Raw milk: part of a complete childhood

Raw milk on tap in Turin Italy.

Here’s a lovely photo taken by Pamela Cuthbert at the Slow Food fair Salone del Gusto in Turin last month. The picture shows a raw-milk vending machine (Raw Milk On Tap) and a group of students on a field trip to the fair who are lining up for a cuppa. Thanks to Ingrid Hamilton and Michael Schmidt for passing this photo along to “the Bovine”.

Now contrast this scene with what they say about raw milk over on the Haphazard Gourmet Girls blog: “…While in general the Haphazard Girls are big critics of FDA, we think they’re very on the ball with the Raw Milk issue, because it’s routinely fed to “consumers” who are not capable of making decisions for themselves: Children and babies.

FDA regulators setting the stage for a “Scopes Monkey Trial for raw milk” by “picking on the wrong guy”

David E. Gumpert’s “The Complete Patient” blog offers a lot more insight and background on the current California raw milk fracas than all those other news sites out there that have been carrying the story. Here’s some of what he has to say:

Mark McAfee of Organic Pastures with his wife, Blaine. Photo via Complete Patient blog

“Last March, I described how agents from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration paid evening visits to the homes of two Organic Pastures Dairy Co. employees to question them about interstate sales of raw milk. The visits were follow-ups to mysterious subpoenas the women received to testify before a federal grand jury on the subject. Shortly after that, the subpoenas were cancelled, and it seemed as if, perhaps, the feds had decided to move onto more constructive pursuits, like keeping poisonous Chinese food products out of our food system.

Doctors divided — Toronto Star report on the early days of pasteurization

Here’s an opinion piece from the Star’s regular feature “a picture and a thousand words”, giving some detailed cultural history around the introduction of pasteurization in Toronto. This story is by Christine Sismondo, from Nov. 23. Here are some excerpts:

It seems that the decision to implement pasteurization was not so "black and white". City of Toronto archive photo via theStar.ca

“A little more than a hundred years ago, Mayor Joseph Oliver was sworn into office at Toronto’s Old City Hall, vowing to clean up this burg.

This was no metaphorical sweep of the broom Oliver was talking about. He meant it literally. His Jan. 13, 1908, inaugural address made it clear what three of his top priorities were: the construction of a trunk sewer, clean water and pure milk.

Oliver’s address was an articulation of the new priorities of urban centres in the early 20th century. And Toronto, in part because of activist journalism and the philanthropy of newsmen such as Joseph Atkinson and John Ross Robertson, was to become a leader in making those public-health ideals a reality.

It wasn’t going to happen all at once, though. While Oliver had said that the “establishment of a milk standard of the highest possible percentage (was) of the utmost importance,” the best way to do that was going to be the subject of a debate that would rage for some time – arguably to this day.

Out-of-state pets will be out of luck — FDA sues Organic Pastures for shipping

Miss 2029 -- an Organic Pastures cow. Photo from the Organic Pastures website.

Further to our last post about running “moo-shine” across state lines, it seems that another bunch of underemployed regulators are justifying their existence by making trouble for Mark McAfee’s Organic Pastures. Thanks to Eddie from Haphazard Gourmet Girls for drawing this to our attention. Sounds like those FDA regulators just can’t believe anyone would go through the trouble of ordering Organic Pastures raw milk from another state and then feed it to their pets. Either that, or they think it’s time Organic Pastures got a little more free publicity in the media. As Mark McAfee has said in the past, “every time the regulators crack down, people love us more and sales go up”. Maybe those regulator types are really friends of raw milk — in disguise.

Here’s an excerpt from one of several stories that have appeared in the online media covering this action. This is from The Capital Press website:

“A California organic dairy producer vows to fight a federal government lawsuit that seeks to bar his company from shipping raw milk products across state lines.