The Consumer's Right to Choice

"It's my body, I do what I want!" --Cartman

There is an inherent tension between the public’s right to safety and the individual right to choice. The major question, then, is how dangerous is raw milk, relative to everything else we consume?

William Campbell Douglass II, a major advocate of raw milk and author of The Milk Book: The Milk of Human Kindness is not Pasteurized, says not very. Douglass points out that in the past 30 years, outbreaks of disease related to pasteurized milk have led to over 200,000 cases of food poisoning and over 600 deaths. Annually, dairy (raw and pasteurized) accounts for only one percent of food-related illnesses. In 2005, the CDC reported that raw dairy accounted for 30 percent of all dairy related outbreaks. The biggest threat is produce, which accounted for 38 percent of food-borne illness between 1990 and 2004. Poultry was responsible for 20 percent, and beef 16 percent.

Yet our chicken isn’t sold to us cooked in order to protect us from bacteria, and nobody is calling for the pasteurization of spinach before it reaches our salad bowls. Parents who give their children raw milk might be increasing their risk of exposure to dangerous pathogens, causing the skin of experts at the CDC to crawl, but the rising rates of childhood obesity suggest that parents are making other unhealthy, but legal, dietary decisions for their children. So why is raw milk the boogey man?

“I have no idea,” answered Kathryn Russell, who has struggled against state regulators to keep her raw milk operation open in Virginia.

The modern dairy complex as a whole has a vested interest in keeping down small distributors and putting the kibosh on raw milk, because direct from the farmer to the consumer operations interfere with price controls, the profits of milk processing plants, and overall loosen the death grip that a few large companies have over the US milk supply. According to Food and Water Watch, a nonprofit watchdog organization, for every dollar that consumers spent on milk in 2007, only $0.27 went back to dairy farmers. The rest went to dairy processing firms. Dairy Farmers of American (DFA) is a large cooperative that collects and markets a third of the milk produced in the US. In some regions, DFA is the only supplier to Dean Foods, a company that controls 40 percent of the liquid milk supply and 60 percent of the organic milk supply. As a result, farmers are often forced to go through DFA or go out of business. Cutting out all of the middlemen means a loss of profit to DFA and distributors like Dean Foods, making pasteurization seem like a very good idea.

The fight for raw milk is one battle in the larger war against big food industry. In 2005, four companies (Tyson, Cargill, Swift&Co, and National Beef Packing) slaughtered 83.5 percent of cows. Smithfield, Tyson, Swift & Co., and Cargill slaughtered 64 percent of hogs, and just two companies (Tyson and Pilgrim’s Pride) control 47 percent of birds slaughtered. The recent resurgence of farmer’s markets and international movements like Slow Food International are a product of the growing desire to eat healthier, tastier food and lessen the burden on our environment. A quarter of our nation’s dairy is trucked across the country from California, and much of the rest of it comes from other southwestern states where low rainfall makes it easier to accommodate thousands of cattle with little shelter. The ecological stress caused by mega-dairies unnerves many people. Over 2.5 million cows live in Texas, New Mexico, and California, and dairies use up to 150 gallons of water per cow per day to rinse manure off of the concrete floors. The stress on local water reserves is incredible. A dairy with 1,000 cows (a normal size for a California dairy) produces between 50,000 and 75,000 gallons of liquid manure a day.

Advocates of raw dairy are not suggesting that mega dairies ship raw milk thousands of miles across the country and sell it in major grocery stores. Pasteurization would be necessary to assure some degree of safety from milk produced and handled in the standard manner. What advocates do want, however, is to be able to go to a farm and buy milk from the farmer, or to buy locally produced milk from a local grocery store. Farms that produce raw milk often also provide free-range eggs, chicken, pork, and other farm-fresh produce. Rather than rely on the organic label, which is increasingly being controlled by large corporations as well, consumers are looking to local sources.

Part of the resistance to raw milk must be a knee-jerk reaction from an establishment that saved countless babies with mandated pasteurization and sees little to no consequences for continuing to demand compliance. How many consumers or regulators can we expect to stop and question a process that has been carried out regularly for almost 100 years?

We are familiar and comfortable with pasteurization now, and people who want raw milk can seem, to be honest, a bit loony. Yet many consumers believe that the idea that milk comes from grocery stores and not from cows is the loonier notion. The truth of the matter is that the majority of us have grown up thinking that food comes from supermarkets and not out of dirt or animals. When one of my friends found out I was researching raw milk, he was baffled, asking me “Raw milk, straight from the cow? Is it… warm?” When I assured him that it was, in fact, chilled when it reached consumers, the thought of milk going straight from the cow to the consumer inspired in him only one thought: “Gross.”

Clearly, raw milk is not for everyone. Some people are prone to trusting the government when it says something is categorically dangerous, and are happy to continue drinking the pasteurized milk that has always worked for them. Many people will not be willing to spend $10 a gallon on raw milk. But the people who have become disillusioned with massive supermarkets and the modern milk industry should be allowed a way out. People should be able to know and control where their food comes from, and what has been done to it before it reaches them.

Unfortunately, the government is constantly pressured by large corporations to limit consumer choice by restricting access to information. Large food distributors don’t want to publicize where food comes from, how it was produced, and what it contains. For example, it is illegal to identify food that contains genetically modified ingredients like corn or soybeans. The argument is that there is no nutritional difference between regular corn and corn that contains a pesticide-producing gene, so the label is misleading because it implies there is a difference. Regardless of the many reasons consumers may have to avoid genetically modified produce (what if it were illegal to mark foods “kosher,” on the grounds that it’s nutritionally equivalent?), the government has sided with big businesses in making sure that we can’t.

Even in states where raw milk sales are legal, distributors constantly face the threat of new regulations that will eliminate sales or otherwise drive raw milk dairies out of business. It is always a battle of David versus Goliath. However, raw milk advocates are a tenacious bunch. Kathryn Russell believes that the rising popularity of raw milk is making it harder to knock down, even though agencies opposed to raw milk become more frantic as the popularity increases. “They have to be more careful now,” she said, because more people are going to pay attention when regulators bully raw dairy operations. We can expect to see the raw milk movement and resistance to modern dairy practices, along with resistance to the doctrine that “bigger is better” continue to grow.