The Complete Patient

I’m glad to see Mark McAfee so upbeat. “The power resides with the people,” he says in his comment on my previous post. “By April new legislation will be introduced and the Blue Ribbon Commission will have made its recommendations. We will have earned far more than AB 1604 would have ever given us. Raw milk is here to stay and Big Dairy and Big Pharma better enjoy their little battle wins because the people always win the wars.”

I guess you have to be upbeat to put up with what he’s put up with over the years, when your business is placed in jeopardy by government regulators on sometimes a daily basis.

As for me, I feel this uncomfortable tightening around the neck. Why should new legislation in April do any better than new legislation did last week? Why should a commission’s findings (assuming they are even on point) be listened to when 700 people jamming a hearing weren’t listened to?

Since when do “the people always win the wars”? There are dozens and dozens of countries where the people lose on such a regular basis that they give up. We call them dictatorships, but are we that far removed? A society denied access to healthy foods many value seems to have lost an important degree of freedom, and based on recent happenings with the National Animal Identification System (NAIS) and cloning, in addition to raw milk, things are heading in the wrong direction.

In recent comments, a number of people have wondered why the regulators have begun focusing so heavily in their raw milk inspections on coliform counts, rather than sticking with seemingly more relevant E.coli and other pathogens that sometimes make people sick. A few have pointed out that the science around coliforms as a disease agent is as hazy as, well, a California Department of Food and Agriculture regulation.

Let’s face it—c oliforms are mainly a diversion, an additional excuse to go after raw milk producers Organic Pastures and Claravale Farm. They’re just another potential tripwire—insurance, if you will, from the regulators’ perspective…as prosecutors might say in going after mobsters, “If we don’t get them on extortion or racketeering or assault, we can always get them on income tax fraud.”

The situation in California is especially fragile because the entire state depends on two producers. It’s pretty easy for the authorities to focus their efforts in such a situation—get rid of one or both, and that’s pretty much the game.

Kathryn makes a very interesting point following my recent posting about Ron Schmid, that herd-share type arrangements present the best hope for success in fighting back because they more naturally align farmers and consumers. I'd add that this approach helps disperse the targets for the authorities--it's much tougher to fight many small producers than a few larger ones. That explains why New York authorities are fighting tooth-and-nail against the limited liability company (LLC) organized by Meadowsweet Farm.

My main question at this point is whether the authorities want to entirely rid big states like California and New York (and eventually the entire country) of raw milk producers, or just harass them enough to discourage other dairies from taking the raw-milk route and thereby keep consumer demand in check. If you think my first possibility sounds totally paranoid, consider that in the FDA's PowerPoint presentation about raw milk from last March, slide 60 contains this message to local regulators: “FDA encourages everyone charged with protecting the public health to prevent the sale of raw milk to consumers…”

Either way, it’s a serious situation if you believe people should have access to natural nutrient-dense foods. As Bob Hayles has said any number of times, this is a war. I appreciate Mark’s effort to remain optimistic—in any war, you have to keep the troops’ morale up. And sometimes, when things look worst, the tide turns. But in the end, people usually have to fight harder than they ever expected to win a war.

No one can accuse the fine public servants of California’s Department of Food and Agriculture of sitting on their hands, and letting raw milk coliforms threaten the health and safety of California consumers.

No, we can all breathe a sigh of relief. The junior he-men, working on behalf of the senior he-man-terminator, are out there…fighting the common enemy, raw milk coliforms. Okay, they may not be putting their lives on the line, or even their lunch hours, for that matter, but damn it, they care about us and, well, that’s all that matters, right?

Pretty much in tandem with the withdrawal of AB 1604 last week from consideration by the Calfironia Assembly, and its provision for a six-month repeal of AB 1735’s 10-coliform-per-milliliter standard, the CDFA swooped in and began testing the milk of the state’s two major raw-milk dairies--Organic Pastures Dairy Co. and Claravale Farm.

According to Mark McAfee, owner of Organic Pastures, the bottle of his dairy’s milk CDFA took for testing had 28 coliforms per milliliter—18 more than allowed under the new standard. (He claims that a private lab’s test of the same milk had a coliform count at 12.) He says that Claravale passed its first test.

The Organic Pastures failure isn’t a huge deal—for now. The CDFA can come back every 30 days to test. If Organic Pastures fails three of five tests, it must discontinue bottling milk for at least a couple days, while CDFA takes additional samples over a period of a day or two. If Organic Pastures passes two such tests, then it is back on the market for at least four months. But if it continues to fail, “It will take milk off the market,” says Mark.

“It’s a stupid game,” he adds. “It’s destabilizing, a game of harassment.”

In the meantime, he says that the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund will be seeking a temporary restraining order of AB 1735, probably next week. Plus, Aajonus Vonderplanitz, a long-time raw milk advocate, is hoping to file a separate suit shortly. In addition, Mark expects the commission investigating raw milk to begin being organized over the next few weeks.

For now, I must say how impressed I am with the speed of CDFA’s enforcement activities. They just won’t take any chances with the public’s safety at stake.

They’ve certainly got federal and state officials in New York over a barrel. Last week, The New York Times published a front page article about how tuna sushi from five of twenty restaurants and food stores “had mercury levels so high that the Food and Drug Administration could take legal action to remove the fish from the market.”

But there is no evidence the agency will take any action. In a followup article, The New York Times stated, “The federal Food and Drug Administration can move to have fish containing that much mercury taken off the market, though it rarely does so.” And no evidence since the report that the FDA has done anything to "protect" New Yorkers (or consumers anywhere, since it's safe to assume tuna sushi around the country is similarly contaminated).

Interesting that the New York Times expressed no amazement, or concern, that the FDA was just hanging around as consumers go on poisoning themselves with mercury in tuna. Are coliforms more dangerous than mercury? Am I missing something here?

I keep thinking about Barb and Steve Smith, and how they took six of their children to the court hearing last week seeking a temporary injunction in their suit against New York’s Department of Food and Agriculture.

They school their children at home. (Six live at home, and three others are grown and on their own. The photo at left shows the Smiths with three of their children, Alan, Paddy, and Jacob.)

To the Smiths, one of the unintended benefits of their court case is using their experiences with New York Ag and Markets and the courts as a real-life civics lesson.

I would imagine there were parents who brought children to the hearing in Sacramento a couple weeks ago with a similar intention in mind.

What are the kids learning? Well, one of the things they have to be learning is that when it comes to selecting your food, the government is no friend. In fact, the government is the enemy.

You can get a sense of the simmering feelings of resentment in a recounting of an Ag and Markets inspection at Meadowsweet Farm last October, by Alan Smith, the 18-year-old son of Barb and Steve . His reference to the “White Coats” is a not-too-subtle takeoff on the Red Coats who inspired revolution in America 250 years ago.

Yet even with all his early-life cynicism, Alan still harbored hopes that the courts would offer eventual justice.

“The next morning when I was having breakfast, my parents were discussing how to get a temporary restraining order to keep the White Coats off our farm until the court date. Court? Yes, we’re taking Ag and Markets to court. They recoil at the mention of court, it’s like the word ‘ni.’ I am looking forward to our court date. Sadly it hasn’t been set yet. I’m looking forward to listening to our lawyers crush Ag and Markets with things like charges of harassment and plenty of illegal stuff.”

His family’s lawyer, Gary Cox, did make a powerful argument. But the judge opted out, sending the case to another court.

The kids got to see a perfect illustration of what Don describes so well in his comment on my previous post—the royalty of America pulling up the drawbridges around their moat. Yet how does one go about explaining to children the subtleties described so well in other comments, of arbitrary standards, germ theory, political theatre, and other such influences on this entire situation?

Much as I’d like to see the children shielded from seeing the real behavior of their government, I really do think it’s preferable for them to learn the lessons earlier rather than later, like the adults among us.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t we back to where we were on the first of this month?

 

For all the hearings, and blistering legislator criticism of the California Department of Food and Agriculture, and reassurances from this politician and that regulator, and the involvement of high-priced lobbyists, and thousands of phone calls and faxes to legislators…isn’t AB 1735, with its 10-coliform-per-milliliter limit on raw milk—in the bottle—still in force? Isn’t California’s raw milk supply in danger?

 

That’s what I read into the various reports on my previous posting—thanks for all the legwork from several individuals, including Amanda Rose, Anna, AuLait, and Dave Hopton. This is a tough story to report--the powers that be don't really want it reported at all--and a number of people have put a lot of time into trying to figure out what’s happening.

 

Believe me, I really wish I were wrong. I have felt any number of times during the past month that I’ve been too cynical and too pessimistic, that I’ve let myself be influenced too much by Aajonus Vonderplanitz’s bleak warnings that you can’t trust anything any of the politicians and regulators say about raw milk without having it in writing.

 

After all that effort, we get a commission to look into the safety of raw milk? That’s almost comical. In legislatures around the globe, when they want to stall something into oblivion, they set up a commission. Do you have any idea how many commissions we've had investigating what to do about Social Security? How to balance the federal budget? How to improve race relations? I don’t know exactly, but I do know that even after they recommend reasonable solutions, the politicians usually ignore them, and eventually, when the situation gets worse, set up another commission to investigate the same thing over again.

 

No, these guys at CDFA have taken Muhammad Ali’s rope-a-dope strategy to another level. I feel a little like I did a few years ago during a visit to Barcelona. I had just arrived to visit my daughter, who was living there, and one of the first things she advised me as we boarded a subway was to watch out for the pickpockets. So, I kept my hands on my pockets and on my fanny pack. But as I headed through a turnstyle exit, a guy in back of me tapped me on the shoulder, distracting me for just a couple seconds, and in that brief period, a guy in front opened my fanny pack and got my wallet.

 

I was pissed, but I was also admiring. Those guys were good. They turned pickpocketing into an art form.

 

That’s kind of how I feel about the CDFA guys. They really are in the wrong profession. Instead of drawing regular middle class salaries, they should be out doing Ponzi schemes and card-sharking—they’d make a lot more money. When the dust cleared, and there was a lot of dust, they kind of brushed themselves off, looked over their victims lying outside the bar, got back on their horses, and rode off into the sunset.

 

Maybe some tough judge will catch up with them. Mark McAfee of Organic Pastures Dairy Co tells me the next step is to seek some kind of legal injunction against enforcement of AB 1735—hopefully in the next couple of weeks. The suggestion in Amanda Rose’s otherwise great writeup on The Ethicurean that there is an injunction is incorrect—there’s nothing between California consumers and AB 1735.

I feel badly for Mark. He was trying very hard to be reasonable and flexible and to compromise. But he was in with a bunch of people like you sometimes run into in Times Square, who move the thimbles and peas around and suck your money up. I probably should have entitled this posting, “The Education of a Raw Milk Dairyman.”

Six days ago, Mark McAfee of Organic Pastures proclaimed after the well-attended Sacramento hearing on AB 1604, “We all won!… Thanks to last minute 'hallway negotiations,' Assembly Bill AB 1604 passed with unanimous consent during Ag Assembly hearings held on Wednesday. This will ensure, for now, the continued flow of raw milk in California."

 

Major blogs like The Ethicurean hailed the news, complete with victory photos of Mark and supporters. For good reason.

Now the latest word from the Left Coast is that we’re about to lose. In an email today to media and supporters, Mark states: “Our AB 1604 raw milk bill will die tomorrow in the Assembly Appropriations Committee… we need to call them and raise holy hell!! The other day was just all grand theater. Big dairy and CDFA pulled off some slimy dirty tricks in their death march to deny us raw milk!! Let’s see if we can appeal to the committee members and get their votes anyway!! We might as well go down trying as hard as we can. We still have a great lawsuit pending!!”

 

This whole thing is beginning to remind me of what it felt like to be a Boston Red Sox fan for 87 years before late October 2004.

 

But it’s also a vivid demonstration about why the struggle over raw milk could actually be different this time around. I harken back to my interview with Ron Schmid, author of “The Untold Story of Milk”, posted a few days ago. His assessment about the raw milk situation was pretty grim. He’s seen all this before.

 

There was, however, one factor that I didn’t discuss in the posting, but which Don Neeper perceptively pointed out in his comments following the posting: the impact of the Internet.

 

I did raise this with Ron, and he acknowledged that it definitely is a wild card. I think it’s difficult for the historians in this struggle, like Aajonus Vonderplanitz and Ron Schmid, to imagine that things could be different this time around. And the apparent sabotage of AB 1604 in California--by sending it to the Appropriations Committee, especially unfriendly territory for raw milk--seems to confirm their argument.

 

But in the old days, news about hearings and abuse of farmers didn’t always get around. There was no way to get it around, since the mass media didn’t cover it appropriately then (and still doesn’t). So when a seemingly done deal, like the passage of AB 1604 by the Assembly Agriculture Committee, unraveled only days later, it was very difficult to re-mobilize the troops.

 

Today it is possible to at least alert the troops. But can they stay mobilized and enthusiastic in such an up-and-down atmosphere? That is the big question to be determined.

 

This latest twist in a seemingly endless series of twists and turns conveys a truly important lesson: in this struggle for nutritional freedom, we are up against very tough professionals. These people from the California Department of Food and Agriculture, along with their legislative and industry cronies, know the system backwards and forwards. They know moves we can’t imagine.

 

Most significant, they are reaching ever deeper into their bag of tricks, for one significant reason: they want to end the struggle HERE AND NOW. They want desperately to stop it in its tracks because demand for raw milk is growing so strongly. If they can’t stop it now, then they may lose to the unstoppable force of market demand. A number of the comments following the interview with Ron Schmid--by Lori McGrath, Barb Smith, and Pete--described the changing nature of the struggle.

 

So my advice is not to let the mood swings here become too discouraging. As Gary Cox, lawyer for the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, has said a number of times, we are fighting the good fight.