The Complete Patient

Of all the crazy twists and turns in the dairy arena—and there have certainly been mmany over the last few years—the idea of importing milk from China to the U.S. would seem to be one of the craziest.

I actually use that idea as a throwaway line in an article I just wrote for The Nation, comparing the twin events of toxic loans and toxic food. In that article, I describe the campaign to change California’s arbitrary approach to regulating raw milk via AB 1735, culminating in the veto of SB 201 by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger week before last. I raise the prospect that the state’s two raw milk dairies could be forced out of business, and joke that perhaps the regulators really would prefer to bring contaminated milk in from China.

And then I read today in USA Today about a Chinese-American who started a large dairy in China several years ago, and has as one of his goals to export milk to the U.S. Take a look at the second to last paragraph, about how this dairyman seeks to become the first Chinese dairy to be certified by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

That may sound like a harebrained scheme, but I think we’ve all learned to take seriously the aspirations of Chinese businesses…and the receptivity of American regulators to such craziness. American apple growers learned about that the hard way some years ago—now more than half our apple juice comes from China. (If you’re smart, you don’t drink ordinary commercial apple juice, since it almost certainly contains juice from China.)

I presume the Chinese milk would come to the U.S. in either ultrapasteurized or powder form. Of course, it would be cheaper than the American variety, making it a serious market threat. My main question for the California Department of Food and Agriculture is this: What are you going to do for a living when our milk is coming from China?

I’ve been trying real hard to understand the causes of the current financial crisis. I even watched former president Bill Clinton explain it on the David Letterman Show, but despite Clinton’s efforts to simplify, my reaction was similar to Letterman’s: “It makes my head hurt.”

For a while, it didn’t seem that bad. Federal regulators running around on weekends trading and dissolving big names like Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers. But you know, down deep, that one day before long the music is going to stop and there will be a tab.

The initial tab, we’re told, is $700 billion—really kind of a shot in the dark because they don’t know how much bad debt is out there. So I take that to mean $700 billion is more likely a down payment, a deposit, if you will, before we get the real tab.

The problem, they tell us, is that so-called “toxic loans” have contaminated the entire financial system. And, indeed, much of the financial system is paralyzed—loans not being made, money market funds teetering on the edge, states and municipalities unable to float bonds.

Now, I’m getting this same queasy feeling trying to make sense out of this Chinese dairy scandal. Regulators running around, pardon the pun, like in a Chinese fire drill, and the damn thing just gets bigger and scarier. It’s not only baby formula in China and 53,000 kids who are sick, which would be horrendous enough. Now we’re learning it’s Pizza Hut cheese in Taiwan, cookies in Macao, White Rabbit Creamy Candy all around Asia, and (horror of horrors) instant coffee and tea in the U.S.—all contaminated.

Just like in the financial crisis, you know we haven’t heard the end of the story. Even knowing germ lawyer Bill Marler has been to China (great new market, it would seem) doesn’t make me feel much better.

Aren’t we dealing with similar problems in the financial and food crises? On the financial side, balance sheets filled with questionable loan instruments that have been packaged and re-packaged so many times no one knows where anything originated…and on the food side, products filled with questionable ingredients that have traveled so far and through so many hands no one can begin to figure out where they came from. Systems based on scale and greed rather than on basic human values. Regulators arrogant in their power, who descend on tiny dairies for producing unpasteurized milk because these dairies might muck up the “real” system…while that “real” system is poisoned in endless small and large ways.

The main alternative people have to survive both the financial and food crises is to seek out old-time alternatives. For financial safety, that probably means things like gold and silver. For food, it means growing your own or buying from small producers and farmers markets, where you are as close as possible to the source.

Are systemic collapses closer than we think?

Yesterday I was in New Hampshire, running a few errands, one of which was to pick up a new supply of fresh milk. The farm I buy it from is on a little-traveled side road, so I was more than a bit surprised to pull up and see, across the road, a brand new enclosed farm-stand. Inside was a refrigerated cooler about half filled with plastic jugs of…raw milk ($2 a quart, $4 a half gallon). A farm worker who saw me examining the jugs and not buying, quickly told me, “Everything here is legal.”

Kathy, the farmer I buy from, obviously has some competition. But the larger message was that the farmer across the street had decided, after watching Kathy grow her business over the last few years, that he wanted in on the action. (Since these farms are within easy driving distance of Hanover, NH, home of Dartmouth, the situation isn’t totally incongruous.)

That scene on a quiet New Hampshire road also suggests an explanation behind another story: The government rumblings against herdshare/cowshare arrangements are becoming progressively louder. There can be only one reason: herdshares are becoming an ever more popular way to distribute raw milk to eager consumers.

Take Ohio, which had seemingly resolved the issue of herdshares back in December 2006, when a judge ruled in favor of a farmer who had had her dairy license suspended by the Ohio Department of Agriculture. The state’s incoming new governor the next month directed his regulators to refrain from appealing the decision.

Now, the ODA’s director, Robert Boggs, is apparently getting antsy about all the herdshares/cowshares springing up in his state, where sales of raw milk are illegal. Last week Boggs stated in a letter to Don Neeper, a raw milk advocate who had inquired into rumblings that the state planned to restrict cowshares: “Foodborne outbreaks resulting from the consumption of raw milk and dairy products made from raw milk continue to be reported by local health agencies and state regulators. Since becoming Director of the Ohio Department of Agriculture, I have learned of numerous such recorded outbreaks in Ohio and other states, some of which originated from dairy farms with herdshare partners or from farms that were licensed to sell raw milk on site. Serious illnesses, some resulting in hospitalization, have occurred.

"Because the Ohio Revised Code does not address herdshare distribution of raw milk to the ultimate consumers, many people have interpreted this to mean that such activity is legal in Ohio. We feel this issue should be clarified, and that diligently crafted legislation is a step to help protect both consumers and dairy farmers…”

Boggs in his letter refers to the 2006 court case, noting, “The Court's ruling was not based on whether the contract used was legal or illegal, nor did it address the sanitary conditions that must be present to insure the safety of the milk.”

Gary Cox of the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund and the lawyer who represented the raw milk producer who won the decision, says, “ Boggs' statement about the import of Judge Hein's decision is wrong. The court was clear, there is nothing in Ohio law that prohibited herdshares.”

Herdshares, of course, are under serious attack in New York and Pennsylvania.

Orchestrating the rumblings and attacks is likely the FDA, which calls the shots with most state ag agencies on issues like raw milk. In his testimony to the Maryland legislature in early 2007, the FDA’s chief dairy guy, John Sheehan, had a strong message about cow shares and herdshares: “ In order to protect the public health, raw milk should not be permitted to be sold for human consumption, nor should people be allowed to attempt to skirt laws banning direct raw milk sales by operating so­-called 'cow share' schemes. The CDC agrees with FDA in this regard… (and) stated that ‘State milk regulations and methods for their enforcement should be reviewed and strengthened to minimize the hazards of raw milk.’”

It’s been interesting that on this blog over the last week or so, there has been a fairly rational debate about the dangers of illness from raw milk. Mark McAfee of Organic Pastures Dairy Co. takes verbal barrages from readers, and resists the temptation of most business owners under verbal and legal attack to crawl into a hole. Gwen/Elderberryjam provides an insightful and informed theory about why just a few individuals seem especially susceptible to HUS.

But such debate is totally discouraged by the authorities. They focus on fear and control. And they receive all kinds of encouragement from politicians in their determination to run roughshod over private contractual arrangements between citizens.

In the meantime, consumers vote with their feet and continue to expand the market for raw milk.