The fear rests on not knowing the history of or scientific impact of pasteurization on milk, and thus missing its clever misdirection. The fear thus supports raids and intolerable regulations on small farmers we need for food security - until they give up. As raids increase and industry continues to eliminate farmers, the public is taught to believe they are being protected while they are actually being increasingly locked into dangerous and inferior industry food.
Human beings have depended on milk since before cultivation of crops. It went wrong once "modern industry" took over and began degrading all the normal factors cows need to produce good milk - free movement outdoors in sunlight and rich grasses to feed on. But the industrialization of milk, like the industrialization of all food, treats all parts (animals being but one) as an endless series of items to cut corners on in order to squeeze out maximum profits. The more that can be short-cutted or even eliminated and the cheaper the inputs, the better for profits, the worse for the food, and the worse for public health.
Dairy farmers producing raw milk on small farms are not cutting those corners but continuing to reproduce the natural conditions cows need to be healthy and thus to produce healthy milk and thus through it to provide health to the public.
One need only look at raw milk's protective value against type 1 diabetes, for educated people to begin questioning a strongly held "modern science" truism about the dangers of bacteria. That view is proving to be simplistic and even dangerous.
"The findings, reported in the journal Nature, support the so-called "hygiene hypothesis" – the theory that a lack of exposure to parasites, bacteria and viruses in the developed world may lead to increased risk of diseases like allergies, asthma, and other disorders of the immune system." Click here.
That is, "science" can be wrong. And not only can it be wrong but it has been slow to catch up with "backward' things human beings have depended upon for millennia. Consider another milk and the same mistaken leaning toward industry over what was normal - "science" promoting bottle feeding over breast feeding, another example of "medical science" misguidedly promoting an industrial product as a "more hygienic technology." That was abysmally wrong scientifically but supported billions in sales of industrial baby formula. And recent "science" coming out of the FDA (our leading "food safety" department) hid evidence of melamine in baby formula in the US, and when confronted with the evidence, promptly created a standard defining it as safe. Click here.
So, to look at pasteurization as a miracle of modern science which produces "good," safe milk is a serious fallacy. It elevates a mere "technology" with its own serious limitations into a "whitewashed" magic bullet, ignoring its true negative downstream consequences - actually damaging milk in the process of "cleaning it up." While it saved people from some of the worst effects of industrializing dairy "production," it eliminated the health-giving value of milk and allowed industry to sell a "cleaned up" but highly diminished "product."
And all of that ignores its being manipulated for economic and political uses - the destruction of real dairy farmers, the entrapment of the public into ONLY industrial milk, and the use of "health" regulations to massively undermine constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties.
The USDA, harking back to the misunderstood history of where the diseases originated (on the industrial side) is busy finishing off eliminating non-corporate American raw dairy farmers - the Amish, the Mennonite and others. Raw milk sales had been outlawed or severely restricted in virtually every state, and the total number of farms has shrunk to less than 2 million; less than 100,000 have milk cows.
The story of what's happened to quality milk is same as the story of what's happened to America's farmers. Both have been mostly eliminated, marginalized by a culture that has allowed corporations to promote the big lie that the processing of natural foods has nothing to do with the epidemic of disease that cripples our society. Corporate spokespersons for the food, drug and medical industries have used billions of dollars – a drop in the bucket compared to their profits – to convince most of us that this rape has been carried out for our own good. "Food safety," cry the corporations and their media and government lackeys. Farmers who would sell fresh raw milk and meat raised and slaughtered on the farm would endanger the public.
Meanwhile, as Eric Schlosser has so elegantly written of the nation's commercial food supply in Fast Food Nation, "There's sh*t in the meat." The Center for Disease control estimates that over a quarter of all Americans come down with food poisoning each year.
Meanwhile all foods rich in cholesterol are maligned as dangerous. ... The best foods in the world come from healthy animals. ... The studies that purport to show that cholesterol in foods is dangerous have been manipulated, misinterpreted and propagandized by the drug industry to dupe doctors and the public into buying billions of dollars worth of dangerous drugs. Every year, corporations and a wealthy few grow richer, while many Americans struggle and many more just get by. Thirty-five million people now live below the government's admittedly low poverty line. We can only guess how many millions would love to have a small family farm if it could support even a modest lifestyle. Click here.
It is strange to think that the political and literal health of this country depends on urban liberals letting go of pasteurization as a monument to modern science, and seeing instead how false "science" by used by a monopoly to help frighten the public into imposing regulations which eliminate political freedoms and in doing so, are eliminating those who bring real things "to the table." The regulations are couched as "food safety" but the reality is that "hygiene" has been used before for totalitarian purposes and is being used now by a filthy food industry to destroy farmers who are, in fact, the most hygienic sector of our food system. The regulations are massive, discriminatory and anti-democratic. They rest on a fallacious trust in science, which sees it as a cure all and not as a mere technology, capble of creating its own creator of problems (which a true understanding of pasteurization shows it to be), and blinds people how it can be manipulated (which the raids on real milk dairy farmers side by side with glowing industrial ads for degraded milk industry prove that it is).
Undoing the lock that pasteurization has had on the beliefs of educated people, and letting them see who it serves and how their own fear is being used against them, can open up the possibility of actually rebuilding real local farming in this country. And dairy farming is central to accomplishing that.
"The dairy cow doesn't ask for much but she asks every day. People who are creating wealth with a cow either are hard working and reliable or they get that way in a hurry. The need to milk the cow twice a day determined the location of churches; people had to be able to walk there and back without disruption to the schedules of cows. It is certainly no coincidence that such a large number of our finest American statesmen were born on farms. Important virtues are nurtured on the farm, including a graphic understanding of the relationship between working and eating. I have come to understand and accept the words of that great 19th Century agricultural essayist, William Cobbett: 'When you have a cow, you have it all.'" [vii]
Seeing through a false glorification of pasteurization is deeply democratic.
What has all this to do with raw milk? Just this: the same repressive, reactionary forces that have concentrated power and wealth into the hands of a few have outlawed raw milk and destroyed the ability of small farms to survive and thrive – and [simultaneously] ushered in the epidemic of heart disease, cancer and other chronic problems plaguing the modern world [and making corporations rich].
Raw milk is the key to the health crisis, the farm crisis, the economic crisis, the small town crisis, even the environmental crisis, the political crisis and the educational crisis. Farmers who could freely advertise and sell raw milk and its products, and fresh quality meats, free of government intervention and hassles, could prosper, and their communities could blossom. The restoration of our individual and national health could become reality."
The public is not living on real milk or even reality but on the milk industry's Happy Cow ads falsely suggesting their (industrialized) cows live decent lives while co-opting the reality lived only by small dairy farmers' cows, the same dairy farmers being wiped out by the milk industry.
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