Legal to Import Raw Milk from U.S.?

Here’s another fascinating bit of information, again from our friends at www.wildthingsorganics.com

According to these folks, it’s legal to import raw milk into Canada from the United States, provided you don’t import more than $20 worth at any given time. They know because they’ve done it. So that means it’s legal to buy it from Organic Pastures and have it shipped all the way from California, but supposedly it’s NOT LEGAL for a local producer to sell it to you. You’ve got to wonder, where’s the sense, logic or fairness in that. in fact, where’s the “free trade”? Are we supposed to import our raw milk from California rather than support local dairy farmers? Why would that make sense? Anyway, here’s what they write about it:

Raven, photo from Wild Things Organics

Raven is our 3-year-old black Dexter cow. (Editor’s note: shown in picture at left) We’ll get back to her shortly.

Kurtis and I had been ordering raw milk from Organic Pastures dairy in California, having it shipped frozen to our Washington address right at the border and hauling it across said border once a week, much to the amusement of the crew at Canada Customs.

For those of you conscientious, citizen’s-arrest types about to alert the feds, put the phone down. It’s perfectly legal to bring the highly controversial white substance over the border for our own personal consumption, as long as we stay within the daily $20-per-person dairy limit. And we did.

The stuff is liquid gold – healthy, delicious and yes, subversive. What’s not to like?

Just the 2-day UPS shipping charges, which usually amounted to more than the cost of the product itself.

Here’s a link to the page where they talk about doing this: The page is called “The Milk of Human Stupidity”.

The Crime Against Raw Milk

by Alton Eliason

These are two brief excerpts from a much longer piece, found on the wildthingsorganics.com forum.
And here’s a link to the whole story.

Never in the annals of health and nutrition has there been a food so maligned, lied about and conspired against as raw milk. Once revered the world over as the most perfect of all foods, its demise was planned in well organized steps to create today’s store-shelf milk, a virtually lifeless product whose only comparison to the original is its color. Although each new processing procedure has been espoused as an improvement in the nutritional quality and the safety of milk, these steps actually led to the destruction of these properties on the alter of corporate greed. In its present store-shelf form, milk is not only empty of most of its nutritional value, but can actually cause many health problems.

As a youth just out of high school in 1934, my employment with a local dairy gave me a “ringside seat,” so to speak, to observe the birth of these nefarious moves. It is necessary to relate the history of Knudsen’s dairy to properly describe the diametrical opposites in the nutritional values demanded then and those found in store milk today. Only raw milk today provides those same qualities….