Matt Stieb writes today about the food freedom movement:
How Raw Milk Went From Hippie to MAGA
This seems right, but it's not. Raw milk certainly had a MAGA moment earlier this year—completely unrelated to RFK Jr.—but its conservative roots go back well over a decade. Here's a Politico piece from 2014:
As buying local has become all the rage and concerns about industrialized agriculture more widespread, the right-leaning food freedom cause is gaining steam and increasingly finding allies on the left.
....Supporters of the movement, including Rep. Thomas Massie, the Kentucky Republican who sponsored the two raw milk-related bills and is looking to take a leadership role in the food freedom movement...plans to introduce more food freedom bills in the coming months. He hopes Democrats are willing to go along for the ride. “I sit two or three seats from the aisle in the House of Representatives because I’m always looking for Democratic co-sponsors,” he quipped.
Let's go further back. Here's the description of a book written in 2009:
The Raw Milk Revolution takes readers behind the scenes of the government's tough and occasionally brutal intimidation tactics, as seen through the eyes of milk producers, government regulators, scientists, prosecutors, and consumers. It is a disturbing story involving marginally legal police tactics and investigation techniques, with young children used as political pawns in a highly charged atmosphere of fear and retribution.
It received a positive review in The American Conservative. The author, David Gumpert, later wrote an obituary for Michael Hartmann:
Hartmann became a folk hero in the Minneapolis area for standing up to state public health regulators who raided his delivery truck and farm on numerous occasions between 2010 and 2014 to halt his raw milk deliveries.
....Hartmann is one of a number of dairy farmers around the country who stood up for their right to sell their farms’ raw dairy products.... Farmers like Hartmann made it work, by studying the law and standing up to the powerful biases in our system. There was no whining about liberal judges or elites or conspiracies or vote fraud or any of the other staples of our current perverted and polarized politics.
Now let's go back even farther. The godfather of the raw milk movement is libertarian Christian farmer Joel Salatin, who wrote Everything I Want to Do is Illegal in 2007. Here's what he says about it:
If this country allowed an opt-out spot for consenting adults to take personal responsibility for the food ingestion, it would unleash an entrepreneurial cottage-based localized tsunami on the marketplace. Wal-Mart would never know what hit it. If the foodies and greenies could only imagine what bottom-up freedom could create, they'd forget their demands for more inspections, more regulations, and more food police and instead campaign for true free markets.
The strongest and longest congressional crusader for raw milk was libertarian Republican Ron Paul, who first introduced a bill to legalize raw milk in 2007 and received standing ovations for promoting raw milk during his 2012 presidential campaign.
The raw milk movement didn't start with leftist hippies. It started with cranky individualist farmers and their conservative customers, who fought against government regulators for their right to do as they pleased. From there it spread on both left and right, but even now it's mostly a right-wing cause. The MAGA embrace of raw milk (and later RFK Jr.) is its natural end point, not a sudden embrace of crunchy hippiedom.
Grew up on a small dairy farm last century. Remember the government milk inspector visits causesd tension--they had a checklist of things--health of cows (brucellosis and TB concerns but mastitis more common), conditions of housing, storage of milk. Dad had to build a milkhouse around 1948 to house the new cooler for storing the full milk cans. By the 60's they (the govt) were pushing for bulk tanks. Those regulations required money, which meant pushing the smaller farms to the wall.
All in all a lesson in economics, politics, and govt, not to mention the ongoing aggravation---in sum a breeding ground for resentment and fertile ground for a raw milk movement.
Exactly. This has nothing to do with being a "hippie". You go around a good many small farms in Wisconsin and families would drink raw milk. If you do so for a long time people can build up antibodies to the bacteria.
The problem is putting this out there to people who haven't built up such resistance. As a former Paulite I was into raw milk, not just as a measure against the government but also big ag which also explains it's appeal. Then a family I knew where I live, their daughter got very sick, in fact suffered brain damage, because she was unwhittingly given raw milk at the local high school football team banquet by one of the parents who was big into the raw milk movement at the time. Other kids got sick too, affected their ability to play sports. Then I realized what this movement was really about and would have nothing more to do with it. If people want to drink it fine but trying to promote it is downright dangerous to others, something they were utter obvious to.
Then they tried to cover their asses by blaming the chicken dinner that was served when they got sued. It really split the community over a decade ago.
I have no sympathy for people like that. A guy I worked with Bill Shaline, was murdered by someone with that attitude:
On June 21, 2000, FSIS Compliance Officers Jean Hillery and Tom Quadros and California Senior Investigator Bill Shaline were shot shortly after they arrived at a USDA-inspected sausage establishment in San Leandro, California. California Food Inspector Earl Willis was also shot at, but escaped injury.
Operations at the establishment were suspended because the plant was not operating in compliance with food safety regulations. Rather than correct the problems, plant owner Stuart Alexander continued to illegally produce and sell products without the required Federal inspection. FSIS and the State of California began investigations to protect the public and detain product that was already found in commerce.
Hillery, Quadros, Shaline and Willis went to the establishment to meet with the owner to collect evidence and serve notice of the violations. The owner retrieved a gun from his office, entered the retail area where Hillery, Quadros and Shaline were waiting, and opened fire, killing the three investigators. Willis was waiting outside for police, who had been called to assist with meeting with the owner. Willis was able to escape by taking shelter in a local business.
https://www.fsis.usda.gov/employees/employee-news-stories/archives/archive-remembering-their-sacrifice-jean-hillery-tom
Willis ran for his life when Alexander chased him while shooting at him. Unable to catch him, Alexander returned to his business while the three people he shot writhed on the floor. He cold bloodily walked up to them and shot them in the head.
Anybody who doesn’t understand how important their work is should read about the recent deaths from listeria from Boar’s Head products.
In order to find raw milk being a "thing" among hippies you need to go back to a time when there were actual hippies.
The "back to the land" style of hippies only existed in tiny numbers and for a very brief time like the early 70s.
Almost all morphed into general environmental advocates and conventional suburbanites.
"cottage-based localized tsunami"
Irrespective of his politics, Joel Salatin appears to be a rather shit writer.
I read one of his early books about raising beef, where he went on and about about cows and the first flush of spring grass being the perfect food for them.
Now my training came from 4-H program on cow-gut biology (cows have 4 stomachs, so it's an intensive program for farm kids who will someday maybe be nursing the cows on the family farm); and it was more than 40 years ago, but I knew he was wrong. Spring grass is like a tonic, but not something to build proteins and muscles and unborn calves with. You need seeds.
And I'll be darned but I did see some writing from him that took that back and admitted grass going to seed was the best food, not that first spring flush.
I'm all for taking the warning labels off at this point.
Where I draw the line is the heath and safety of the animals, it they go after that it's time to lock and load.
'Freedom' --from the people who are massively freaked out by the sight of someone else wearing a mask in public during an epidemic and cry over the prospect of not having gasoline in their car.
The real meaning of freedom is that it's the absence of those people, every single time.
Dunno bout the politics of it, but I was drinking (and enjoying) raw milk products in CA way back in the before time of the late 70's. Alta Dena was the one and only 'official' raw milk dairy in CA (at the time?) and there was a whole state agency for it. I recall the cottage cheese being especially tasty. Quick Google search shows they stopped in 1999.
I'm glad that you posted this. I remember discussions around raw milk in CA circa 1980, with Alta Dena being at the center of it, and it being controversial at some level, but I couldn't begin to recall the details. In any case, it all predates Kevin's "always" date of 2007.
Yeah, I remember getting raw milk from Alta Dena. Supposedly it was somehow better for you. Then I read about it and found that to be untrue so I stopped buying it. I have a very strong suspicion that the right wingers Kevin is talking about are old hate the government type hippies who are current Trump supporters.
Yep, "always" appears to be a shorter measurement than I thought.
On the other coast, my mother used to buy raw milk from the local Amish. She mostly separated it to make other things, but we drank a little too.
If people want to drink it, who cares? Those who aren't competent enough to do it safely will quickly learn their limitations, and while unpleasant, it almost certainly won't kill you.
Also, keep in mind that Fighting The Man for your right to buy [ammo, "vitamins" made of sawdust, milk that spoils almost instantly, gold, tax avoidance tricks, and so on] is a marketing trick that goes back at least to prohibition (and I'm sure before that, I just can't think of an example right now).
That heroic peddler with a bottle full of Fix What Ails You fights big government for you!
Honestly, let them have this one. Label clearly and it's of no risk to anyone that doesn't want the risk. Hell, throw in some tort reform so you can't sue the farmer if you get sick while you're at it.
I remember hearing in France that part of the reason their cheeses are often better is that they could use raw milk. I wonder if that's true.
I'm cool w raw milk as an option, but recognize that there *will* be casualties. Back when Alta Dena supplied raw milk in California, there were pretty regularly outbreaks of this or that as a result.
It's really true, there are some delightful raw milk cheeses you can eat in Europe that cannot be imported into the US due to regulations - aged raw milk cheeses are allowed, say a cheddar aged 12 months but a raw milk brie or stilton - nope.
These types of cheese are also illegal to make inside the US too though folks are trying to loosen the regulations for cheese making, the risk for these cheese is pretty low but not zero for vulnerable groups, hence the regulations.
It would be great if it made them all sick, but we wouldn't be so lucky. This is a pretty trivial thing, but if it's illegal then, by golly, we should arrest them and put them in prison for a decade!
Here is an equation: Raw Milk + Children + Milk Borne Disease = Child Protective Services.
Rather than a crusade against "oppressive" government and "freedom-fighting" dairy farmers, this ought to be a conversation between potential sellers and buyers of raw milk.
I cannot imagine ever buying unpasteurized milk. The risk of getting sick is way, way too high. Milk is notorious for being a breeding ground of all kinds of micro-organisms.
Maybe somebody else is a bit more willing, but still, how do we know anything about the care, or lack of it, some dairy farmer has taken?
Regulations are often a form of transmission of information - steps X, Y, and Z have been taken to ensure the product can be used safely.
Once upon a time, this worked on a relationship basis. You knew the dairy farmer, you knew what he did, and how reliable it was. But these days those guys are anonymous. They might be super responsible, they might not. In the absence of any information transmission - via regulation - the business could easily become a cost-cutting race to the bottom.
But let me recap: I'm not saying, "don't do this".
I'm saying, "let this be a conversation between sellers and buyers. How can buyers know that the milk is safe to consume?" I would think that the dairy industry would want to transmit that message.
The whole "know your farmer" thing has always seemed bizarre to me. How many people have any idea what sanitary dairy farming practices actually look like, and are in a position to effectively evaluate them on site? "He seems like a nice guy" when you chitchat at the farmer's market isn't enough.
It isn't foolproof, of course.
I think though, that's it is far less likely that someone would try to scam or knowingly pass off inferior or dangerous goods to someone that they knew and had conversations with.
This isn't a binary. It isn't all or nothing. But it does seem like things lean that way.
However, this just doesn't scale. What would happen if everyone went to the closest farmer's market on Sunday (or whatever)?
“I think though, that's it is far less likely that someone would try to scam or knowingly pass off inferior or dangerous goods to someone that they knew and had conversations with.”
[Bernie Madoff enters the chat]
Some people will never learn that affinity fraud is literally people passing off shitty products to people they know and have conversations with.
The "know your farmer" schtick was dead by the mid to late 1800s, when lots of people worked in cities and milk was brought in from outside the city. You'd buy it by the pail (bring your own bucket), and even if you "knew" your milk vendor, you did not know if the white liquid you got was watered down milk or a sort of whitewash with enough milk added to smell right. Forget "pasteurization."
There were actual reasons why the Pure Food & Drug Act was passed.
The libertarians and their sympathizers always assume that the Free Market will eventually lead to nobody being ripped off ever, because consumers will abandon retailers who screw them too much. As if consumers go home and do their own inspections: hmm this milk is only 93% real milk! And this pound of hamburger has bits of ground rat mixed in! let’s go back to that roadside stand and give that seller a whooping after taking our money back! There are definitely reasons why people wanted government to regulate this shit to begin with…
I grew up on a dairy farm. We sold milk to Hood, a New England dairy.
We also sold milk directly out of our bulk tank to customers (neighbors) who came with their own milk jugs for us to fill, half-a-buck a half-gallon.
And of course we drank the milk.
I am still happy to drink raw milk, and buy from a local farm here occasionally. But my husband and children say it causes stomach distress (I think that's proteins that are denatured by the pasteurizing, not microbial).
The best use for raw milk is making fresh cheeses for home cooking. Mozzarella, cottage cheese, skyr, etc.
I know the farm, know their milk-room procedures, and live in a state with a food sovereignty law that allows farmers to sell directly to customers.
I would not purchase raw milk from a farm stand or market where I did not know their procedures.
And an important note here: one local dairy farm, Nezinscott Farm in Turner, Maine, just won a James Beard award as one of the best restaurants in the nation. I've been eating and purchasing food from this farm for about 25 years now, and agree: it's a farm that tastes like Maine (away from the sea).
Not many people know the flavor of their homes, I'm lucky to know that. Blessed.
So I recommend drinking the raw milk from a good farm like Nezinscott, filled with the good flavors of the grasses of summer. Eat the cheeses, the turnips and potatoes, too. It's the flavor of a place, its sun, soil and water, and something most people have forgotten: the taste of home.
Modern food safety is pretty amazing. For example, you know pork has to be well cooked? Well, with modern farming pork sashimi is safe. https://www.foodrepublic.com/2012/04/03/los-angeles-on-the-subject-of-the-pork-sashimi-at-pigg/
Raw milk will probably cause a few illnesses every year, but I doubt it is enough to justify preventing people from buying it.
Why not compromise and just require warning labels?
I just like how milk is too important to be left to the states, but abortion is just fine without federal protections.
I'd be happy leaving both choices to the individual.
As someone recently hospitalized for several days with an undetermined intestinal infection, yeah, no, don’t increase your risk of that intentionally. Definitely the first two days were the most miserable of my life.
Kevin, as others have pointed out, if you want to show how something didn’t start with the hippies, you need to go back to the time of hippies. And while I’m sure there were some hippies still around in the aughts, going back to the time of hippies means going back to the 1970s and mid/late 1960s.
The question is how many hospitalizations and deaths of small children are we willing to tolerate? That is who is at greatest risk, and there's no way that we are going to see raw milk exclusively consumed by adults.
In Japan, health regs are much stricter. That enables people to trust and eat any raw eggs sold in the markets, and consume raw meats and milk from select licensed farms.
But you know, the conservative folks here just want to drink raw milk without any health regulations. If you die, oops.
At one point I ate raw chicken ovaries dipped in raw egg in Japan. Much better than you might think.
Horse (raw or cooked) is readily available there as well, and is quite delicious, right about exactly between beef and venison. Of course hear in the land of the free it’s illegal, not to consume necessarily, but because overlapping state and federal laws make illegal every major step of the supply chain.
Much stricter, yet no one feels inconvenienced.
About raw milk, and kids: I grew up on a farm, but soon after my birth we did not have milk cows anymore. I remember (will the terryfing watch dog roam free?) going alone to the neighbouring farm, for buying milk directly from the tank . What I remember too however is my mother ALWAYS boiling the whole gallon of milk immediatly after coming home. Pasteur was not so long ago, after all.
So... I don't really relate with the problem of the dangerous germs, why would you want to consume it raw? You can't keep it as long, and you have to pass more often by the watchdog. For me it is about getting it untransformed, and boiling is not a transformation that matter for the taste. Taking out some fat or homogeneizing it, that is something else.
But it was in France, so I am not clear what how raw does raw milk mean for your side of the pond.
On the other hand we have this conviction that fromages au lait cru are the best. I don't know if it is a fact or an urban myth. What I suspect is that most processes for those cheeses include anyway some form of cooking and therefore sanitization. I am eager to learn the details if someone knows them. I remember vaguely some recent polemic about some alternative to pasteurization anf if it was compatible with the AOC ( Appellation. d'Origine Contrôlée) au lait cru.
I don't know about French cheese making processes but there are plenty of recipes for yogurt, cottage cheese, quark, farmers cheese, etc., that can be made at home. All the ones I've seen involve heating the milk as a first step - basically pasteurizing it.
The temperatures involved for those are almost never pasteurization levels. They are temperatures that actually encourage the growth of bacteria. For example it is lactobacillus that makes yogurt.
And in case you were not aware ultra-pasteurized milk can't be used to make cheese at all because the denatured proteins won't congeal. Ultra-pasteurized milk is not normally something you find in the average grocery but Costco's milk although not sold as shelf-stable often is because they don't have to worry about the supply chain as much I assume. I learned that when I decided to make a big batch of mozzarella and therefore bought milk there in bulk. It ended up just being the texture of coconut creme.
+1
Did I not read carefully enough, or was this all about the right to SELL raw milk, rather than the right to drink it? That is, cheap lazy producers trying to evade gummint safety requirements?
It seems to me that there is a simple free market solution to this. Anyone who is sickened by raw milk should be entitled to generous compensation and all sellers of it need to show that they have a food safety insurance policy of $10 million or more.
That’s exactly it. I suspect farmers desire to sell raw milk is mostly driven by resentment of government imposed costs involved in pasteurisation etc. See how happy they are once they get slapped with a few lawsuits.
The whole set up is government mandated risk management to protect both consumers and them but they fail to see that.
Who are the people who want to produce raw food products like eggs and milk?
They're people who feel that they have no responsibility, are offended that they should be required to have responsibility, are happy to think it's not their fault if something goes wrong, and resent the complexity of complying with the public interest, which they tell themselves is stealing from them.
They're people incapable of doing the specific job they insist on doing. So, why do they insist on doing it? To create harm, injury and resentment. They're conservatives, they are like this in everything.
Perhaps.
Having grown up as 'one of those people,' and being someone who wants access to raw milk and raw-milk cheeses now, I think you've got it backwards: those people think they make their products with care, in methods that are clean -- that the onus to make a safe product should be on them, and not flow from the government.
At least for many of those farmers, this is true. But I also know dairy farmers who don't care if they get cowshit in the milk because it will all be filtered and pasteurized.
The rules then become a disincentive to farm in a way that is food safe.
Am I wrong to think raw dairy is just a small part of any farm 's output yet it represents the whole of their outlook?
I don't doubt your perspective, but I can't imagine trusting producers of any product not to think their lives depend on cutting every corner they can get away with and that the public interest is standing in their way. These are the people who voted for Trump because of immigration and who want to make up for the lack of farm workers by repeating child labor laws.
Food safety regulations only exist because so many producers cannot be trusted and I think they are still trusted way too much.
If not for safety regulations in the auto industry we'd all still be driving around in 1950s technology.
Yes, you are wrong.
It will depend upon the farm. Small, family-run dairy farms used to be common, now there are few left nationally but lots of giant industrial farms where all sorts of unconscionable things are done to the animals, from feeding them plastic pellets to growth hormones.
And the same food-safety regulations that make milk safe from an industrial farm put small farms (which generally can be trusted) out of business.
I am not a conservative farmer now, though I grew up on a farm. Now, you would probably call me a foodie with a strong interest in local foods wherever I am. And it's just the kind of arrogance you expressed (without realizing it was arrogance and only with the intention of keeping people safe,) that helped put Donald Trump in office.
Caveat emptor isn't a way to live your life.
That a job can't be done in the way society requires means only that it's not really needed. Raw dairy is a really niche interest.
Do you believe that if your children died because you gave them raw milk, knowing it's risk, you should be charged with murder? And the neighbor kid who was also sitting there?
Do you feel that if your child dies of food poisoning -- say from some old fresh pickles with salmonella or from some raw honey -- you should be charged with murder?
I know how to produce milk that is safe to consume. I grew up drinking raw milk. That means I understand the importance of sterilization all the equipment used, the milking machines, the equipment to pump milk from the barn to the milk parlor, the bulk tank, the sinks, the walls, the floors. I used to do this every morning before I went to school.
It wasn't dairy farmers like my family that made people sick, it was poor storage before refrigeration was commonly available.
And modern rules of no direct sales and pasteurization have resulted in generations of farmers who don't have that care, who produce milk that is probably not safe to drink, and would make children sick. Should the rule makers be charged with those murders, because the rules encouraged more lax farm standards?
Raw dairy is inherently contaminated and spoils rapidly, unlike raw carrots.
It's like arguing that Russian roulette is safe because there's only one bullet in the gun so you can just leave it laying out on the kitchen counter.
Raw dairy, properly handled, is perfectly safe for anyone who's also able to eat raw honey.
Raw breast milk is the preferred food for human babies.
And raw-milk cheese and yogurts have been a staple of human food for going back forever.
ETA: and seriously, have you ever milked a cow or a goat? Been inside a milking parlor? Cleaned out a bulk tank or compressor system? I have; so who know's more about this?
And how did Mr. Salatin afford to start his business trying to sell unregulated foods? His daddy made buckets of money exploiting the environment and people in Venezuelan. Gosh who does that sound like?
It is so ironic that safeguards that were put in place generations ago to protect us from being killed by germs (which used to cause the great majority of human deaths) are now being framed by ignoramuses as being somehow bad for our health.
The only reason anyone can believe in anti-vax, raw milk and the like is because they have no clue what the world was like in the bad old days, when a quarter of babies didn't make it to their first birthday, half of kids didn't make it to adulthood, and no one could ever really count on still being alive a year in the future. Wish we could speak to our deceased ancestors, and let these morons get a talking-to from their great-grandparents about just how stupid they are being.
I'm all in favor of them being unregulated. Natural selection does not favor the dumbass.
Next up: libertarian restaurants where none of the employees wash their hands after using the bathroom and the owner proudly boasts of not a single thermometer in the fridge or any of the prep stations. Want to pull his food service permit? Molon labe, motherfuckers!