The Complete Patient

Nicolas Teyssedou seems at first your prototypical farmer—serious and a man of few words. But then you get the 25-year-old owner of La P'tite Ferme (the small farm) outside the town of Caussade in Southern France, talking about raw milk, and before long he's expounding on theories of philosophy and chemistry.

Nicolas, like the owners of a growing number of American farms, is trying to make farming work by going back to traditional production and growing practices, such as raising his cows on pasture. Also like more American farmers, he is selling directly to consumers, from his farm and at farmers markets.

I had the good fortune of spending some time with Nicolas because my cousin, Lynn Gumpert, who lives part-time in this area of France (the rest of the time in New York), had met him at a farmers market and come to treasure his hand-made yogurts, cheeses, and flans. But she didn't really know much about his farming philosophy and experiences, so we decided to pay him a visit on Wednesday afternoon. Fortunately also, Lynn translated.

The first thing I noticed driving up the dirt road to his farm was his twenty cows grazing peacefully on an expansive pasture. He greets customers in a small store (pictured above) that looks like a cheese shop, displaying his products in refrigerated cases.

He answered my questions tersely at first, but when I told him I have a site on the Internet about health and nutrition, he graciously gave me a tour of his refrigerated production shed, where he carefully mixes batches of raw-milk cheese and flan (coffee, caramel, and chocolate flavors), along with plain and fruit yogurts. The cheeses, depending on variety, are heated to between 15 and 42 degrees Celsius, the latter being the highest temperature possible while still avoiding pasteurization.

The yogurt is made from milk he must pasteurize in order to conform with national regulations stipulating which bacteria can and can't be present in the final product.

The product that gives him "the most problems," he says, is the one requiring the least amount of preparation—you guessed it: the raw milk.

There the regulations seem to become tighter and tighter as time goes on. So while raw milk can technically be sold in stores, in practice that is nearly impossible, since the milk must be sold within three days of having been produced; pasteurized milk expiration periods are much more flexible. Thus, Nicolas is limited to selling his raw milk directly from the farm or at farmers markets.

In addition, as a raw milk seller, Nicolas must annually produce proof that he has had his cows vaccinated for major diseases. And the government seems to be stipulating ever more regulations concerning cleanliness—use of plastic gloves and paper hats by milkers and cleaning of cows before and after milking.

As he described the restrictions, one thing that stood out to me is that the regulations, based on his account, seem to be consistently applied, across the country.

While Nicolas' sales of raw milk are growing, he laments that they aren't growing as fast as sales of his cheese, flan, and yogurt. "Ideally, I would like for people to buy raw milk and make their own cheese and flan. But people are cooking less and less, so I have to make these products for them."

He finds older people, who can remember having consumed raw milk in their youth, most interested in the product now. Younger people object sometimes to the fact that the milk has a fuller taste than the pasteurized stuff they are used to. To me, the milk tasted great, nearly sweet, though not quite as rich as the milk I am accustomed to from New Hampshire.

Nicolas says he transformed his parent's farming operations a year ago based on his studies of agriculture in high school and two years of college, during which he became disillusioned by traditional farming and food processing methods. He bemoans especially that milk products are separated for cream, protein, skim milk, and sugars. Then they are re-constituted for mass-produced yogurt, ice cream, and other such products. The same kind of separation and re-constituting happens throughout the food production system, he says, and in his opinion underlies growing problems with chronic disease and obesity in Europe and the U.S. Sound familiar?

When I ask Nicolas if he envisions his focus on raw-milk products and direct-to-consumer approach being more profitable than the traditional farming methods his family used before he took over operations a year ago, he shakes his head. "I am doing what makes sense ecologically and naturally."

He says his production costs are actually lower than using traditional approaches. "I produce half of what they (conventional farmers) produce, but I have much higher quality products. And my costs are much lower. Grass feeding is one-third the cost of grain feeding."

But more important is the underlying philosophy he has adopted to guide his approach to farming: "Nothing is added, nothing is lost, but everything is transformed."

Most farming involves adding and taking things away, he says; thus, when chemical fertilizer is added to soil, under this philosophy, "It means some things are not working as hard." Nutrients and beneficial chemical reactions are lost.

For now, he is one of just a handful of farmers around France committed to pasture feeding, and one of an even smaller number committed to raw milk production; he estimates there are four or five pasture-based farms in his "department" (like a county), and one other raw milk producer. In some departments, there aren't any raw milk producers.

All of which launches him into a lament that corn feeding is government subsidized, while grass isn't. He's also discontinued labeling his products "biologique" (organic) because he has to pay more than $1,000 annually in fees and fill out special forms. Moreover, he feels consumers, at least in his area of France, associate organic with higher prices, which makes them less likely to purchase his products.

One of his goals is to get more visitors to his farm, "so people can see that the cows are eating grass." Education, he feels, is his most advantageous long-term advantage.

***

Overheard in an outdoor cafe in the main square of a tiny tourist town in southern France:

British tourist, after consuming a couple beers and just prior to getting back onto his tour bus, to his waiter: "So, how long you here for, chap?"

Waiter, with a sigh: "I live here."

I am generally loathe to make lots of comparisons between other countries I visit and the U.S., since it is difficult to gain a true picture of another country in a brief visit.

But one thing that definitely stands out in driving around southern France is how beautiful and well preserved the countryside is. There just aren't any strip malls, Wal-Marts and fast-food stands to clutter thin gs up. Each small town is self-contained, and there aren't any shopping malls to greet you on the way in.

So the countryside has the look it's had for many hundreds ofyears--tranquil and pleasing to the eye, with neat fields of corn, wheat, and sunflowers.

I've been staying with cousins in a tiny town near Montauban, not far from Toulouse, the last couple days. They spend ever more time here in France and less in the U.S. One of the reasons they are drawn here is that France supports its farmers, and in doing so, preserves its countryside much more effectively than we in the U.S. (and many other countries) have done.

Even so, they foresee a trend in France that has the countryside eventually losing influence. One part of that trend involves foreigners buying up farmhouses and farmland for vacation homes. In their town, there are now British, Dutch, and German homeowners both in town and in the adjoining countryside. These foreigners tend to preserve the land, but they don't cultivate it. This trend is repeated around France.

A second trend is globalization. As much as France wants to support its farmers, the pull of international trade agreements is forcing the country in the direction of the U.S. in encouraging factory farming as a way to increase "productivity" and a "free market."

In the meantime, it's refreshing to experience a number of old-time customs out in the countryside with regard to food and eating:

• The practice of allowing pets into restaurants (actually common in cities as well). It's a bit of a jolt to have a dog come barking into your brasserie, but it happens pretty regularly, and no one bats an eye.
• In the country, flies seem to be everywhere in and around restaurants and hotels. People swat them off their food, but they are an accepted part of the atmosphere.
• While public bathrooms have improved a great deal over the years, many still feature common cloth towels shared among many, rather than paper towels or blow dryers.

The more one analyzes the government's data about raw milk, the more suspect the data become.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) obviously put a lot of time, thought, and energy into that 66-slide presentation that I and others assessed a few days ago. We found a number of holes in the presentation, such as mis-statements about the possibility of rabies being spread through raw milk.

Now Mary McGonigle-Martin has completed an even more in-depth assessment of the presentation (in her comment on yesterday's post), and her results confirm the initial impressions several individuals had as to be nearly shocking. Not only are they inaccurate in describing the situation in California last September in which four children became ill, but they mix and match data so as to skew it toward their viewpoint (as in the use of illness from Mexican raw milk cheese).

It's important to remember that these are supposedly skilled scientists accumulating and presenting this data--scientists whose salaries we are paying. It is becoming clear that these individuals are much less scientists than propagandists. As such, they are a disgrace to their profession.

Fortunately, their "data" are increasingly coming under public scrutiny, not only on this blog, but in more local media. One recent case is in North Carolina, where a journalist with an alternative paper challenged the blatherings of a local agriculture official in an excellent article. Among the highlights are that raw milk gets blamed on a kneejerk basis for stomach illnesses, that deli meats are a more worrisome source of listeria than raw milk, and that today's raw milk isn't the same for the most part as the raw milk that caused problems a century ago.

Most intriguing to me about this article is the refutation to the scientists' argument that there is no data to suggest raw milk has nutritional benefits over pasteurized milk, via citation of recent studies. It's the same kind of argument offered by the scientists about immunization. Isn't the basis of the scientific approach maintaining an open mind?