Posted on 11/07/2011 6:53:17 PM PST by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
SILVER SPRING, Maryland, November 2, 2011 – They escaped arrest. The “raw milk freedom riders” who illegally transported raw milk from a farm in Pennsylvania to FDA headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland and then drank it and distributed it to a crowd rallied in support of their efforts got away with their crime.
As reported yesterday in this column, this group of raw milk activists planned the ride and rally to protest government restrictions on the sale of raw milk and the spending of taxpayer money to raid and bankrupt small family farms.
The rally began at noon as the swelling crowd gathered to hear speakers and await the arrival of the caravan, which, after celebrating its arrest-free arrival, gave out milk and cookies for all to enjoy.
In the crowd of 150 were raw milk supporters from Massachusetts, Wisconsin, New Jersey, Minnesota, and Ohio and throughout the DC Metro area. Said Kimberly Hartke, publicist for the Weston A. Price Foundation:
“The rally was celebratory, as the moms, with joy, took back their power and acted out their food sovereignty as citizens of a free country.”
Organizer Karine Bouis-Towe of the Farm Food Freedom Coalition read a statement from the Obama administration that said:
“Barack Obama and Joe Biden recognize that local and regional food systems are better for our environment and will support family-scale producers. They will emphasize the need for Americans to buy fresh and local.”
(Excerpt) Read more at communities.washingtontimes.com ...
I am glad there are laws and oversight here that prohibits all the things that happen to food in China (and Russia, etc.) that cause health problems.
Google “Chinese baby formula” and you will see that no one in China was enforcing the food safety laws - and melamine powder was added as filler to the formula.
As I said, I want the laws to be state rather than federal, but THAT is what the argument should be - not “food safety laws are dumb”, which is clearly what some here are advocating.
But you are forgetting that the butterfly-fairies in the green meadow beside the babbling brook just north of here cause the milk from the magic organic cows to be immune from all disease and organisms harmful to humans.
Wake the hell up, stupid!
/sarc
No its not the governments job to tell you what you can eat, however congress did indeed pass food safety laws, and they regulate what and how things can be SOLD.
You want raw milk, go buy yourself a cow, and milk it yourself.. hell suckle it from the teet directly, no one will or can stop you.
However, you wish to sell it to others, that’s where you run into the food safety laws.. You really need raw milk that badly, go buy a cow, and drink up.
Frankly I see no reason exceptions can’t be made for a farmer to sell it directly to the nutjobs who show up wanting to risk major illness and death, but I this stuff has no business on supermarket shelves.
These “healthier without pasteurization” are collectively idiots IMHO, inidustrial processing make pasteurization a neccessity for any sort of reasonable safe ongoing food supply.. Care to recall not all that long ago when some juice manufactures weren’t bothering to pasteurize their juices because it wasn’t required, and claimed it was healthier? Not suprisingly folks got sick and died. Its not a question of IF that is the end result of, only when and how many will get it.
I can’t fathom how anyone who has ever seen the equipment in even a modest sized dairy farm, could remotely believe that what comes out the other end isn’t going to be contaminated with harmful bacteria.
I am well familiar with the history of food safety, as a food service professional.
But government regulation doesn't make food safe. Take restaurant inspections by 'health departments'... once every 3 years doesn't do much for food safety. Training people does.
As a nanny statist, you obviously turn to government for solutions, when the real solution is an educated populace.
/johnny
I think it's more a function of threat of being sued rather than the weak and ineffective food laws in the US that cause our food to be safer.
If you have seen food service from the inside, you would know just how ineffective laws are, and how effective training and education is.
/johnny
I have less problem with oversight, assuring that if I claim to produce “X”, that I am indeed producing “X” and doing so safely.
I have less problem with allowing raw milk but requiring frequent (daily even - some dairies do this voluntarily) testing, and displaying the test results.
I’m not completely at ease with that level of government involvement, but I wouldn’t really get heated up over it. Information, standards, enforcing truth - not bad things. Assuring that the reasonable expectation of the consumer is met is fine. But no reasonable consumer would buy raw milk expecting it to be pasteurized. If they know what it is, and want to buy it anyway, then let them buy away.
If I choose to eat at a restaurant that has less than an A health certification - I do so with knowledge of the implied risks.
Dishonest? There’s not a dishonest bone in my body.
The fact is your sites are selling products. Period.
You can look at the sources in Wiki if you want more facts even. It’s not Wiki itself; it’s what people source in there.
Quackwatch is a good place to start.
The “real cures” of so-called “natural” nonsense sure worked out real well for millions of people for thousands of years, didn’t they? Lots of death from influenza, much less more “serious” diseases. How’d that work out for “Plague” victims? Mass exterminations.
Incidentally, where do you think they get pharmaceuticals, anyway? They just concoct them out of thin air? Sometimes they’re based directly on observations of your “natural” stuff and simply isolated and concentrated so they actually work effectively. Hence aspirin and penicillin, etc.
Government certification is a two-edged sword. Sometimes (often?) one’s legitimate concerns are falsely allayed because of the implied assurance of a government stamp of approval.
How many horrible drivers are there in possession of valid, government certified, drivers licenses?
Paranoia is extreme & irrational.
Some of us are just skeptical and wary, but not paranoid.
No I don’t turn to goverment for solutions, and comparing health department inspections of restaurants, which are handled by counties and local municipalities to federal food safety regulations is not remotely an apples to apples comparison.
I agree with you basically.
There is nothing wrong with people making their own food to eat how they want, and even selling it at their stands, etc, to people. I honestly don’t have a problem with that.
I’ve eaten many eggs and a few chickens from my aunt’s farm. No problem.
I think it’s more that honest-to-goodness “stores” should have to ensure their food is “certified”.
(I know the FDA/etc is not perfect - heck, many of the “standards” are actually antiquated and useless as Stossel points out. I think the principle is OK, though.)
Talk about your red herring.
Milk cannot be sold without being pasteurized, that’s pretty straight forward. Trying to pull drivers licenses which are STATE ISSUED with federal food safety standards is hardly a comparable argument.
As I have said, I am fine if the law makes an exception for some local farmer to sell his milk directly to consumers who are foolish enough to drink it. However it should not be put into the commercial food chain.
We know what happens when unpasteurized products enter that channel.. folks get sick, and yes some die. Its not an matter of if, just a matter of when it will happen, and how many it will happen to.
The days of the typical american going to his neighbor farmer to buy his food are long gone, we live in an industrialized age. Everything, including milk, is industrialized. Have you ever been on a dairy farm? Ever been in an industrial processing plant? I have, there is no way anyone familiar with these can be so self dillusional that they believe what comes out of the end of these product lines is the equivalent of what once was.
Even the most modest of dairy farms is mechanized and streamlined. Contamination and cross contamination is going to occur, there is no way around it. Even if your heard is not infected by known bovine infections known to transmit to humans, your are going to get contamination into the milk at even the most modest of scales.
Raw milk gets into the commercial food supply without limit and the next thing you know folks are going to be falling ill, not simply because they chose to drink raw milk foolishly, but because some idiot is going to start making other products with that raw milk and folks are going to get sick from it not even knowing raw milk was used to manufacture it.
Sorry, but food safety laws are a good thing, and all one needs to do is bother to go see how commonplace deaths and illness occurred from processed foods prior to them being put into place to realize it. I’m sure H.J. Heinz didn’t go and lobby for food safety lawas because he was a government control freak, and wanted more inspectors and regulation in his industry, he did it because he was not a fool, and understood that it was needed for the safety of the public and the good of his industry.
Exactly,
Huge difference between direct sales by producer to consumer and putting it into the overall food supply. If the law doesn’t have an exception for the local farmer to sell it in small quantities to individuals who buy directly from them, then I have no issues changing the laws to allow this.
This sort of thing however, has no business getting into the commercial food supply.
“Do you think there should be any laws that govern food safety?”
I think the FDA, an arm of gov’t that protects drug companies and not the public should be reined in. Many deaths result from unsafe drugs on the market. Let’s put emphasis on safety where it belongs. Raw milk is not unsafe. Many products of the drug companies that are approved by the FDA are unsafe, and allowed to remain on the market after they have disabled and killed. Drug companies and their CEO’s should be held accountable, as well as the FDA for this outrage.
But you no doubt would not agree with that. After all, you are an ‘expert’.
Tell me about it. And that as a lifetime non-smoker of tobacco, ganja, whatever. I only smoke when I’m on fire.
Do you think the government, any branch, has the jurisdiction to ban sale of raw eggs, or any other product that's been used for millenia?
You continue to lie.
I do not have any sites that sell anything and you know it. If you cannot defeat the facts, you attack the messinger.
Quackwatch is a total fraud.
The idiot had to surrender his medical license.
He has an endless list of court orders against him for his fraudulent activities. He owes thousands in court ordered payments to Tim Bolen and others that he cannot pay.
You must be him.
Only natural means can save lives, and most health crises are caused by mainstream treatment and drugs.
Cancer patients, for example, never get to die from cancer; they are killed by cancer “therapy.”
First, you did use the “buy yourself a cow” argument, and it was to that post I was replying. That you changed your argument later does not invalidate my response.
Here is what I posted:
“Government certification is a two-edged sword. Sometimes (often?) one’s legitimate concerns are falsely allayed because of the implied assurance of a government stamp of approval.
“How many horrible drivers are there in possession of valid, government certified, drivers licenses?”
The clear point of the driver’s license example, except to the (probably intentionally) obtuse, is that government certification is not an assurance of quality. One being state and the other federal does not refute the point - in fact, the state, being closer to the populace is more likely to do a BETTER job of certification, not worse.
And the broader point, that we often trust such government certification instead of doing our own due diligence, you did not address.
Regarding your distinction between commercial and farm sales - as long as I know what I’m buying, what difference does it make to you, or to anyone else at all? If I unwittingly purchase one while intending to buy the other - that’s a problem.
The guy making something else with the raw milk could buy it direct from the farm and make his product - the safeguard for that is - follow me now - inspection. A guy who uses raw milk in his product should make sure his customers know it. Someone making products for mainstream use (i.e folks who DON’T want raw milk products) should be required to use pasteurized milk.
So you’re arguing a strawman - I’ve not advocated doing away with inspections, I’ve decried prohibitions. If people want raw milk, and someone wants to sell them raw milk, and they know they’re getting raw milk - let them buy the goldarn raw milk! Raiding a fellow’s dairy because he sold raw milk to someone specifically requesting and knowingly receiving it, is outrageous. And that’s how this whole thread started.
The idiot to whom you refer at least discusses those “fraud” cases. I’m sure ALL those wonderful non-”Western”/non-modern subjects discussed are all perfectly kosher for you. Acupuncture, chiropracty, supplements galore, are all just being victimized by “frauds” like Quackwatch.
Meanwhile, I LINKED the EXACT page that showed the website YOU linked DOES INDEED SELL PRODUCT.
That is no lie. Guess you didn’t open the page to see what it had.
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