, I'm all ears.
Elizabeth,
I read some of Price's book a couple of years ago (it is too dense for a quick read and eventually I moved on to ther books, intending to return to Price's). In discussing other cultures and human history, a lot is of made of short average life spans. I'm not convinced that is very significant. Potential life span is more significant. Premature death due to high infant mortality, trauma and infections were very common in the past (not to mention violence). In hostile environments, early death was not necessarily a function of lack of health or natural longevity. Infectious diseases, epidemics, and plagues increased as "civilization" spread, as humans had more and closer contact with larger numbers of people, not to mention the animals that were in close proximity with human populations. Also, there were all sorts of well intentioned but injurious medical and folk treatments that hastened death. So there is potential for a great many people to die prematurely, skewing the statistics for potential lifespan. Yet clearly some people had lifespans just as long as our own (Ben Franklin, for example, but there are many others of note).
Also, I was surprised that Price is not mentioned in Taubes new book, but that may be due to Price's primary research interest in dental health or just the need to edit out redundant sources (I hear the book draft was originally about 700 pages and now is under 500). Additionally, according to Taubes, there is abundant data from British colonial and missionary physicians from the last two hundred years which details "Western" disease clusters (including dental caries; appendicitis; diverticulitis, Crohn's disease, and other intestinal/digestive disorders; diabetes; gout; and cancers) as being prevalent in people consuming a diet high in sugars and refined grains (also suggesting a common cause) and very low, even non-existent, in populations whose diets did not include these "industrial" foods. Additionally, as Price noted, these British physicians were very aware of increasing prevalence of these "Western" disease clusters as populations adopted the Western diets and dropped their traditional foods.
UGGH!! I wish I could have told them to leave it alone. I suspect some of my tummy troubles as an adult could be due to them removing it???