Why is the FDA using swat teams on raw milk?

[slayer202]

flip flop flip flop flip flop

 

[bignateyk]

Raw milk is delicious. My wife buys it from a local amish farmer. I don't drink much milk, but it is amazing when made into a cheese sauce (probably because it still has the cream in it).

Pasteurization also removes the good baceria, doesn't it? I don't see a problem with local vendors selling raw milk as long as it is clearly labeled as such. The amish guy even makes people sign a waiver.

 

[soulcougher73]

Faux outrage found.

 

[bignateyk]

The FDA saying you don't have the right to consume raw milk is like the FDA saying you don't have the right to consume medium-rare steak or eggs over-easy. I bet the country would be up in arms if that happened...

 

[RadiclDreamer]

remember when Dave warned us about things like this?

:hmm:

Daves not here man

 

[Schadenfroh]

If people want to buy natural milk, let them. It's their body.

WTF is natural milk? Human breast milk? That is the only milk "nature intended" you to drink, even then, you are not supposed to drink it after you can chew food. Pasteurized and unpasteurized milk come from the same source, the teat of a mammal. Pasteurized milk is every bit as normal / natural as cooking meat.

if you want unpasteurized, you should grow it yourself.... but not sell or distribute it.

It should not be banned, despite how irrational drinking it is. Just like "organic" vegetables, they carry an increased risk of food-borne illness, but people are free to enjoy their significantly increased risk of getting sick from it, just as companies are free to profit from the anti-science fears of the general population. However, if they start making health benefit claims that are not backed by unbiased, peer reviewed, scientific studies, then they should be fined and forced to change their marketing.

 

[Beev]

When I lived on the farm back when I was a kid I used to squirt milk straight from the cow into my mouth. Warm deliciousness.

inb4 "I bet it was a bull"

 

[wwswimming]

I've been hearing more about this. "Raw" milk is simply milk that hasn't been pasteurized. OK, no big deal there as long as the farmer does his work and tests the milk and cows.

But apparently the FDA is running around shutting down such an atrocity of selling tasty fresh milk.

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jul/25/business/la-fi-raw-food-raid-20100725

LOL! Look at the fear they're pushing on their site.
http://www.fda.gov/Food/ResourcesForYou/Consumers/ucm079516.htm

because the Talmud-Worshippers in Corporate America don't like competition.

they also don't like markets that sell foods that don't pay a bribe to the rabbi for Kosher certification.

 

[highland145]

I hope more and more rational people speak out against the FDA's dairy-funded crusade against raw milk and raw milk cheese. Many of the raw milk supporters I know have been intelligent folks, but there are definitely some crazies in the camp and they give raw milk a very bad name.

My sis-in-law has been raising hell for several years about this. But unless you have deep pockets or aren't producing so they can't come after you, I don't think one can win.

 

[NetWareHead]

I buy raw organic milk and drink a half gallon of it a week. I also make my own yogurt and sometimes butter from this milk. I'll never go back to pastuerized milk again. Raw milk has a taste that is uncomparable to any milk I tried.

 

[Cogman]

Salmonella, E. coli, and Listeria. Nothing I want in my milk, thank you very much.

I drank raw milk for about 16 years of my life. Never got sick from it.

Most of the health concerns in milk came from pretty crappy living environments for the animals being milked. Today, those concerns are REALLY small.

It is on the same level as cookie dough. Yes, you can get all those things you listed above from eating raw cookie dough, but it isn't likely.

 

[nanette1985]

It is on the same level as cookie dough. Yes, you can get all those things you listed above from eating raw cookie dough, but it isn't likely.

Mmm, raw milk and raw cookie dough FTW!

I also grew up on a farm - my family is mennonite. No problem with raw milk, I'm still alive and kicking. Even my lactose intolerant teenager drinks the stuff without issues. Well, a small amount anyway, he IS lactose intolerant.

Government is weird sometimes.

 

[linuxboy]

Upon further conversations with some of those involved, it seems that the raid this time was precipitated by a securities fraud situation. Food was seized as a matter of course because ownership could not be easily established, and may be possible for it to be released. Milk was dumped because it is perishable. Arraignment is this morning, should know more then. Facts are challenging to ascertain right now without more investigation.

 

[PingSpike]

Mind if I send you a gift basket filled with tasty treats from Chinese street vendors?

Here in the USA, the Evil Gubment likes to stick its nose into the bidness of people selling food that might be tainted. On the whole (milk) I think that's a good thing.

If you prefer dirty cardboard, trash, rancid cooking oil, vermin, stray pets, lead, melamine and other flavorful additions to your food feel free to start importing it from less Big Brotherish sources.

I thought we were doing that more and more lately. I know at least some of our food products come from China, the country that managed to find a way to poison drywall so bad it corrodes copper pipes when it is installed near them.

That's how it works. The USA passes safety laws that increase quality and safety of its products (at an increased cost) and then imports dangerous cheap trash from somewhere else that lacks those laws.

 

[ichy]

The FDA saying you don't have the right to consume raw milk is like the FDA saying you don't have the right to consume medium-rare steak or eggs over-easy. I bet the country would be up in arms if that happened...

Yup. As long as raw milk is clearly labeled as such then dairies should be able to sell it. We allow people to inhale toxic cigarette smoke (as we should BTW, I'm not an anti-tobacco jihadist), it's absurd that we make it so hard to sell unpasteurized dairy products.

 

[waggy]

Pasteurization changes the flavor. A lot of cheeses require raw milk - not pasteurized. It's damn difficult to get raw milk if you don't own your own animals. I have seen ads for "milk for animal consumption only" - I suspect it's a hint-hint, wink-wink type of transaction.

A lot of different types of cheeses made from goat's milk are delicious. To call one product "goat cheese" is essentially like labeling all those other cheeses you buy in the store "cow cheese." Goat milk fudge is also delicious. I've had quite a bit of it. I have about a pound of a soft goat cheese in my fridge at the moment, it's delicious.

Areacode's story is but one of many. Big Dairy has the FDA/USDA in their pocket. There was a family in Vermont who imported a special breed of sheep. Vermont is a dairy state. Those sheep had better output than cows - with less input. (Required less feed per gallon of milk produced.) That particular breed of sheep has NEVER had scrapie in any country in the world. Scrapie is related to mad cow disease. Their entire herd was seized. Of course, the only way to test them is to kill them and examine the brains. Why not just kill all the adults? After all, if zero adults were carrying the disease, then of course zero of the offspring would have the disease. But that leaves a problem - the offspring could compete with the dairy industry. The entire herd was put down. And, of course, it's illegal to import more now. There were zero positive tests, although they had an "inconclusive" - with a sample that was far too old (months) and degraded to be of any value at all. There's a book about the whole thing: Mad Sheep by Linda Faillace
http://www.chelseagreen.com/bookstore/item/mad_sheep:hardcover/reviews
(pretty good book)

I may be mistaken, but I believe it was from the book that I learned an interesting fact: when Mad Cow was doing its damage in Europe, the European countries came to a conclusion: "Hey! Let's not grind up the slaughter leftovers of cows and feed them back to cows." The industry that ground up all the cow stuff said, "wtf are we gonna do with this stuff?" It was exported to the U.S. for several months. At one point, France was testing as many cattle a DAY as the U.S. did in a year. An American producer wanted to export beef to Japan. Japan said "not unless you guys test every single animal that you slaughter." The USDA said "you may NOT test every one." The U.S. beef industry said "whew! That was a close one." If an adult animal showed symptoms of mad cow, they were tested at slaughter. The vast majority of cattle are slaughtered before the age of 3. Mad cow takes 5 to 8 years before there are symptoms.

In my opinion, any farm selling raw milk is going to be damn sure that their herd is tested and they're going to be as safe as possible. A small farm is one lawsuit away from ruined. I believe that at the heart of the matter, the possibility of some of the diseases (E Coli, etc.) is there, and at least on the surface, the USDA and/or FDA kind of have the right idea, but their enforcement is very overzealous - pushed by big business in order to reduce competition.

For what it's worth, worldwide, more goat and sheep milk is consumed than cow milk. NOT in the U.S. though - not as long as the dairy industry has as powerful of lobbyists as they do. Goat milk is generally considered healthier than cow milk. (Go ahead and google for goat, cow, milk - source after source lists goat as being better. Someone else can do the legwork to find a peer reviewed source, but here's the first one I clicked on: )
http://www.gardenharvest.org/milkbenefits.htm

i referred to the dairy industry as a cartel once here and got flamed for it. but there is no better description then that.

 

[Genx87]

after recent outbreaks of salmonella and other foodborne illnesses, the FDA should crack down on farmers selling unpasteurized dairy products.

if you want unpasteurized, you should grow it yourself.... but not sell or distribute it.

Were these salmonella outbreaks a result of these farmers selling unpastuerized milk?

And the license issue is rather silly. This guy had been selling this for 6 years. Were there any complaints as the safety of his milk? If not, then what does paying a license fee bring to the table? I think people get the wrong idea that being licensed means you are safe. It just means you applied for, paid, and possibly passed an inspection at some point.

 

[Modelworks]

The FDA is like any other government agency, worried about all the wrong things. They go after raw milk but apple juice from china that contains high levels of arsenic are okay to serve to millions of kids.

 

[Genx87]

OP is usually a troll but on this topic there's some truth.

The Estrella Family Creamery in Washington state was one of the most respected artisan cheesemakers in the state. They were fully licensed and very professional about their health standards. This included doing their own testing for contamination.

One day they found listeria contamination in their Cave 3. They followed procedure right down to the letter, reporting the FDA, stopping sales of all cheese that had been through Cave 3 and issuing a recall (voluntary on their part) of all cheese that had been through Cave 3. As it happens, it was all soft cheese.

They closed the cave, brought in the FDA for recommendations and made every change the FDA requested of them, mortgaging their farm to do so. They returned to making cheese aged in that cave but did not sell any of it pending the FDA's ok.

Upon retesting, the FDA found listeria still in that cave unfortunately, and they also found it in the drain in the make room and in the wheel track of the little on premise retail shop. This is where things started to go bad.

The FDA asked the Estrellas to do a recall of ALL their cheeses. The only thing out in the market were their hard aged cheeses. Now, there has never been a case of hard cheese listeriosis in the history of the US and in general cheeses aged more than 18 months are considered not a risk for listeriosis. This was entirely at the discretion of the FDA, there was no listeria bacteria found anywhere in the hard cheese aging caves, and they had no good reason to do a recall.

Faced with the prospect of losing $600,000 worth of product on top of their expensive changes and remortgaged farm, in the face of an overwhelming lack of evidence, the Estrellas refused the recall. Here is where things go from bad to worse.

Context: the Estrellas have adopted several children from Africa. Their oldest is 22, their youngest is 12. Three girls, two boys. These are unbelieveably good kids, amazingly happy and well adjusted considering the trauma they've gone through in their lives. Some of them saw their parents killed in front of them when they were young. The FDA inspectors know this; they are well acquainted with the businesses and people they inspect.

The FDA rounded up the Federal Marshals and one day, with no notice, they showed up on the Estrellas doorstep, FULLY ARMED, to shut down the facility and seize the product. The kids were home alone. They asked the marshals to wait, that their parents were 15 minutes away and on their way home, but the marshals refused.

They broke sanitary protocol all over the creamery, walking in to the make room with mud-caked boots, no hairnets, etc, causing contamination as they shut down the facility. They put a seizure notice on the doors. The FDA then made up a list of complaints (spiderwebs, rust, cheesemaker eating out of the middle of the cheese wheel and putting it back, etc.) and it was formally posted. Trust me, I've been out there, I've seen Kelly Estrella as she makes cheese, and none of those complaints are accurate.

Now, the Estrellas can go to court to combat this but cheese has a limited shelf life. They cannot afford to fight this, and even if they could the product that is locked up would be worthless by the time the court battle even rolled started.

They have shut down their entire business and are trying desperately to stay afloat while they transition their business to an organic CSA. Honestly, they have a very slim chance of making it, considering that they have no income and have to ramp up both a market and product within a year.

The FDA in Washington is absolutely in bed with the dairy industry, and the dairy industry is a pretty powerful lobby. They love to help the local news out with scare tactic stories about raw milk and, given the overblown all natural movement in the Seattle area, the newspaper finds it a properly controversial topic to cover.

My husband has dairy goats and we do not sell or share milk. We could be arrested for pouring you a glass if you came over to our house, even if you signed a waver. It is harder to get a license to sell raw milk or cheese than pretty much anything else you can imagine, even if you plaster the thing with warning labels. There are plenty of people out there who know everything you could know about the risks and still really want to buy it, but that apparently doesn't matter jack shit.

People all over Europe and actually every else in the world drink raw milk and eat raw milk cheese, but the US regulates the stuff like it is arsenic. You can produce and sell it but the regulations are ridiculous, the setup is prohibitively expensive, and as you can see with the Estrellas, the government can shut you down anytime they want without any practical recourse on your part.

[edit] By contrast, I just got back from Italy where we visited a parmigiano maker, large scale. The doors didn't shut during working hours, there were flies, plenty of rust, all raw milk, no hairnets, no washing off shoes, but this is a maker who is selling tons of of the Parmesan cheese you buy at the grocery store. When you salt the shit out of your cheese and age it, IT ISN'T DANGEROUS. They allow that stuff to be imported without even half the regulations we face in the US, but they shut down a domestic operation for a single swab of listeria in the drain.

Oh, and not all listeria is dangerous, and the FDA declined to ever test what they got from the Estrellas to find out if it was a dangerous strain.

I talked to a former Cold Stone Creamery owner who had a nightmarish dealing with inspectors due to the salmonella outbreak in their frozen cakes. These people would come in and demand cakes and ice cream unrelated to the outbreak be taken off the shelf and not sold. She describes them more along the lines of the Gestapo. The inspector got a hard on for her store and would constatly pull inspections and shut down the store for minor things until the she finally walked away from the store. This is our govt hard at work making a business friendly envrionment to create jobs.

 

[Modelworks]

I think people get the wrong idea that being licensed means you are safe. It just means you applied for, paid, and possibly passed an inspection at some point.

And even worse is that the FDA allows some companies and organizations to do their own inspections, not like they would lie or anything. We have a local guy that sells smoke hams. He butchers the hogs himself, prepares the hams and runs his own smokehouse. The guy has been doing it for over 45 years. The last couple years he will not sell to anyone he doesn't already know and can't publicly list his hams for sale because the regulations will not allow it.

 

[ShawnD1]

Government != nanny state. Or rather, it shouldn't. If people want to buy natural milk, let them. It's their body.

If we let people kill themselves with raw milk then we would also need to legalize drugs. You know we can't do that. The raw milk should stay illegal. Selling it should get a minimum of 10 years federal prison.

 

[AreaCode707]

And even worse is that the FDA allows some companies and organizations to do their own inspections, not like they would lie or anything. We have a local guy that sells smoke hams. He butchers the hogs himself, prepares the hams and runs his own smokehouse. The guy has been doing it for over 45 years. The last couple years he will not sell to anyone he doesn't already know and can't publicly list his hams for sale because the regulations will not allow it.

Another spot we went when we were in Italy was to a prosciutto maker. They showed us how they salt and hang the hams for months to age into a delectable local specialty, a primary food staple of folks in Italy...

Then they showed us another section of their plant where they make prosciutto to ship to the US. Where the Italian prosciutto was salted and air-hung, the prosciutto destined for the US was doused in chemicals and preservatives and vacuum sealed. The Italians wrinkled their noses and said they would never eat the stuff they produce for the US, both for flavor and health reasons.

THAT is what the FDA has produced. We are so afraid of our food now that we literally will refuse food not loaded up with artificial elements.

 

[DominionSeraph]

Sure is tin-foil hat in here.

 

[linuxboy]

Sure is tin-foil hat in here.

How do you figure? Everything I've said is factual information that can be verified by looking at the source material.

 

[AreaCode707]

Sure is tin-foil hat in here.

Once you've had your friend's home raided by federal marshals with guns because they are selling cheese, I think it's hard to tell that story without sounding a little tinfoil hat. Unfortunately.