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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/08/dining/08raw.html

----------------------- [soilandhealth] raw milk

Date: Wed, August 8, 2007 7:41 am

soilandhealth

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Should This Milk Be Legal?

By JOE DRAPE

THERE was the name of a Web site scrawled on cardboard and quickly torn

to bits by an anonymous farmer in the Greenmarket at Union

Square. Then came the paperwork, legal enough presumably, to protect the

source of the illicit substance. Finally, Yaron Milgrom-Elcott received

the monthly drop site: an address near Chelsea, open for two hours, show

up or lose the white stuff.

Mr. Milgrom-Elcott never missed a drop. Each month, he joined mothers

with newborns and Wall Street titans in search of a box of

unpasteurized, unhomogenized, raw milk. He is also part of a movement of

perhaps hundreds of thousands across the country who will risk illness or

even death to drink their milk the way Americans did for centuries:

straight from the cow.

Twenty years ago, the Food and Drug Administration banned interstate

sales of unpasteurized milk. This spring the agency warned consumers

again that they were risking their health drinking raw milk.

Still, individual states determine how raw milk is bought and sold within

their borders. While its sale for human consumption is illegal in 15

states, New York is one of 26 where it can be bought with

restrictions. The chief one is that raw milk can only be sold on the

premises of one of 19 dairy farms approved by the state. Clandestine milk

clubs, like the one Mr. Milgrom-Elcott joined, are one way of

circumventing the law, and there are others.

Raw milk drinkers may praise its richer flavor or claim it is more

nutritious than pasteurized milk. No matter why they drink it, the demand

for it is booming. In 2000, the Organic Pastures Dairy Company in the San

Joaquin Valley near Fresno became California's first raw milk dairy with

certified organic pasture land. This year its co-

founder, Mark McAfee, expects it to gross $6 million — up from $4.9 last

year.

His raw milk is sold in 300 stores in California, where it is legal. He

also has an $80,000 a month mail order business, shipping creams and

cheese as well as milk to all 50 states. He believes he reaches 35,000

customers a week for his raw milk products. Because the laws allow

interstate shipping of raw milk that is not meant for human consumption,

Organic Pastures milk is labeled as pet food.

" I like to go into the warehouse and see the addresses — it goes all over

creation, " he said. " We don't have the same customers day in and day out.

We're the entry point. We hear back that shipping is too expensive but

that they found a local provider, either a farm or on the black market.

They have got to have it. "

Mr. McAfee said he knows firsthand of more than six dairies in

Pennsylvania, some of them Amish, that supply the black market in New

York and Boston. " They're sending in 200 cases of milk every month, " he

said.

Some drink it for the same reason raw milk cheeses are popular: the

taste. " I first discovered it two summers ago in France, " said Mr.

Milgrom-Elcott, who is pursuing a doctorate in medieval Jewish

mysticism at New York University. " There is a richness and density unlike

processed milk, plus there's this complexity of flavor. "

Others believe that it is good for them. Pasteurization — a process of

heating and quickly cooling milk to kill pathogens such as E.

coli, salmonella and listeria — also destroys beneficial bacteria,

proteins and enzymes, they say. Advocates attribute stronger immune and

better digestive systems to raw milk. Many have incorporated it into

their diet as part of a broader philosophy to treat their bodies and the

planet properly.

Nina Planck, the author of " Real Food: What to Eat and Why, " defied the

F.D.A.'s warning and drank raw milk while she was pregnant. She not only

continues to drink it while nursing her 9-month-old son, n, but also

allows him the occasional sip. She has an

arrangement with a couple of farmers to deliver it to New York City.

" We drink raw milk because we trust the traditional food chain more than

the industrial one, " said Ms. Planck, who knows a number of

farmers from her days as director of the New York City Greenmarkets and

through her boyfriend, Rob Kaufelt, the owner of Murray's Cheese in

Greenwich Village.

" We're willing to spend more money the higher up the food chain we go, "

she said. " We're not alone, either. You cannot categorize the people who

are drinking raw milk. They are people from the blue

states and red states, farmers and yuppies and Birkenstock wearers. "

Food scientists can hardly believe that so many consumers have turned

their back on one of the most successful public health endeavors of the

20th century. In 1938, for example, milk caused 25 percent of all

outbreaks of food- and water-related sickness.

With the advent of universal pasteurization, that number fell to 1

percent by 1993, according to the Center for Science in the Public

Interest, a nutrition advocacy group in Washington.

Barbano, director of the Northeast Dairy Foods Research Center,

operated by Cornell and the University of Vermont and supported by the

dairy industry, grew up drinking raw milk on a family farm. He does not

remember ever getting sick, but says science has never found any evidence

that it was more beneficial than pasteurized milk. In fact, he said, raw

milk has very little vitamin D, which is added to most pasteurized milk.

" There is always going to be a percentage of raw milk that carries

disease-causing bacteria, " said Dr. Barbano, who is a professor of food

science at Cornell. " As long as I have pasteurized milk

available for me, and I guess more importantly for my daughter, the risk

is not worth any benefit anyone has been able to prove. "

Sally Fallon, president of the Westin A. Price Foundation, another

nutrition advocacy group, argues that the risk to raw milk drinkers is

insignificant, and the demand for product is growing steadily. In 1998,

when the Washington-based foundation created the Web site

realmilk.com, it barely had half a page of sources where raw milk could

be purchased legally. Now, the list has grown to more than two dozen

pages, and Ms. Fallon puts the number of raw milk drinkers at half a

million.

" We are trying to be pragmatic and create demand, " said Ms. Fallon of the

10,000-member, 400-chapter foundation, which has mounted legal challenges

to raw milk regulations in several states. " Even though it is illegal in

some places, it is very available through cow sharing or cow herding

programs. "

In Virginia, for example, Chip and Planck — Nina's parents — pay

$40 a year plus $25 monthly to own a share in one cow, the only legal way

to get raw milk in that state. In return, they get a gallon of raw milk a

week. It is technically not a sale but compensation for the cow's room

and board.

Last year the Hawthorne Valley Farm in Ghent, N.Y., offered a buyers'

club program to its raw milk customers in the hopes of giving a

bigger boost to a steadily growing market. It was designed to

encourage those customers in New York and beyond to order in bulk but

send only one representative a week to pick up the order.

When the New York State Department Public Interestand Markets caught wind

of it, however, it asked Hawthorne to end the program and the farm

complied. Still, Abe Madey, the farm's dairy manager and

cheesemaker, says business is steady. About 100 regular customers, many

of whom drive two hours from New York City, purchase up to 7,500 gallons

annually of raw milk worth about $45,000 to the farm, he said.

The milk club that Mr. Milgrom-Elcott belongs to, and others like it, is

far more problematic, according to A. Chittenden, a

spokeswoman for the Agriculture and Markets department. She says the 41

milk inspectors charged with the monthly testing of New York's 5,000

dairy farms had not yet turned their attention to the

clandestine dropoffs.

" It is under review, " said Ms. Chittenden, adding that the department

cited five of the raw milk permit holders for violations in the past

year. " Our utmost concern is for public health. We are trying to

insure that the safest products are out there. "

For a few months anyhow, Mr. Milgrom-Elcott can shed his identity of a

potential law-breaker. His wife, Miriam Sheinbein, just finished her

third year at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and is

currently serving a brief rotation in San Francisco. In California, raw

milk is legal and widely available. While Ms. Sheinbein, who is 19 weeks

pregnant, has decided to forego the delicacy until the baby is born, Mr.

Milgrom-Elcott is delighted to take his habit above-

ground.

" It's hard to live without, " he said.

But then again, Mr. Milgrom-Elcott's secret life in New York was not

without its thrills.

" We also bought crème fraîche from the milk club, " he said. " It was

nearly as ethereal as our fromager's in Aix-en-Provence. "

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