The Complete Patient

Brit says (following my Sept. 11 post) that she and her husband had the flu the other weekend, based on their symptoms. Melissa in her comments following the same post suggests they had listeriosis from the Organic Pastures cream that was recalled, based on the timing of their illnesses.

Reading these widely varying speculations reminds me of an interview I had last November with Lewis Jones, then head of the Ohio Department of Agriculture’s dairy division, which I recounted in a posting shortly afterward. 

I asked him about the illnesses of an elderly man and a four-year-old Dayton boy, which the ODA concluded were caused by raw milk. That conclusion triggered the shutdown of an Ohio dairy.

The elderly man actually said his immune system had been compromised. The mother of the boy wrote on the BusinessWeek.com site after publication of my article about Ohio’s harassment of farmers that the boy had likely become ill from eating snow laced with bird feces.

Jones’ response to the mother’s suspicions? “That’s what’s so dangerous (about raw milk). If people get sick, they’ll say it was something else.”

In other words, people who consume raw milk are ignorant ideologues, who can’t face “the truth.”

The solution of Jones and other officials in Ohio was to rid the state of raw milk. It would be as if the Hall family decided that every time it snowed, they would have all the snow cleared from their land, and prohibit their children from visiting anyone’s house where there was uncleared snow, to eliminate any risk from ingesting infected snow.

I think Mark McAfee makes an excellent point following my posting yesterday, when he states that “raw milk is not perfect and that is what makes it perfect. It is a product of nature and filled with a diversity of hopefully wonderful and great living healing things. There is absolutely no guarantee of perfect safety in any natural thing.”

When you drink raw milk, eat sushi, down a spinach salad, or eat raw almonds, you are taking your chances. (Actually, you’re probably taking more of a risk from a bologna sandwich or fast-food burger, but I diverge.) It’s a small risk, actually a tiny risk, but there is a risk nonetheless.

And if there is illness, you usually can’t be absolutely certain it was the raw milk or the spinach or whatever if the authorities can’t isolate the E.coli or whatever the bug is and match it with the food and producer in question.

That is what happened in the case of Chris Martin and Lauren Herzog—either no bug was discovered (Chris) or the bug that was discovered (Lauren) couldn’t be matched up to any food or producer.

The parents of these children have their beliefs, just like the Hall family in Dayton had its beliefs. Either belief could be correct. The Hall family wanted the ODA to be honest and forthright, but it refused to go further than simply repeat its mantra that raw milk was the culprit. The Martins and Herzogs want Mark McAfee to be honest and forthright. He has given the Martins and Herzogs much more than the ODA gave the Halls, but they want something additional—“facts,” an apology, an investigation, is what I hear.

They definitely want him to keep in his mind the details of their cases the same way they do. But as a couple of people point out, Mark isn’t like that. Anna says it well when she states, "Yes, McAfee's passionate and evangelical (perhaps a bit too much in manner like a revivalist) and often speaks extemporaneously so some of his words could be better chosen. So I guess I make allowances for some of the more over-the-top things he says (for instance I object to the 'cure' claims). He's a believer, and as such, is into it 100%."

I’ve known many entrepreneurs like Mark, and their minds don’t operate like those of lawyers, or journalists. Mark was cleared of wrongdoing by a system that would have liked nothing better than to put him out of business. He can’t be expected to keep being re-tried and rehashing the details of the cases over and over exactly the way the parents want to hear it.

Probably the situation I have had to deal with that most closely resembles the Mary/Melissa situations involved the murder of my grandmother by the Germans during the Holocaust (that prevented me from ever meeting her), and the injury of my aunt (whom I knew and loved very much), which led eventually to her death. For many years into adulthood, I avoided buying German products or traveling to Germany, to express my opposition to its recovery, even though post-War governments apologized and paid reparations. You see, they didn’t admit as fully as I would have liked the culpability of the great mass of German people. Eventually, I have let it go. I have been to Germany several times and I freely purchase German products. I don’t especially enjoy visiting Germany or hearing German spoken, but I decided that forgiveness for me personally was preferable to holding onto my hatred. It has been healing.

Would it have been easier or more difficult to forgive if my grandmother had died from eating some food that I suspected was tainted by a particular factory or farm? I'm not certain, and I'm not sure it matters.

In many ways it’s easier to just continue holding onto certain beliefs about guilt or innocence concerning some personal misfortune than to make changes that upset the beliefs. It’s certainly simpler than accepting the reality that uncertainty is an inherent part of the human experience. One of the main benefits proponents of raw milk are seeking is the freedom to experience such uncertainty for themselves.