Posted on 07/14/2010 12:49:09 PM PDT by Lorianne
When the 20 agents arrived bearing a search warrant at her Ventura County farmhouse door at 7 a.m. on a Wednesday a couple weeks back, Sharon Palmer didn't know what to say. This was the third time she was being raided in 18 months, and she had thought she was on her way to resolving the problem over labeling of her goat cheese that prompted the other two raids. (In addition to producing goat's milk, she raises cattle, pigs, and chickens, and makes the meat available via a CSA.)
But her 12-year-old daughter, Jasmine, wasn't the least bit tongue-tied. "She started back-talking to them," recalls Palmer. "She said, 'If you take my computer again, I can't do my homework.' This would be the third computer we will have lost. I still haven't gotten the computers back that they took in the previous two raids."
As part of a five-hour-plus search of her barn and home, the agents -- from the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office, Los Angeles County Sheriff, Ventura County Sheriff, and the California Department of Food and Agriculture -- took the replacement computer, along with milk she feeds her chickens and pigs.
While no one will say officially what the purpose of this latest raid was, aside from being part of an investigation in progress, what is very clear is that government raids of producers, distributors, and even consumers of nutritionally dense foods appear to be happening ever more frequently. Sometimes they are meant to counter raw dairy production, other times to challenge private food organizations over whether they should be licensed as food retailers.
The same day Sharon Palmer's farm was raided, there was a raid on Rawesome Foods, a Venice, Calif., private food club run by nutritionist and raw-food advocate Aajonus Vonderplanitz. For a membership fee of $25, consumers can purchase unpasteurized dairy products, eggs that are not only organic but unwashed, and a wide assortment of fermented vegetables and other products.
The main difference in the two raids seems to be that Palmer's raiding party was actually much smaller, about half the size of the Venice contingent: Vonderplanitz was also visited by the FBI and the FDA.
In the Rawesome raid, agents made off with several thousand dollars worth of raw honey and raw dairy products. They also shut Rawesome for failure to have a public health permit, though the size and scope of the raid suggests the government officials might have more in mind. Regardless, within hours the outlet reopened in defiance of the shutdown order.
Earlier in June, agents of the Minnesota Department of Agriculture, escorted by police and also bearing search warrants, raided and shut down Traditional Foods Warehouse, a popular food club in Minneapolis specializing in locally-produced foods. They also raided two farms suspected of illegally selling raw milk. And in a national first among such raids, agents searched a private home and made off with computers; the family's offense appears to have been that it allowed one of the raw dairy farmers to park in its driveway to distribute raw milk to area residents who had ordered it.
The Minnesota Department of Agriculture has declined comment on such raids, saying they are part of an ongoing investigation into raw milk distribution in the state in lieu of eight illnesses in May linked to raw milk.
Meanwhile, the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade, and Consumer Protection has launched three raids over the last three months on the dairy farm and farm store of Vernon Hershberger, near Madison. The day after DATCP agents placed seals on his fridges storing raw dairy products in July, Hershberger cut the seals, and announced he was going to challenge the agency's contention he needs a dairy and retail license to sell his products. Obtaining such licenses would be problematic, though, since Wisconsin prohibits sale of raw milk, except "incidental" sales, and defining "incidental" has been a bone of contention for many years. In any event, Hershberger contends he sells only to consumers who contract privately for his food.
What's behind all these raids? They seem to stem from increasing concern at both the state and federal level about the spread of private food groups that have sprung up around the country in recent years -- food clubs and buying groups to provide specialized local products that are generally unavailable in groceries, like grass-fed meats, pastured eggs, fermented foods, and, in some cases, raw dairy products. Because they are private and limited to consumers who sign up for membership, these groups generally avoid obtaining retail and public health licenses required of retailers that sell to the general public.
In late 2008 and early 2009, the representatives of state agriculture agencies in Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois met via phone conferences with representatives of the FDA to map a plan for targeting raw-milk buying clubs in the Midwest. The meetings came to light after Max Kane, the owner of a Wisconsin buying club who was subpoenaed by Wisconsin authorities for the names of his customers and suppliers, obtained email accounts of the sessions via a Freedom of Information request to Wisconsin's Agriculture, Trade, and Consumer Protection department. (Kane has since been prosecuted by Wisconsin authorities for contempt of court for failing to give up the names; his case is under appeal after he was found guilty last December.)
Now, the Midwest program seems to have gone national, and the recent spate of raids suggests a quickening pace and broadened scope. While most raids before the Midwest government meetings had been related to raw-milk distribution, some, like a December 2008 armed raid of Manna Storehouse, an Ohio food club near Cleveland, have been about licensing issues. In that raid, armed law enforcement officers held a mother and eight young children being home-schooled at gunpoint for several hours while they searched the home and food storage areas. A legal challenge to the raid by the family is still tied up in court.
The current uptick has Pete Kennedy of the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund concerned, not only about the spreading of the raids, but about the seemingly easy willingness of judges to hand out search warrants. While the U.S. Constitution's fourth amendment suggests judges should exercise tight controls over search warrants ("no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause..."), Kennedy observes, "I haven't seen an agency turned down yet" over the last four years in requests for search warrants connected with raw milk and other food production and distribution.
Given that the targets of search warrants don't get a say in court as to whether they should be issued, legal experts and those who have been raided say the most that food producers can do is take steps to prepare themselves to weather the raids as best they can.
Here are five suggestions they offer:
(excerpted)
When you had one family drinking milk from one cow, the cow had as much chance of getting TB [and other diseases] from the family as the family did from their cow or each other. But if thousands of people are drinking milk mixed from thousands of cows, and one cow can infect the whole mixture, you have an entirely different situation.
Or maybe you don’t believe in the germ theory.
I am disappointed to hear that about Santorum but glad to know it before I lend him any support.
Well a few decades after pasteurizing came another invention widely used today even in transporting food. It's called refrigeration and they make trucks well equipped for refrigerated transport.
Most farms who grow their own food, milk their own cows, and process their own meat understand refrigeration and use it. The milk in these cases isn't sitting in a milk can on the side of the road it's immediately refrigerated thus the chances of contamination, bacteria, etc, are pretty low. Most farmers have far more common sense and knowledge of handling their product than some commercial operations and most involved government agencies.
The reason many of these laws were enacted was prior to everyone having immediate adequate access to refrigeration capabilities. To be honest I'd really worry more about store bought items as some retailers have no qualms about putting refrigerated items back in the cooler that have been sitting in carts perhaps hours.
Your question is a logical hole in a deep septic tank.
Raw milk didn’t cause any disease for the first 6000 years; inventing pasteurization didn’t change that.
Pasteurized milk causes far more of the diseases that you list than does raw. Poor sanitation (like what exists in the large commercial daries that produce pasteurized milk) can result in diseases in any case, but the dairies that specialize in raw products are considerably cleaner, and the record shows them to be safe.
The heating of milk destroys all the natural protections, such as the digestive enzymes that raw milk naturally has, the colostrum, which is a natural disease fighter, and converts the lactose to a higher glycemic level.
Pasteurized milk has been proven to be a cause of insulin insensitivity through inflammation that is an unavoidable consequence of undigested lactose being converted to lactic acid, and it also is strongly implicated in colon and pancreatic cancer for the same reason.
Ceasing the use of pasteurized dairy products is often all that is required to end type II diabetes, chronic lung congestion, bladder infection, and toenail fungus.
People that are diabetic on pasteurized milk are often able to switch to raw milk without the diabetes returning.
There is no legitimate reason to pasteurize anything, and all foods that get pasteurized become unhealthy to eat.
“How slowly, 70 or 80 years?”
It can bring on type II diabetes in a matter of less than a year. The colon cancer takes 20 years or so generally.
Please explain how pasteurization makes milk indigestible. Using science based (not faith based) terms. Thanks in advance.
How?
The colon cancer takes 20 years or so generally.
I know lots of 20 year old who don't have colon cancer. And they've been drinking that (literal) poison for 20 years.
Which of the following provided beneficial effects for six thousand years? What were those benefits? Maybe you could rank these pathogens in order of benefits derived?
What's present in raw milk that isn't present in pasteurized milk that delivers all these supposed benefits?
Healthy bodies are able to resist bacteria, humans and bovines.
The safety record of the raw dairy industry is far better than the the rest of the dairy industry.
Part of this is because they raise their own herds, and rarely add animals from outside. Animals that have been given synthetic hormones are very prone to disease, and early death, and those on the open market are an unjustifiable gamble. Also the source of silage has to be closely watched. Commercial dairies use silage that contains ground up dead animals often. The raw dairies don’t take that chance.
So can the food they help process in commercial plants without so much as a TB test or inoculations. But you seldom hear about raids for that. Eating out at a family restaurant? There's a real good chance an illegal is preparing part of that meal including raw food products etc. Again where is Guburmunts Jack Boot Thugs to stop that? No where to be found. The very last food I would be concerned about is directly buying milk, beef, eggs, produce or anything from Farmer Jones private farm. What will be the next target? Local Farmers Markets?
“What’s present in raw milk that isn’t present in pasteurized milk that delivers all these supposed benefits?”
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Natural enzymes, colostrum.
Bacteria have not historically been a problem with milk. Until the folly of pasteurization, dairy products were not stored for long periods; they were usually replenished daily.
Your bacteria are much more likely to be present in pasteurized milk due to the poor sanitation at those facilities.
When they do they are healthy & make good stuff.
When evil f's feed the darlin's dead animals & corn, they get sick and make stuff that makes us sick.
Keep your blinders on toad; the population is getting sicker every day, and primarily due to consuming non-food.
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Be honest. As a kid or an adult have you ever gone swiming in a creek, river, or lake? Did your dad allow you to do so as a kid? Did he even bat an eye saying yes? There is always a certain amount in most of of what you listed in our enviroment no matter what.
“When evil f’s feed the darlin’s dead animals & corn, they get sick and make stuff that makes us sick.”
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Exactly.
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I’d buy raw milk if I could; did when I knew a woman who sold it.
I just boil it before drinking. It’s still infinitely better than store bought milk; homogenizing milk isn’t healthy either.
And healthy cows kept clean have good milk.
Lingering death from tuberculosis is a benefit? Who knew? Campylobacter, Salmonella and E coli are other potential "benefits" of raw dairy products. Cow pox is another awesome bonus.
I choose not to partake, but fully support your right to do so. As I clearly stated previously in no uncertain terms (and which you tellingly chose to edit right out), it is the right of everyone to eat and drink whatever they want without government intervention. I said that as clearly as I possibly could.
Why did you choose to leave it out when you picked over what I wrote to respond?
Did you choose to leave it out because you think it makes for a nicer narrative to mis-characterize what I very clearly stated? Do you have trouble with reading comprehension?
Did you vote for O?
Um... Let's see... one of us (me) said that I don't agree with an action some people might take, but that I strongly support their right to take that action. I clearly and unambiguously affirmed that the individual, not the government has primary rights to their bodies and what they put into them. See, that would be the conservative position.
The other (you) casts unfair aspersions, and then blatantly left out the parts of my statement that you didn't like so that you could hurl an unwarranted insult because you didn't like what I wrote about milk. That would be what liberals do.
One of us (me) unambiguously supports the rights of the individual to do what they like, even if it may be dangerous to the individual. Your body? Your food? Your right to do what makes you happy.
The other (you) is acting quite a bit like a liberal Obama voter, picking and choosing bits of information here and there until you've fabricated a reality you feel comfortable in.
P.S. Helpful Hint: Picking and choosing which information makes you "feel" good isn't the best way to convince someone else of your choices.
“Be honest.”
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You should know from experience here that you are asking for more than you’re going to get!
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Increasing food poisoning isn't gonna reduce sickness.
and primarily due to consuming non-food.
But enough about the bacteria in raw milk.
Thanks for answering my questions using science based terms. LOL!
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