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)
. . . .Wow!
. . . Sure is quite.
Seems like that last bombard you dropped quenched all the mind controlled gov-bots?
Truth rules once again!
What's the next topic that needs outing?
Love your illogical, and self-contradictory posts, and certainly we all know that agreeing with you, regardless of the irrevocable facts that get in the way, is a mark of great intellect.
.
Discussing this topic is like arguing religion...a waste of time.
Meaningless? Good grief, that's just absurd.
Regular pasteurization does not sterilize milk. Regular pasteurization isn't even hot enough to kill all the organisms in milk -- only the bad ones. That's why it will turn sour. Ultra-pateurization sterilizes milk and is why those creamers you get at 7-11 don't have to be refrigerated.
It can have bacteria counts as high as any unpasteurized milk.
Pasteurized milk that is refrigerated and not past date will not have the same kind of bacteria, or the same counts, as raw milk. That's ludicrous.
have it meet the criteria for being safe at that moment, and who knows what happens to it from then on. There are no guarantees.
You like stating the obvious. If you leave a gallon of milk outside in the sun for several hours during the summer there's no telling what might grow in it. That applies to a lot of food products. However, that's not what we're talking about, is it? No one can argue the fact that pasteurized milk is safer than raw milk and no one can prove that raw milk is any more nutritious than pasteurized milk. That being the case, why would you subject your children to the risk, knowing the results can be horrific, when they'll readily drink either product?
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.
So which is it, is lactic acid good for you and only found in raw milk or is it bad for you and only found in pastuerized milk?
I do, that's why I don't swim in water I know contains dead animals or has raw sewage flowing into it.
Oh do you swim in the ocean?
Sure. But we don't swim in it after we get a hard rain during the dry season. Too much animal feces get carried into the gulf from the runoff and bacteria counts soar. The county will even close the beaches from time to time for that reason. When they do, I don't go bashing the government for denying me my right to swim. Maybe I have too much common sense.
Nobody got sick out of at least several hundred swimming in the water.
Sure. As any one with any background in science will tell you, it's the dosage that makes the poison. Sickness from raw milk is rare but when it happens it has devastating consequences. I suppose the same could be said for anyone choosing to swim in raw sewage. The chances are you won't get sick but you'll wish you hadn't if you do. E. coli, hepatitis, cholera, gastroenteritis and Weil's disease have a unique way of making you regret those decisions. Just as I'm sure any parent would feel after their kid survives a bout with salmonella, E. coli or brucellosis from drinking raw milk.
If the farmer takes reasonable precautions? Yes a operson should be reasonably safe
Do you think raw milk farmers are testing every batch of milk they market? If so, you're not being reasonable.
Remember there are still many family farms and many do in fact drink their own cows milk.
Yup, as is their right. But, then again, some of them still get sick from it. Again, it's their choice. I'll bet they wish they had made better choices when they watch their child fight off a bout with salmonella. Maybe not. Some people look at those kinds of events as character building experiences that help develop the immune system. These people are also known as morons.
You can't sterilize the entire world or your environment.
No, but you can make good choices, especially when it comes to children. Making good choices is key to leading a happy and successful life. When you have two products that are the same nutritionally, and kids will gladly drink either one, why would you choose the one where there's a chance it could make you child very sick, leave them with damaged organs for the remainder of their life or kill them? Doesn't seem responsible to me, but that's just me. It's that commons sense again.
You can wax nostalgic about how good things were back in the day but the amount of foodborne illness has dropped dramatically since you believe you could eat raw meat with little risk. You might also note that the number of listeria poisonings from meat have dropped considerable since then.
It's interesting to note that those with a background in science are all saying the same thing on the thread. Raw milk contains dangerous pathogens and pasteurized milk does not. There are no important nutritional difference between raw milk and pasteurized milk. So why would you drink raw milk? Maybe we're being too rational. Maybe we understand that there is more risk from a glass of raw milk then there is from going for a swim in the creek or in the ocean. There are all sorts of risks in life and it's a waste of time to worry about all of them. However, people with common sense will not take unnecessary risks with their health and, especially, with the health of their children.
You don't do facts very well but you've absolutely cornered the market on crazy.
Your predictable & prejudice rage pushes certain facts out of your range of vision, a common problem in reality challenged individuals.
, I highly recommend drinking some raw milk for that.
Also ones liver enzyme profile is a deciding factor on that matter.
We all have differences in how we digest things.
However, most of us will do better with raw milk as nature intended , not cooked to hell and broken apart into smaller bits than our bodies are designed to handle.
So what's the answer? Lactic acid, good for you or poison?
Your predictable & prejudice rage
Stupid people make me angry. Doesn't rise to rage, unless their ignorance hurts or kills children.
However, most of us will do better with raw milk as nature intended
Like all those natural pathogens?
not cooked to hell and broken apart into smaller bits than our bodies are designed to handle
Bits too small to handle? Could you explain that using science based (not faith based) terms? Thanks.
Never heard of it.
My understanding is the homogenization (which was a marketing trick so butterfat % is hidden) makes the fat molecules isolated and small enough to cause trouble.
Homogenization hides butterfat? How?
makes the fat molecules isolated and small enough to cause trouble.
You think it actually makes the molecules smaller? How would it do that? How are the "smaller molecules" dangerous?
If you have the money and space to store it, sugar keeps forever. It can be used as money and traded directly or made into ethyl alcohol which is always in demand.
Hopefully others will, or they can do their own research.
It's not hard and it's very interesting.
When we all had milk delivered from local dairy's with happy cows eating grass and herbs ( not dead animals and genetically modified corn and other chemicals), there was naturally a different butterfat content to the milk.
You could see it ( the cream rose to the top, which was great, you could use it or just shake it back in solution).
To eliminate the advantage good dairies had over bad dairies they started homogenizing everything.
So much for diversity.
Try again?
makes the fat molecules isolated and small enough to cause trouble.
You think it actually makes the molecules smaller? How would it do that? How are the "smaller molecules" dangerous?
After all, it's a lipid.
That's a relief. You sounded like some of the other morons on the thread.
instead of clustered they become individual and can permeate membranes they shouldn't.
Individual fat molecules in your stomach cause trouble? How?
Raw milk has built in protective systems, most of which are destroyed during pasteurization
Big claim, no specifics. Can you name the "protective systems" that are "destroyed" during pasteurization? This guy is talking out his butt.
Raw milk contains lactoperoxidase which uses small amounts of H2O2 and free radicals to seek out and destroy bacteria
He grossly overstates the antimicrobial effects of lactoperoxidase. Lactoperoxidase is a very heat stable enzyme. It is not destroyed by minimum pasteurization conditions. If this is such a great bacteria fighter why do we find pathogens in raw milk?
Lactoferrin will kill a wide range of pathogens but does not kill beneficial gut bacteria.
It does not "kill a wide range of pathogens" but it does have some antibacterial properties. Pasteurization does not inactivate lactoferrin. Lactoferrin's behavior to heat depends on the iron status of the protein.
Raw milk contains Immunoglobulins (IgM, IgA, IgG1, IgG2) which transfer immunity
So does pasteurized milk.
The author likes identifying all sorts of raw milk properties without telling us that those same properties apply to pasteurized milk as well.
Raw milk contains hormones and growth factors (natural ones - not the added synthetic kind) which stimulate maturation of gut cells and prevent leaky gut.
Huh? Synthetic hormones are added to the milk during pasteurization? What the....?
Here’s the bad news. When milk is pasteurized most of these components are completely inactivated and those that remain are greatly reduced in their capacity to fight bacteria
This is just about as dishonest as it gets. This guy flagrantly lies and some here eat it up. Why am I reminded of PT Barnum?
From 2001-2003, 316 bulk tank milk samples from dairy herds across the United States were tested for coxiella burnettii. The researchers found that 94% of these raw milk holding tanks contained the pathogen while 90% of the US dairy herds sampled carried it. Where were all those antimicrobial agents to kill the "wide range of pathogens" found in this study? Are these bug killers only good for some bugs and not others? Can the author answer the question? Don't waste your time.
Coxiella burnetii in bulk tank milk samples, United States.
The author is being intentionally dishonest. He's obviously agenda driven and has little interest in the truth.
He keeps running away from answering this question. I know why he avoids it, but it's good to keep asking since it exposes the hypocrisy (and the lameness) of his faith.
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