The assaults on food rights disclosed Friday were especially discouraging because they came from two seemingly opposite directions.

First, there was the corporate assault, from Whole Foods. Corporations, of course, can never be trusted to keep their commitments. Whole Foods, despite all its high-sounding rhetoric about sustainability and organic food, is a large New York Stock Exchange corporation. And it took the typical corporate approach of waiting until late on a Friday afternoon to make an unpopular move, and then didn’t officially announce its action. Mark McAfee of Organic Pastures Dairy Co. put out the word. Whole Foods clearly hoped it could get away with placing little signs by the dairy case, and that consumers would shrug their shoulders and quickly forget that Whole Foods ever carried raw milk. Now there’s talk of Whole Foods wanting some sort of national standards on raw milk. Sounds nice. Anyone want to wager how long those might take to develop?

Then there was the judicial assault in the decision against Meadowsweet Dairy, and that is, in my estimation, a more serious matter. I can remember in one of the first hearings in the Meadowsweet case in early 2008, when Gary Cox argued before a New York state judge. that the search warrant being used by agents from the New York Department of Agriculture and Markets to harass Barb and Steve Smith contained errors and was being misused. It was being used in essentially an open-ended manner, when search warrants are designed under the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, affirmed in many legal decisions, to be used only under strict judicial supervision.

Got ‘em, I remember thinking. This is the Bill of Rights we’re talking about. This is the red line that no agency crosses without risking the entire case. This is one of the beauties of our system, teachers of constitutional law like to say (I’m sure Barack Obama taught this in his constitutional law classes at the University of Chicago)—that our system so respects individual rights that guilty individuals will be freed rather than abridge their rights. Indeed, judges have in the past thrown out serious criminal cases, in which the suspect is very likely guilty, because of misuse of search warrants.

So what happened when Gary Cox pointed out all the problems? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. The case was allowed to continue to its inevitable conclusion last week, with a panel of appeals court judges very nearly laughing at the notion that citizens have the right to privately contract for access to food. No, they said. The regulators make all the rules covering the transfer of food between people. Make some honey from your backyard hive to give to work colleagues? Hand out eggs from your backyard chicken coop? Make some kefir from the raw milk you bought at a licensed dairy and give it to friends? Better watch out—that’s Ag & Markets’ turf, and the regulators decide whether you can or can’t engage in such activities. We’ll see how much authority Ag & Markets grabs—it’s all there for the taking.

What’s disturbing is that our Constitution is being rendered irrelevant. Rep. Ron Paul made this argument most pointedly at last Wednesday’s lobbying day when he noted that the Congress doesn’t declare war any more, as required by the Constitution. The President just decides to fight a war, and Congress goes along. Know when we last declared war? December 1941, after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Even though we’ve fought at least five wars since then, and launched numerous invasions of Caribbean/Latin American nations.

Actually, Ron Paul has been making this argument for many years. But sometimes you just have to see it up close and personal before it truly becomes real.

I’ve long thought there had to be some sort of middle ground to settle the raw milk problem, as well as other similar problems. But I’m beginning to realize that there probably isn’t a middle ground. Tyranny allows no middle ground. So long as the anti-raw-milk side has the judges, regulators, legislators, insurance companies, university professors, and medical communities on their side, why should it negotiate? Why settle when you can have everything you want? Lykke can rail about some examples of unsanitary conditions at raw dairies, but there was never any hint of illness at Meadowsweet Dairy.  New York Ag & Markets and the judges didn’t care about illness. It seems as if things can never be cleaned up enough for the people in control, because sanitation isn’t part of their agenda.

And because the tyrants aren’t ever satisfied with their level of control, there isn’t really a place to hide. The emotional plague articulated so well by Richard Schwartzman is running rampant. Yes, Dave Milano, you are right to worry when they might come after you and your cow.

Certainly California and New York consumers have gotten a dose of that reality medicine. No matter where you live, the move toward tyranny will either hit you directly, as it has Barb and Steve Smith and Mark McAfee, or it will test your resolve—if you’re a Californian, are you willing now to drive an hour for your raw milk, now that the Whole Foods a couple blocks away has banned your raw milk?

There’s no easy way to fight tyranny. Yes, we can join the Tea Party movement and just throw the bums out next election. But the bureaucrats and judges will still be in place, working against freedom, and as we know, they make the key decisions.

I have to think that the most effective immediate step we as citizens and “consumers” can take is to use our economic power. I wrote a few weeks ago how a grocery chain customer can easily be worth $100,000 or $150,000 over twenty years. I guarantee you the executives at Whole Foods aren’t going to be pleased if ever greater numbers of $100,000 customers divvy up their Whole Foods business to co-ops, farmers markets, online health food and supplement suppliers, and so forth. Remember, Whole Foods stocked raw milk in California, Pennsylvania, Washington, and Connecticut not because they’re good guys, but to lure health-conscious shoppers in the expectation they would buy much more than just milk. Yes, Whole Foods took a risk, but it was a business risk designed to differentiate the chain from other chains. Now, Whole Foods has decided for whatever reasons it doesn’t want to take the business risk any longer. Well, if you get rid of a big market differentiator, you essentially become just another grocery chain, and you’ve got to put up with the consequences.

Blair McMorran puts it well: “I think this is just the beginning of a little tidal wave of change that is happening, and Whole Foods just lost their foothold on a terrific opportunity.” I hope she’s right.

On the legal side, I’m not so sure what to do. Judges are there in part to protect our rights.  One of the great strengths of this country has been its willingness to respect the rights of minorities—to allow people of different beliefs to do their thing, so long as they weren’t harming outsiders. The country’s most serious problems—most notably racial relations—have come when we allowed the tyranny of the majority. It took a civil war, endless legal cases, civil disobedience, sending in soldiers, and huge protests to move toward legal respect for racial minorities.

Americans who want to consume raw milk, even via strict private financial arrangements, apart from any contact with outsiders, are being treated as if they were scam artists. It’s not unlike what went on in the South after the civil war, when the police and judges allowed the indiscriminate persecution of blacks. The only choice is to keep fighting, with more court suits, more food freedom legislation, and more lobbying. Or else move to Canada, where they seem to have at least one judge who respects the food rights of the minority.

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Speaking of corporate creepiness, Wal-Mart is positioning itself as a supporter of locally-produced food. It got the Atlantic to write a favorable article, but you know where this story is going. Wal-Mart will do wonderful promotion, and then, when local producers are signed up and committed to filling those fast-growing orders, they’ll learn the Wal-Mart way of doing business—continually lower your prices till you become something like a conventional dairy producer, selling at or below your cost of production. A modern-day slave. My advice to small farms: read the fine print in any contracts you sign with Wal-Mart.