I’ve been thinking a lot over the last few weeks about illnesses from foodborne pathogens, in particular how they’re portrayed for raw milk. Two recent articles—one about the safety of mass-produced ground beef and the other about the safety of raw and pasteurized milk—have helped crystallize the issue for me. These articles have helped convince me that raw milk advocates need to come at the issue of illnesses in a different way than they have.
The first article, about a woman who became seriously ill from E.coli 0157:H7 contained in a hamburger, and is now paralyzed from the waist down, is testimony to the power of a tragic story. It was a front page article in the New York Times last Sunday, and has received lots of attention on food blogs, and NPR’s “On Point” did an hour-long discussion about it on Wedneday. Agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack even came out with statement saying the situation is intolerable.
The second article just came out on the Marler blog comparing data about illnesses from raw and pasteurized milk. In an impressive data assessment, it argues that, while there are significant numbers of illnesses from pasteurized milk, there are many more outbreaks for raw milk than pasteurized milk based on consumption.
That article is especially relevant to discussions on this blog because it relies heavily on arguments from the Weston A. Price Foundation, and on data obtained by the Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control on illnesses from raw milk. Its key argument: “If the risk from raw and pasteurized dairy products was equal, or if raw dairy products were actually safer as WAPF states in their documents, we would expect that raw dairy-related outbreaks would be 1% or less of the total number of outbreaks. Instead, raw dairy products (excluding queso fresco) caused 75 (56%) outbreaks compared with 47 (35%) outbreaks associated with pasteurized milk products (Figure 4). In other words, there should have been only 1-2 raw dairy-related outbreaks among the 134 reported during that time period given the small estimated number of raw milk drinkers.”
Now, one can argue that both of these articles are misleading. In the case of the article about hamburgers, the reality is that the number of illnesses from E.coli O157:H7 appears to have actually declined significantly over the last decade or so, and the beef industry makes this point. I also heard the argument made on the NPR program. But the argument was drowned out by the amazement, and horror, that a young woman could be paralyzed by illness from a hamburger. There was almost a hysteria around the notion that someone could be made so sick by something as commonly consumed as a hamburger.
In the case of the pasteurized-vs-raw milk illnesses, it can be argued that comparing the number of pasteurized and nonpasteurized outbreaks is misleading because the number of illnesses from pasteurized milk is often much larger. It can also be argued that the regulators are biased in how they assess blame. Indeed, the WAPF repeatedly makes this argument, most recently in the case of illnesses in Wisconsin attributed to raw milk.
The WAPF, along with the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, issued strong statements questioning whether public health authorities have been justified in linking 35 cases of campylobacter in Wisconsin to raw milk. This comes in the face of genetic linkages of some of the sickened consumers to cows at the farm.
Now, I know anything is possible, and perhaps some of these Wisconsin cases weren’t from raw milk. I’m often the first to question questionable reports. But the evidence seems convincing that at least some of the illnesses were from raw milk.
In a press release last week, though, the Weston A. Price Foundation stated that Wisconsin’s report is “replete with bias and inaccuracies to create the impression that raw milk should be singled out as a dangerous food.”
As its first instance of bias and inaccuracies, the organization states, “The report alleges 35 confirmed cases of Campylobacter jejuni infection among shareholders of the Zinniker Family Farm, Elkhorn, Wisconsin. Although DNA test results allegedly found the same strain of C. jejuni in 25 of the patients and manure samples obtained from 14 out of 30 milking cows on the farm, the agency did not find C. jejuni in any of the raw milk from the farm.”
To argue that because there waren’t pathogens in the milk nixes the entire case is inappropriate. The same kind of linkages are used by public health authorities to assign blame when illnesses occur in other foods, including pasteurized milk. Raw milk isn’t being treated differently in that respect.
Some previous cases have similarly resulted in outcomes that strongly suggest raw milk was the culprit. In the Dee Creek case in Washington state, for example, not only were matching pathogens between patients found at the farm, but fines were paid and a federal indictment resulted in a plea agreement.
I know it can be argued that because the public health and regulatory authorities use illnesses to further an agenda of eliminating raw milk, rather than working to help reduce illnesses, proponents need to challenge all allegations.
Unfortunately, a picture is worth a thousand words—in our media-saturated world, it’s almost impossible to deny the power of the tragic story. The beef industry has discovered that with respect to trying to counter stories like what appeared in the NY Times last week. Similar tragic stories are used by regulators to make their case against raw milk. We saw it in California, when the story of Chris Martin’s serious illness was used to help defeat SB 201, that would have removed the coliform standard of AB 1735.
My point is that it’s very difficult to deny the case histories, and doing so not only hardens the approach of the authorities, but makes them look rational. Rather, admitting that, yes, children (and adults) do occasionally become sick from raw milk, as well as committing to finding causes for the illnesses, helps disarm the critics. If they don’t want to help, then they must be the irrational ones.
At the very end of its press release about the Wisconsin cases, WAPF states, “A double standard is evident. Only raw milk is singled out for removal from the food supply, not pasteurized milk, peanut butter, spinach, green peppers, cookie dough and hamburger, all of which have caused widespread illness nationwide in recent years.” That is definitely true. But that statement, together with an acknowledgment that some people did become ill from raw milk, belong right at the beginning. In other words, raw milk is another food, usually a health-promoting food. People occasionally get sick, though, just as with any other food. Let’s move on.
***
There’s a happy ending to my posting of two weeks ago, about the raw milk seller temporarily expelled from a farmer’s market. It turns out he’s been allowed back in. Apparently he adjusted his liability insurance to offer protection to the farmers market as well.
Now, that doesn’t necessarily make up entirely from the fact that Whole Foods stopped carrying raw milk in its Florida stores, but it is a victory nonetheless, since it doesn’t set a precedent for farmers markets cracking down on raw milk.
When someone becomes critcally ill,from one perspective,we say that they are suffering from a bacterial infection,bacteria that aren’t usually found in such high numbers are found in a stool sample.From another perspectve we say that the normal balance of bacteria has been upset.Both are true,but they lead us in different directions in the search for the cause of the illness.Those who see a bacterial infection want to track the bacteria back to it’s source.Those who see an imbalance want to find the cause of the imbalance.Tracking the trail of any bacteria is an impossible task ,it requires a leap of faith to proceed in this direction.Finding the cause of an imbalance is an easier task.We know many of the things that can be the cause of a sudden change in the balance of bacteria in someone’s gut.It’s a matter of going down a checklist to discover which one of these things could have been the cause.Unfortunately,most medical professionals are too busy following the trail of the "pathogen" to even check to see if the imbalance might have a simple ,easy to identify,cause.
I hear you. Ingesting a "pathogen" IS the cause of the imbalance or infection! So lets trace that "pathogen".
Is it possible that someone could have an upset digestive system without ingesting a "pathogen?Could taking antibiotics upset someone’s digestive system?Does a pathogen always have to originate from outside your digestive system?
Genetic engineers know how to create any kind of e coli bacteria from the common strain of e coli.They take advantage of natural behavior of bacteria to do this.Everything they do in the laboratory is happening all of the time in nature.So when you trace the pathogen back to it’s source,if the pathogen is e coli 0157:H7 you will find that it’s source is common ,harmless,beneficial e coli that has mutated into 0157:H7.To get common e coli to mutate,all we need to do is to put it under stress of some sort.When subjected to stress bacteria produce a high percentage of mutations as a survival strategy.To get 0157:H7 we need to select for that strain by giving all of the mutations that arise the type of terrain that favors 0157:H7.
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=2747772
"This review concentrates on stress-induced mutagenesis in Escherichia coli and related bacteria with a few examples from other organisms. The mutagenic phenomena are variously called adaptive, stationary-phase, stress-induced, or starvation-induced mutagenesis (see Table 1). In the first section, I describe some of the global responses to stress in bacteria, and how each can result in increased mutation rates. In the second section, I give some specific examples of stress-induced mutagenesis (see Table 2), and then discuss in greater detail what we have learned from studying a particular case, adaptive mutation to Lac+ in E. coli. I conclude with a discussion of the potential impact that stress-induced mutagenesis may have on survival and adaptation."
"Stress-induced mutagenesis is neither a theoretical construct nor a laboratory artifact. Among natural isolates of E. coli, 40% had at least a 10-fold increase in mutant frequency, and 13% had at least a 100-fold increase in mutant frequency, when they were incubated on agar plates for 7 days (Bjedov et al., 2003). Among the same group of isolates, only 3% and 1% had equivalently increased constitutive mutant frequencies, respectively (Bjedov et al., 2003). These numbers suggest that inducible mutators are widespread, and that they make a greater contribution to natural variation within a population than do constitutive mutators"
"Up-regulation of error-producing DNA polymerases and down-regulation of error-correcting systems may have evolved for other purposes, but yet may be retained in the population because they increase diversity when it is advantageous to do so."
We should be looking for the stress that induced the mutations and the terrain(conditions) that favored the survival of the 0157:H7.The bacteria are simply responding to these factors.Any kind of antibacterial chemical can provide the stress ,then an overly acid environment would favor the survival of an e coli 0157:H7 mutation.
Miguel, look at that picture (figure 1a), and tell me with an honest face, is that the poster child of raw milk? The photo shows a very sad situation where people probably had good intentions, but sold "grass fed WAPF raw milk" without a clue how to raise cows or milk them.
Miguel, what’s your approach? Deny outbreaks, and say to farmers: "We should be looking for the stress that induced the mutations and the terrain(conditions) that favored the survival of the 0157:H7."
Hello, I think we should help farmers less informed than you about how to produce raw milk in more sanitary conditions.
My plea to you and others in the raw milk movement: help these folks that are making people sick. Stop denying the outbreaks and figure out how to fix them.
This should be happening, yet the govt isn’t doing this. Why is that?
I believe Miguel is looking at the whole picture, not just one portion. If you limit yourself to just one area, you miss too much and don’t come up with viable solutions. Why do some become ill to different degrees and other not ill at all? What is the difference in the body environment that limits the "pathogens"? A good scientist will seek out all avenues of possibilities.
Commensal microbes live in well established diverse communities.They prefer to live in a stable situation.Change favors the microbes that are not competitive in a stable community .These are the ones that often create problems when their populations explode due to a collapse of the commensal community.The collapse is caused by sudden change."Kill steps" are sudden change."Kill steps" destroy stability which devastates the commensal microbes’ well established communities."Kill steps" enhance virulence.The more "kill steps" that a microbe survives the more virulent it becomes.This is not a crazy theory of mine it is well established fact backed up by research published in peer reviewed journals.
What is our best strategy then ,do we try for the ultimate "kill step" so that we don’t create any more virulent microbes?Or should we join forces with the commensal microbes?After all ,they are recognized as a huge part of our own immune system.If stability is what they prefer,let’s find ways to give them stability.It’s not all that hard to do.All we really have to do is to stop the strafing and carpet bombing with chemicals designed to prolong "shelf life" by killing "spoilage microbes".If you are concerned about ingesting virulent microbes with your food,avoid food that has been subjected to one or more of the numerous "kill steps" used by the Food Industry to prolong shelf life.Eat fresh food grown on healthy soil.
Because farmers,food processors and consumers believe that bacteria are the enemy and need to be killed ,people will continue to become ill,not from bacteria but from the attempt to eliminate bacteria.In fact as we have seen,the more people try to kill off the bacteria the more frequent and severe the bouts of illness become.Sanitation should always be practiced with the knowledge that,while the equiptment needs to be clean,the food should not be contaminated with antibacterial substances.
Why is raw milk picked on so much. From what I have seen there have been very few "microbe matches" between the few who have caught a bug and as a way of life happen to consume "raw milk" . There were no matches with Mark’s milk in the very small 2007 outbreak and no matches to the recent Wisconsin outbreak (some Campy was found in the manure – but then might that have been contaminated with bird feces?). Campy is found in most of the Chicken produced in factory farms – did the investigators not ask these families if chicken had been prepared and conusmed prior to the outbreak? Perhaps cross contamination from cutting board or handling.
I don’t think the right questions have been asked of the families that have suffered from these outbreaks. Unless the microbes are found in the milk itself – there should be no reason to pinpoint an outbreak on raw milk period. All of the confirmed E.coli O157:H7 contamininated hamburger matched with the patient – but I have yet to see an exact pathogen match from milk. Strongly suggestive – yes. Exact match – no.
Miguel,
Brilliantly said…..
This entire discussion misses the true villians. The Monsantos of the world that intentionally induced incredible GMO and antibiotic stresses that now express themselves as genetic sports never seen before in nature. These corporate felons have dodged a bullet from criminal indictment. Why is this?? This is the question….Lykke….attack the origins of the challenge. Not the organic farmers.
This is like watching a NFL football game while the nation burns. A great distraction while critical awareness is neglected. Why is our country packed full of unconscious fools? Why is there not a massive revolution and rebellion against the true origins of the pathogens genesis. The movie "The Future of Food" describes this dynamic.
Somehow mankind in the 20th century began to believe that he should change nature and remake nature through science and chemicals. This is a failure of understanding nature. She can not be manipulated. She can not be forced to change by man. For every short sighted manipulation there is long term disaster…cooperation is the only sustainable pathforward.
The long term disaster is now manifesting itself as pathogens and weakened immunity.
Stupid is as stupid does. Shortsighted people hit walls with their heads.
It would be funny to watch mankind die off as a direct result of his selfish madness….if it was not so tragic, greed based and misguided. MIke Moore speaks of this in his new movie Capitalism. Money has gripped America and it has changed our moral fiber. As Christian humanitarians we are much closer to socialism than capitalism. Christ atacked the money changers…he did not embrace them. Greed is a sin…yet America has somehow come to embrace it as a virtue.
Monsanto is the Devil. Lykke…attack Monsanto and greedy faceless corporations like them. They created the madness…. we humanity loving organic farmers did not.
Mark
If we want to understand why food is making people sick,we will have to get past the idea that bacteria are responsible for illness.They are a result rather than the cause.If you spray a beautiful wild meadow with herbicide,what survives will be a few very hardy plants like thistles.Did the thistles cause the whole thriving community of plants to die?In fact they are part of the recovery process.They will spread and cover the soil to prevent erosion until the slow repopulation begins. As other plants return,the thistles will diminish to the small part of the community they once were because they need bare ground without competition in order to establish themselves.Does it really help to kill all of the thistles,then trace back to the place they originated and kill all of the thistles there,If that even can be done?If we want to reestablish a stable community,we need to reseed and heavily.
When someone insists that we can only discuss bacteria as the cause of food poisoning,they are desperately trying to distract our attention from far more obvious causes.Any food can be "contaminated" with bacteria.In fact eating food is how we acquire the bacteria that are our immune system.Just like in the wild meadow,it is very hard for new bacteria to colonize an already full community.Of course there are people who’s immune systems have more in common with a roundup ready soybean field than a wild meadow.Eating sterilized food with preservatives in it is how their system got so out of kilter it definitely is not a solution.
The real question is what cleared the ground that allowed the change loving opportunistic bacteria to establish itself and grow?If we could bring ourselves to LOOK for this agent, we would see it standing right there in the open where it has been all along.It is becoming more difficult all of the time to find food or water or even air that is not contaminated with antibacterials.Part of the deception is that there are so many different labels for things that kill bacteria.There is no doubt that the effect is cumulative.Each preservative may kill a different species of bacteria,but a typical meal(even of" Organic" processed food) could contain enough chemical residue and preservatives to make room for an opportunistic organism to establish itself.Does it really matter whether that organism was waiting patiently in your gut or whether it just arrived along with the food or even whether it came from one of your commensal bacteria as a mutant induced by the stress of being bombed with an antibacterial?Don’t be distracted into searching for the source of the bacteria.The "Bottom Line" is that longer shelf life means increased profit.Killing "spoilage organisms" extends shelf life and increases profits.At it’s root ,the cause of food poisoning is economic.It is the need for ever increasing profits.
Again brilliantly said.
The CMAB ( CA Milk Advisory Board …the "got milk" people ) annouced the findings of a new UC Davis study on breast milk ( raw ). The study focussed on the miraculous capabilities of breast milk and the oligosacharides which are specialized sugars found in breast milk ). In short, oligosacharides protect bacteria so that they can transit the stomach acid environment so they can reach the gut and they also feed beneficial bacteria in the gut. These are things Sally and I have been saying and teaching for years.The CMAB marketing people now want to find a way to take these special sugars out of raw milk and then add them back into pastuerized milk to increase the immune properties of processed milk.
Oh how they fiddle with nature in hopes of patenting something special.
Message to the CMAB…..try listening closely to your consumers and then try cleaning up your filthy, antibiotic, rBSt hormone, CAFO grain fed, lagoon lakes, manure pile, concrete filled steel jungles, lactose intolerant act and just drink the milk raw and stop trying to outsmart mother nature.
Cause your track record of trying to fool mother nature kind of sucks and all this messing arround is bankrupting and killing your farmers.
Mark
Mark
I passed along your thought of several months ago about taking a sip from each cows teat at the time of milking to see if it tastes right. Before my agister takes any milk for consumption by us shareholders, he drinks a squirt from a cup he bought – just for that purpose. If it has any kind of funny taste the milk from that quarter is discarded. Only one cows teat has had a compromised taste and this early warning enabled him to deal with the situation effectively. He was very appreciative that you passed this commonsense test along.
We owners are very confident that we are receiving extremely high-quality milk. After filtering, the milk is quickly chilled in ice water and the agister carefully maintains it at a low temperature (probably around 37 or 38 degrees) until it reaches our hands. We know that the best way to ensure that the milk remains safe to drink is to MAINTAIN THE CHAIN OF COLD.
My sense is that producers generally dont do the teat test and have done too little to inform / encourage consumers , nay, strongly advocate that consumers MUST keep this perishable at a low temperature until consumed. Perhaps putting this on a label would wake up the consuming public.
If the taste test were done at milking and the Chain Of Cold were maintained all the way to consumption, I suspect that the raw dairy-related outbreaks (that David referred to above) would approach 1% or less of the total number of outbreaks and outbreaks would virtually disappear in the US.
Again, its the taste test and the chain of cold.
Miguel has some interesting theories, but what about the virulence of a certain strain of bacteria? Certainly this plays a role in outbreaks. Most foodborne illnesses are isolated cases (or appear to be isolated) and are not attached to an outbreak. Outbreaks are what spark the Medias attention.
Why have there been so many raw milk outbreaks over the past few years? Is anyone asking this question? Or do we just want to blame the victims immune system. I still question if raw milk helps to build a healthy gut and immune system, why are people becoming ill from contaminated raw milk. According to the WAPF, raw milk consumption should prevent a person from becoming ill from a foodborne pathogen. The good bacteria should out weigh the bad. In theory this sounds good, but reality tells a different story.
Miguel, we live in a polluted, antibiotic, herbicide, pesticide, chemical world. According to your theory everyone should become ill, but they dont. Maybe genetics somehow play a role. For example, it has been recently discovered that some children who develop autism dont have a certain gene that allows them to expel toxins from the body. Maybe something like this plays a role in people who become ill from pathogens. We dont have all the answers.
cp
Raw milk outbreaks???
It appears you have attached the stigma of Typhoid Mary to raw milk?
I agree we dont have all the answers and should therefore stop acting as if we do.
Theoretical understandings as to the cause as disease (germ theory) or the origins of life (evolutionary theory) are full of holes and are indicative of religious phenomenons that defy common sense.
Ken Conrad
http://www.myfoxdc.com/dpp/health/101309_woman_disabled_by_flu_shot_reaction_dystonia
A rare side effect of the flu shot? Is this different than "playing russian roulette"?
Shouldn’t flu shots be banned? If they harm one person isn’t that one too many?
Bacterial infection in previously healthy people is always preceded by a disruption of the commensal bacterial community.A bacterial infection is simply the explosion in numbers of one particular type of bacteria.These opportunistic bacteria are mutants of commensal bacteria.Under normal,stable conditions they compete very poorly with the dominant strain and are not a threat.We cannot hope to avoid these commensal bacteria just because under some circumstances mutants arise that can result in infection.Cheesemakers know that sometimes the milk they buy for cheesemaking will contain antibiotics.Adding 10 to 20 times as much starter to the cheese can sometimes overcome the antibiotics in the milk so that cheese can still be made from it.Although the world is polluted with antibacterials,we can compensate by consuming lots of probiotic foods and also by carefully avoiding activities and foods that might upset our systems.Because medical professionals always focus on the "pathogen" rather than looking at factors that might have killed the commensal bacteria,they really have no idea what caused the illness.Even raw milk could be contaminated with sanitizers or antibiotics.This would kill some of our commensal bacteria.When people fear bacterial contamination of food they sometimes think that a little bit of sanitizer in the food might be a good thing because it will kill bacteria that might be contaminating the food.I know dairy farmers who have added chlorine to the bulk tank to reduce the bacteria count in their milk.If doctors tested food that was suspect,for sanitizers when someone becomes ill ,they might be surprised to find a high level of sanitizer in the food.
Doctors who recommend the flu shot should be sanctioned., Parents who allow flu shots for their children should be arrested and their children put into juvenile detention
Any public health official pushing flu shots should lose their jobs and the companies making the shots should be put out of business. Where is the FDA when you need them?
But then again flu shots are not raw milk produced by a small "easing pickings" producer.
If there is an immune system fault, why is it unjust to discover it?
In all illness the disease is present before the symptoms, but our medical machine is both uninterested in the terrain of pre-illness, and unequipped to detect it. By now the indoctrination of medical and laypeople into current medical theory is so complete that most of us cannot even countenance a suggestion that there is more to disease than a deadly bug. Thus we accuse those looking for underlying causes of blaming the victim. Crazy, and NOT compassionate.
As miguel has been patiently explaining here, infectious disease is in fact a microbial imbalance that allows a certain unfriendly bacteria to proliferate. Clinical symptoms appear later as toxins are released by the proliferating microbes, but its only then that our medical machine notes a problem. In their narrow vision they call the secondary symptoms the disease, then add injury to injury by carpet-bombing (miguels nifty phrase) with antibiotics, killing both the bad and the good microbes, in effect using the patients future to pay for the present.
Actually, you could take another step within and say that an environmental disease exists when circumstances promote mutagenesis of friendly bacteria into unfriendly ones. This is apparently what happened with 0157 H7, a mutation almost certainly resultant of stressful feedlot conditions, and H1N1, which is an amalgamation of several strains (human, porcine, and avian–called swine flu because the pig was the only of the three species able to hold all three strains) which probably expressed itself because the first infected pig was under stress (read confined in crowded pens, full of antibiotics and unnatural feed).
There is a silver lining to this environmental dark cloud. Research suggests that if we can clean up our world and our bodies, we will greatly diminish microbial mutagenesis. From the article miguel cited:
Modeling and simulations have confirmed that mutator alleles can contribute to adaptive evolution in changing environments (Leigh, 1973; Taddei et al., 1997b). However, the mutator allele is always doomedwhen a successful mutation is achieved, individuals that continue to mutate are at a disadvantage. Thus, continuous feast-full conditions should select for low mutation rates, and they apparently do (Trobner et al., 1984)."
Most everyone has staph living on their skin. Our bodies keep it under control. Yet when some get a scratch/surgery they become infected. Has there been studies to find out why this occurs in some and not others? I’ve read theories about immune dysfunction, also anesthesia can lower the immune system plus the room temp of the OR may be a contributing factor, etc. I would imagine it wouldn’t be as simple as just one thing causing dysfunction of the system.
I agree with you 100% Unfortunately, there have been at least 2 possibly 3 generations of Americans who have grown up eating mostly processed foods (convenient, fast and cheap) and have no connection whatsoever with the the origin of thier food. Consequently immune systems of these generations have become compromised and are no longer able to perform as well as say our ancestors born at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.
My own ancestors in the 18th and 19th century lived until the ripe ages of the 70’s and 80’s and even 90’s . Once they survived through the unfortunate childhood diseases that predominated at that time. None of them died of cancer, stroke or heart disease. They all died with dignity from "old age" surrounded by a loving extended family.
It breaks my heart to see my own son’s generation riddled with chronic diseases such as asthma, allergies, diabetes, etc…
When I grew up in the 70’s I only knew one child in my school with asthma . . . . and this child was sheltered and raised in a very "sterile" environment.
It breaks my heart even more to see chonically ill elderly who have been raised on the USDA’s food pyramid and a lifetime of processed industrial foods to die of cancer, dementia, stroke and heart disease. Many of our elderly end up living thier last days not among family but in sterile hospital beds or have an extended stay at a nursing home. It is so sad.
Whole foods such as raw milk, grass fed meats and local seasonal vegetables are a conerstone of a healthful way of life that sadly most Americans are lacking. Health has suffered greatly from industrial ag which is the antithesis of all of the above. The only way to counter these effects is to bring back farming as a "valued" job title (not something to be laughed at), abolish all regulations that hamper the start-up and growth of small local farms but reward big "ag"
I would love to see the current generation of kids raised without the TV and the X-box but with lots of fresh air, sunshine and dirt while growing and thriving on home cooked meals based on whole foods period. Otherwise, health care costs will continue to spiral out of control and our entire financial system may very well collapse.
I am hoping the status quo will change in my lifetime. . . . there seems to be a "foodie revolution" taking hold and I hope more and more people wake up and realize all the lies that have been told by "TPTB" based on the notion of "safety". Whole foods such as raw milk, yogurt, butter and cream based on grass fed cows are the cornerstone of any healthful diet.