Re: ARTICLE came out in TN newspaper!

[Guest guest]

[] Here's the front page article folks. Very cool. Seems kinda fair.

Better treatment than some articles I've seen. BIG step for

Tennessee.

D.

http://tennessean.com/local/archives/04/12/63400735.shtml?

[MAP] Congratulations ! Reasonably non-slanderous exposure in

itself is an exceptionally valuable thing.

I noticed a poll alongside that article and when I voted it said 900+

votes have been cast. That's evidence of considerable readership, and

it's enough to make the results meaningful. By all means I'd

encourage folks on this list to not only read the article, but take a

half a second to vote in the poll!!

Here are a few of my reactions to the article.

First off, when I saw " " and " Peaceful Pastures " I immediately

thought " gosh, that sounds awfully familiar! " . Of course is

from this list (or at least one of its relatives --I get confused)!

Small world, huh? I'm sure I'm not the only one who would judge

to be rather young and vibrantly healthy based on the pictures! So

there's your 15 minutes and ! :-)

[Kline] Mike son, professor of food microbiology at the

University of Tennessee, did a study in the 1990s that he says clearly

demonstrates health risks associated with raw milk. son took

samples from 300 dairy tanks in Tennessee and southeast Virginia and

found disease-causing pathogens in 5% to 10% of them.

''That's the percentage you've got of picking up a hazardous organism

from drinking raw milk,'' son says. ''Most outbreaks come from

small children going to dairy farms and drinking raw samples.''

[MAP] I would like to know if the offending dairy tanks came from

junk farms or good farms. Criteria would include degree of pasturing,

soil quality, animal diet, size of farm and associated quality of

daily personal attention to each animal from the farmer, medical

practices, etc. However we'd like to define this distinction, there's

no doubt it exists and is typically rather obvious. The distinction

is deeply important, because obviously raw milk consumers insist on

getting milk from *good farms*. I suspect a different picture would

emerge from a study that sampled only dairy tanks from farms that are

actual candidates to be a raw milk source.

I'd like to see the real data and evidence about these supposed

" outbreaks " from kids on field trips. Methinks this is udder

nonsense.

[Kline] House Bill 0776, sponsored by Rep. Glen Casada; Senate Bill

1017, sponsored by Sen. Bryson

• Would have authorized sale of raw, unpasteurized cow and goat milk

on the premises where it was produced if milk was cooled and labeled

as unpasteurized.

[MAP] Bad, Bad, Very Bad, Glen. Including a " cooling " clause in the

legislation is unnecessary, undesirable, and inconsistent with the

essential spirit that should underlie this kind of legislation. The

essential spirit is consumer responsibility and freedom to make

reasonable choices.

Crucially, a cooling provision serves to do little beyond reinforce

myths about the microbiological safety of milk. Cooling has

absolutely no impact on the safety of milk. Safe milk is safe whether

it's chilled or left to sit on the counter to be consumed at room temp

over the course of a few hours or days before it clabbers, or left out

to be consumed after clabbering. And unsafe milk is unsafe

regardless of how fast it hits the cooler or how long is stays there.

There are often practical advantages to immediately chilling milk, but

these have no connection whatsoever to food safety.

I usually buy my milk by visiting a farm during milking time for the

express purpose of getting it before it's cooled. There are various

reasons why people might wish to exercise this option.

For starters, nothing compares to the flavor of warm milk enjoyed mere

minutes after milking. Anyone who hasn't experienced this is simply

not qualified to offer an opinion about the flavor of milk. " You

haven't lived until... " . In a perfect world, a consumer would stroll

down the road to their farmer neighbor--with their finger-countable

herd of heritage-breed cows, goats, and sheep--everyday during milking

time and bring a pitcher of warm milk back to the supper table for the

family to enjoy.

Further, some believe there is a nutritional benefit to milk lost in

cooling and/or sitting for more than x minutes. I haven't seen

adequate discussion or evidence on this one way or another, but it's a

possibility worth considering and at the very least people are

entitled to act in accordance with their beliefs on this issue, and

marketplaces are entitled to be thusly shaped.

Significantly, some consumers may wish to ferment their milk in some

fashion, making clabber, kefir, koumiss, yogurt, etc, a process

requiring the maintenance of warm temperatures and ideally initiated

as soon after milking as possible without any cooling. Indeed, a

significant percentage of raw milk consumers enjoy their milk

exclusively in the form of artisanal ferments like kefir. Excluding

that special treat of sipping some while standing next to the cow and

chatting with the farmer, I can cite myself as such a consumer. My

own practice is to start a batch of kefir with the milk I buy as soon

as I get home with it, at which point it's typically still moderately

warm. It's not a big deal, but it's a nice way of doing things when

it's convenient, and it certainly approximates a natural and

traditional practice. If my schedule makes it more convenient to go

at a non-milking time and get cooled stuff from the bulk tank, I don't

feel like it matters too much and I mainly just miss getting a few

sips of the fresh warm stuff.

Additionally, there's some attraction in getting fresh warm milk

directly from a specific animal during a milking session because it

allows for a suitably inclined consumer to differentiate among milk

from different individual animals instead of getting milk pooled from

the herd. This is not intrinsically related to the issue of cooling,

but it certainly goes hand in hand in practical reality. Different

cows produce different milk depending on breed, individual physiology,

stage of lactation, individual diet, etc. Besides potential

nutritional considerations (e.g. fat content), a serious milk gourmet

may wish to revel in these subtleties much like a wine connoisseur may

indulge their analogous preoccupations.

This is not a matter limited to aesthetic esotericity, however; while

not the norm, there have been occasions where I have sampled

side-by-side the milks of cows of the same breed at an impeccable 100%

grass-feeding farm, cows standing side-by-side and milked in immediate

succession and discovered one to be unsatisfactorily watery and and

bland, while the other was dramatically more flavorful. The

difference was dramatic enough that it wouldn't escape even the vulgar

philistines who blithely drink cold milk on a regular basis. I value

my option as a consumer to pick which cow I get my milk from.

[Kline] Detractors say raw milk:

• Is high in fat.

• Could contain campylobacter, listeria, salmonellae and E. coli,

which can make a person sick.

• Won't keep as long as pasteurized milk.

• Has the same nutritional value as pasteurized milk.

• Tastes no different from whole-fat pasteurized milk.

[MAP] Well now, this is comically pitiful. " high in fat " !? Does fat

disappear when you pasteurize milk? Is pasteurization an essential

step in the process of removing some or all of the cream to produce

lower-fat milk for fat-phobes? Does fat content have *any relevance*

at all to the topic of raw milk? Does the writer of this article have

a clue?

Furthermore, as a journalist, has he perhaps had *any exposure* to the

high-profile discourse of recent years deconstructing low-fat

mythology or the ubiquitous defenses of high-fat diets in publications

like The New York Times? Perhaps news doesn't travel that fast down

South to the glistening skyscrapers that house the staff of

" Tennessean.com " ?

Okay, moving on to the next easy target. " tastes no different " ?

Let's see, if a group of wine tasters said wine A tasted better than

wine B, but some hack from an Ag department (perhaps a leading expert

on grapes) insists they " taste no different " , who would you believe?

If Bob from Tennessee listened to Ali Akbar Khan perform a piece

of Indian classical music and then compared it to a performance by an

amateur sarodist, and concluded they " sound the same " , would you take

his opinion seriously? If your grandfather went to the audio store

with you and auditioned a $100 stereo system next to a $10,000 system,

and then said " I don't hear no difference sonny, you're wasting your

money on that stuff " , would you say " Aw, heck, gramps, I guess you're

right, I'll just buy the cheaper one " ? More to the point, is either

the author of the article or the Ag department cliche-faucet he quotes

aware of the widely documented results of carefully controlled taste

tests among cheese connoisseurs comparing raw and pasteurized cheeses?

The point about pasteurized milk " keeping longer " is deeply

misleading. Are they aware that, in sharp contrast to pasteurized

milk, raw milk doesn't actually go " bad " in general and that the

result of natural souring is a nearly universal desideratum in the

culinary traditions of dairying cultures?

Further, even if we restrict ourselves to the case of consuming

unfermented milk, does the fact that raw milk consumers would need to

scramble to use up their milk within, say, a week or two constitute an

argument of any substance against the legal sale of raw milk? In a

scenario where raw milk was legal and reasonably accessible, is the

burden of buying milk as often as <gasp> once a week (!) that

disturbing?

How is " nutritional value " being defined? Are all scientifically

established and quantified nutrients being considered, or did Joe

Schmoe from an Ag department pick his " top ten favorite and important "

nutrients and measure them in raw and pasteurized milk, finding the

differences " too small to mention " ? Maybe he decided to just go by

the nutrients covered by the ever-authoritative and meaningful

" Nutrition Facts " labels on commercial food products? How many years

of graduate study in nutrition does it take to discover that certain

very famous and widely studied nutrients are <gasp> heat-sensitive?!?!

Have the researchers ever heard of exotic entities like vitamin C,

B-vitamins, and enzymes?

If the " nutritional value " is the same then I'm sure the researchers

wouldn't've have minded if their own mothers squeezed their nipples

over a saucepan and gave their milk a quick boil " just to be on the

safe side " and then gave it to them in a plastic bottle back when they

were just " academic hopefuls in the crib " ? (Heck, their moms could've

even thrown in a little synthetic vitamin A and D as a " bonus " while

they were at it!) I wonder if those researchers would've even gotten

their middle-school diploma to say nothing of their PhD!

All these non-trivial comments aside, I'd like to draw attention to

the most profound and fundamental flaw of this article and its

numerous ilk in the annals of C-grade journalism. The representation

of the raw milk debate is essentially reduced to the following scheme:

part 1: X with credentials A, B, and C says raw milk could make people sick

part 2: Y says raw milk has health benefits.

What's missing here? How about specific *counterarguments* to the

claims of health risk? Such counterarguments are readily available in

published works such as Ron Schmid's _The Untold Story of Milk_ or

from the mouths of any number of raw dairy advocates. There's a world

of difference between arguing for raw milk by saying " it's better

because it has mystery nutrient Q or the lady down the street says her

second-cousin in Florida has been feeding it to her daughter for a few

weeks and mentioned that she seems somewhat more jolly because of it "

versus " the specific claim cited about a risk from pathogen P doesn't

stand up to the available evidence (see references) and is greater in

food F which is routinely sold in supermarkets without the slightest

hullabaloo " .

Put differently, there is a profound logical difference between saying

" M is good " and " M is not bad in the way X says it is " . It's

certainly interesting to know about any *advantages* to raw milk, and

why, as sociological observation, consumers are motivated to seek it

out, but this is a mere sidebar to the most critical issue, which is

whether the claims of *disadvantages* and *risks* are valid.

Like so many others, this article fails to give any hint that a

serious argument exists saying that raw milk is, contrary to popular

belief, *not* dangerous. Ultimately, who cares if raw milk is better

or not? The issue is " is it dangerous? " . If it's not, then legal

restrictions are not justified and consumers should be able to choose

raw milk for any damn reason they please, even if they just like the

way the word " raw " rolls off their tongue. If you think this is just

a bad attempt at humor, take a long hard look at the actual forces

that drive the marketplace in industrialized societies, and then

reconsider my point. The customer is always right.

By offering bad journalism with mushy logic in which the " pros and

cons " are presented without any logical relationship to each other,

the reader is most likely to be left with a vague feeling of

stalement, instead of a clear perception of the essential issue and a

sense of the existing discourse that attempts to resolve it.

I hope this point is given the serious attention it deserves. It's

extremely simple, but easily missed and rarely voiced in discussions

of raw milk and its status in the media and government.

Mike

SE Pennsylvania

The best way to predict the future is to invent it. --Alan Kay