Got Raw Milk? Join the Vassar Raw Milk Co-op
By Jacob Greenberg
Why drink raw, whole milk?
It is healthier and safer than pasteurized and homogenized milk; promotes clean, local, natural, and sustainable farming; ensures that cows are pastured and treated humanely; and is a means of supporting small farmers, a step aimed at fixing our failing industrial food system.
And, it tastes better.
Pasteurization – the process of cooking milk at a minimum of 145°F (63°C) for at least 30 minutes, 161°F (72°C) for at least 15 seconds, or 191°F (89°C) for at least 1 second – destroys enzymes, diminishes vitamin content, denatures fragile milk proteins, destroys vitamins C, B12 and B6, kills beneficial bacteria, and promotes pathogens.
It is associated with allergies, asthma, lactose intolerance, increased tooth decay, colic in infants, growth problems in children, osteoporosis, arthritis, heart disease and cancer.
Homogenization – a process that breaks down butterfat globules so they do not rise to the top –makes nutrients in milk more difficult to digest, and rids it of healthful, nutrient fat. Since butterfat contains vitamins A and D needed for the assimilation of calcium and protein in the water fraction of the milk (and is rich in short- and medium chain fatty acids that protect against disease and stimulate the immune system), homogenization, which removes these essential fats, is largely linked to heart disease and cancer.
Only by marketing low-fat and skim milk as a health food can the modern dairy industry get rid of its excess poor-quality, low-fat milk from modern high-production herds.
Pasteurization and homogenization lead to: the poor treatment of cows, which then produce a toxic, inedible milk-like substance that needs to be pasteurized; the sale of poor quality, nutrient-deprived “milk”; the growth of feedlots and consolidated industrial dairy; and unclean, unsustainable, and unregulated farming practices.
The raw milk movement, a facet of the slow food and locavore movements, promote clean, fair, local, and sustainably and naturally-produced foods, thus challenging the status quo and giving us an idea of what a better, healthier world might look like.
For the sake of our health, the health of the environment, the health of the animals we eat, and the health of the farmers who grow our food, we need to be educated about the food we eat and the milk we drink.
We need to start by exclusively supporting pasture-raised cows. Why? Not just because cows are ruminants – they are built to digest and break down grass – but because feeding them corn, soy, and animal and factory by-products is unethical, immoral, and inhumane.
Even when supplemented with antibiotics, such a diet kills them. This changes the nutritional value and the taste of both the meat and milk. Factory, feedlot dairy cows have 300 times more pathogenic bacteria in their digestive tracts than pastured, grass-fed cattle – which have a neutral stomach pH – and one even more acidic than our own.
But 90 percent of dairy cows in the U.S. live their entire lives in sheds with concrete floors never having been brought out to pasture.
This is unacceptable.
The milk that feedlot cattle produce is undrinkable in its raw state. It is “milk” that needs to be pasteurized.
This is a fact of industrial dairy, and so is disease.
E.coli 0157:H7 is often cited as a reason to pasteurize milk even though it is a product of feedlot cattle – it evolved in their acidic gut – and was never seen before 1982.
This is a fact of industrial agriculture.
And so this is not just about raw milk.
This is about social and environmental justice.
This is about being educated about the consequences of supporting industrial agriculture, and about the benefits of knowing where your food comes from and how it is produced.
Consider that if you’re lactose intolerant, you can drink raw milk.
Pasteurization destroys lactase, which is essential for digesting lactose. This is why 99 percent of people who are lactose intolerant can drink raw milk; they are only allergic to pasteurized milk, and dairy products made from pasteurized milk. And, since we can no longer absorb the majority of the calcium in our dairy products, this “decalcification” of pasteurized and formula milks is a major cause of osteoporosis and cavities.
Raw milk also contains galactose, essential for milk-sugar digestion; lipase, which helps with fat digestion; and phosphatase, essential for the absorption and digestion of calcium.
Pasteurization destroys these enzymes and rids milk of vital nutrients and vitamins.
At least 50 percent of Vitamin C is destroyed by pasteurization. The loss of Vitamins A, D, E, and F can run as high as 66 percent, whereas 100 percent of these vitamins are naturally available in raw milk.
Pasteurization destroys probiotics (good bacteria) and neutralizes the antibacterial properties present in raw milk, which are not only healthful and necessary for digestion, but also prevent the development of harmful, pathogenic bacteria.
Not to mention that the enzymes and bacteria present in raw milk from pastured cows prevent the growth of pathogenic bacteria.
Aajonus Vonderplanitz, Ph.D., and William Campbell Douglass, M.D. in their “Report in Favor of Raw Milk,” explain: “Raw milk contains enzymes and antibodies that make milk less susceptible to pathogenic bacterial contamination, such as nisin and lactoperoxidase that inhibit the growth of Salmonella.”
Furthermore, empirical evidence continues to prove that pasteurization creates degenerative matter in milk on which microbes, pathogens, feed, rendering pasteurized milk a culprit cesspool for “pathogenic” activity.
According to Vonderplanitz, Ph.D., nutritional scientist, what most people do not understand is that Salmonella, E.coli, campylobacter, listeria, and other microbes are not harmful. What is harmful is the degenerative matter on which these microbes feed.
“The microbes that science and medicine term ‘pathogenic’ are simply the symptom that degenerative matter exists. So as soon as the microbes consume the degenerative matter, the microbes go dormant – this is known as the exhaustion theory. These microbes are part of the process of waste-elimination.”
The evidence proving the danger of pasteurized milk is overwhelming.
As raw milk sales decreased in the middle of the 20th century, Salmonella outbreaks increased.
A total for some of the documented outbreaks due to pasteurized milk over the past few decades is 239,884 cases and 620 deaths. The nation’s largest recorded outbreak of Salmonella, between June 1984 and April 1985, was due to pasteurized milk contaminated with antibiotic-resistantSalmonella typhimurium. It sickened more than 200,000 people and caused 18 deaths.
For the more than 40 million servings of Organic Pastures raw milk consumed in California, from 1999-2008, not one person reported illness because of raw milk consumption. And this was from commercial, mass-produced raw milk.
There were 19 recalls of pasteurized milk during that same period.
And furthermore, for the 3 billion glasses of Alta Dena Dairy’s many raw milk products consumed over 40 years, there was not one epidemic, and not one proven case of food borne illness because of raw milk consumption, even though this was mass-produced raw milk.
Vonderplanitz and Douglass write: “When Alta Dena produced raw milk and supplied the entire United States, they sold approximately 50,000 gallons of raw milk daily that was not under the over-restrictive regulations imposed in the 1990’s. There was not one scientifically proved outbreak of bacterial food poisoning caused by Alta Dena’s raw milk.”
We are being lied to, given unhealthy and nutrient-deprived food-like products that are making us sick, so that the food industry (and health industry?) can maximize profits.
So why pasteurize?
It lengthens the shelf life of milk – thus allowing for dairy farms to consolidate and industrialize – and turns milk into a commodity.
Consumer Reports explains in a January 1974 article that pasteurization “is an excuse for the sale of dirty milk; may be used to mask low quality milk; and promotes carelessness and discourages efforts to produce clean milk.”
In other words, it is a means of covering up poor farming practices designed only to maximize profits.
Pasteurization and homogenization first gained momentum in the early 1900’s, in the time of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle when conditions in the food industry were toxic, unsanitary, and deadly.
Cows were confined to manure-laden stalls and fed the byproducts of an increasingly industrialized economy (grain and factory byproducts); milk was diluted with sewage-tainted water; chalk, plaster, white clay, and animal brains were added to the milk to cover up for the absence of cream, which had been skimmed and sold separately for a profit; and there was little sanitation or refrigeration.
Not to mention, industrial feedlots turn manure from a source or fertility, which “feeds” the grass, into a source of pollution and disease.
This build-up of waste on industrial farms; the use of unnatural feed because of the removal of pasture; the desire to lengthen milk’s shelf life (stimulated by World War II, which created the need to ship milk overseas); and the decreasing locality of dairy farmers (as food industrializes it becomes less local, more consolidated); continues to lead to the exploitation of farmers, animals, and the environment, and the creation of a ‘dirty,’ inedible milk-like substance that needs to be pasteurized.
If we wish to have healthier, tastier, more naturally and sustainably-grown foods, then we need to resist the industrialization of our food system, and we need to demand such food by supporting our local farmers and being educated about the food we eat, and the milk we drink.
Only four corporations control 80 percent of the milk produced and sold in the U.S., today, and the National Dairy Council, which is closely affiliated with pasteurized dairy products, does 100 percent of the advertising.
With the overwhelming influence of the food industry, it is not surprising that the FDA and the CDC, which are lobbied by the dairy industry – a $40 billion per year business, excluding federal subsidies (which run in the billions) – claim that “Raw milk is inherently dangerous and it should not be consumed by anyone at any time for any purpose,” despite evidence proving otherwise.
The FDA and the CDC have absolutely no empirical data supporting their claims about raw milk. Their claims are based entirely on biased speculation.
There is a lobby for big-scale, consolidated dairies since they have the money to lobby congress, the FDA, the USDA, and the CDC, whereas small farmers do not. So this one-sided propaganda campaign is designed to scare consumers into believing that pasteurization is necessary by using absurd, immoral, discriminatory scare tactics based entirely on speculation.
This is one instance:
“Raw Milk Can Kill You.” That was the name of an article written by Dr. Milton J. Rosenau in the May 1945 issue of Coronet Magazine.
It stated, “Crossroads, U.S.A., is in one of those states in the Midwest area called the breadbasket and milk bowl of America. Crossroads lies about twenty-five miles from the big city on a good paved highway…What happened to Crossroads might happen to your town…might happen almost anywhere in America.”
Then, Coronet’s “expert,” Dr. Harold Harris went on in detail to describe an epidemic of undulant fever in Crossroads that infected 25 percent of the population and killed one in four, which we are led to believe is the result of raw milk consumption.
An investigation revealed the town of “Crossroads” does not even exist. The epidemic did not exist, and furthermore, it is impossible for raw milk to transmit undulant fever.
This misinformation continues to be spread today, where consumers eat it up as fact.
The solution? Support local farmers who grow produce and raise animals naturally and sustainably, using the sunlight not oil. Know where your food comes from, how it was grown and how the animal products and animals you eat were raised (what did they eat? were they pastured? were they fed hormones or antibiotics? etc.).
Join the Vassar raw milk co-op (email us at vassarrawmilkcoop@gmail.com) and Slow Food Vassar (vassar@slowfoodusa.org), your on-campus sources of local and sustainable food, and learn about the food you put in your body.
Remember, this is not just about raw milk.
This is about standing up for our right to freedom of food choice, something the FDA declares is notour right: in a lawsuit filed by the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund on the interstate raw milk ban, the FDA claims that the “Plaintiffs’ assertion of a ‘fundamental right to their own bodily and physical health, which includes what foods they do and do not choose to consume for themselves and their families’ is similarly unavailing because plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to obtain any food they wish.”
This is about protecting our environment.
This is about supporting and protecting small farmers from unconstitutional, immoral, unjust, and oppressive legislation and excessive regulations that discriminate against them as competition to eliminate.
This is about putting our faith in our relationships – as Michael Pollan says – rather than in new technologies (which maintain the status quo through a top-down mentality: such as using chemical fertilizers to make up for the absence of manure when cows move to feedlots, or to mass advertise avoiding certain contaminated foods, which treats such illnesses as E.coli 0157:H7 as unavoidable facts of life rather than what they are: facts of industrial agriculture).
This is about supporting the humane treatment of the animals and animal products we consume.
And this is about being educated, and about knowing what we put in our bodies.
As Michael Pollan says, pay your farmer now or your doctor later.
The Vassar Raw Milk Co-op Sources its raw milk and eggs from Shunpike Dairy
