Some years ago, I took a vacation in Costa Rica, and while traveling back roads, I got to see lots of corporate banana plantations. What I noticed first and foremost about these vast agricultural preserves was that most of the banana bunches were covered with blue plastic bags.
When I inquired with a fruit seller I happened to meet, he explained that the bags were meant to feed the bananas fungicides to prevent diseases. They not only coat the bananas, but sicken the plantation workers, he said. This fruit seller was peddling organic bananas, which he said didnt grow with the blue plastic bags and fungicide.
That banana experience made such a deep impression on me that I resolved never again to buy anything but organic bananas, and I never have. Indeed, it made me more committed than ever to feeding myself and my family organic fruits and veggies. To me, the prospect of ingesting or feeding to my family fungicides and pesticides, even in very small quantities via residues on fruits and vegetables, is something I consider too risky to tolerate. My instincts tell me those tiny bits of residue, day after day, week after week, accumulate over the months and years to cause cancer.
That is how I react to perceived risk.
I know other smart discriminating people who pooh-pooh my concerns about conventionally-raised fruits and vegetables. They regularly shop at the mass market grocery stores and buy the bananas I avoid, without a second thought.
However, some of these same people will read a newspaper account of children becoming terribly sick from pathogens picked up at a petting zoo or state fair (there is now such a situation with two very sick children in Oklahoma) and resolve never to take their children or grandchildren to a petting zoo or state fair. To them, its preferable to deny their children the pleasures of a petting zoo than risk even the slightest chance they will become seriously ill.
I will read the same newspaper account, and, while Ill feel terribly for the victims, decide that such occurrences are so exceedingly rare that Im not going to deny members of my family the pleasure of going to the petting area of a zoo. Rather, Ill try to reduce the odds even furtherin this kind of situation by insisting the children wash their hands before we leave the zoo.
Notice I havent said anything about raw milk. I recount these situations to illustrate how differently various people assess risk. But the same sort of decision making goes on around raw milk, and we’ll likely be hearing much more about it if Cong. Thomas Massie’s proposals for removing restrictions on interstate sale of raw milk go forward for hearings.
I have decided that raw milk is highly nutritious, and likely helps strengthen my immune system, perhaps reducing the odds for cancer. I have also concluded that the very occasional examples of serious illness from raw milk played up by the news media are so rare that the risk of illness doesnt outweigh the overall nutritional benefit.
As upsetting as the stories I see on Facebook and in the news media about people sickened by pathogens are, Id rather make my decisions based on the data and not on the basis of a few terrible stories
Why is that? I think that I intuitively feel the repeated exposure to small amounts of poison is highly risky over a long period of time. The odds of getting cancer are pretty highless than one in ten for both breast cancer and prostate cancer. My intuition also tells me that the chances of getting sick from raw milk is a huge long shotmaybe one in 100,000 or more. And I know that even if I get sick, the odds are overwhelming that the illness will be mild; my chances of getting seriously ill so that I or a family member needs to be hospitalized are one in some millions. Nutritionist Chris Kressler did a great analysis two years back. He made the point that most illnesses from tainted food, including raw milk, are mild, with a few days of upset stomach. Then he added:
The statistic we should be more concerned with is hospitalizations for serious illnesses such as kidney failure and hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS) caused by unpasteurized milk. This does happen, and children and the elderly are particularly vulnerable and more likely to experience a serious illness. That said, hospitalizations from raw milk are extremely rare. During the 2000 ? 2007 period, there were 12 hospitalizations for illnesses associated with raw fluid milk. Thats an average of 1.5 per year. With approximately 9.4 million people drinking raw milk, that means you have about a 1 in 6 million chance of being hospitalized from drinking raw milk.
To put this in perspective, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation, you have a roughly 1 in 8,000 chance of dying in a motor vehicle accident if you live in the U.S.. Therefore, you have a 750 times greater chance of dying in a car crash than becoming hospitalized from drinking raw milk.
Or, as I noted, men have a one in six chance of being diagnosed with prostate cancer, and women a one in eight chance of being diagnosed with breast cancer.
Now, having said all that, I can appreciate that not everyone thinks the way I do. For some individuals, reading about or seeing a photo of a single child who needed to go on dialysis because of complications from a pathogen in raw milk is enough to scare them away forever.
What is completely deceptive is that the the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advise people to view risk by reading individual stories, not by considering data. Thus, this advice from the FDA: “Yes, its true that its possible to get ‘food poisoning’ or foodborne illnesses from many foods, but raw milk is one of the riskiest of all . to see how devastating these illnesses can be, check out these real-life stories about the dangers of raw milk.” No data, of course, because that would be devastating to their case (except when they massage and manipulate the data, using data on outbreaks instead of illnesses, to conclude that raw milk is 150 times more dangerous than pasteurized, or to do ridiculous extrapolations like in Minnesota to conclude there were more than 20,000 raw milk illnesses over a decade; they’ll never ever do the arithmetic based on real confirmed illnesses from raw milk compared to other real confirmed illnesses from other foods. Never.)
(By the way, Chris Kresser says in the same article I quoted from above something I have said on many occasions–that the risk of getting sick at all is higher with raw milk than it is with pasteurized milk, on the order of 9.4 times higher, not 150 times higher. He puts the odds at one in 94,000 for raw milk versus one in 888,000 for pasteurized milk–both pretty remote.)
However, for individuals who make their decisions based on tragic stories, it doesnt matter what the data say. It could be one in 100,000 or one in ten million, and their decisions would be the same.
That is fine, and if that is the way people feel, they should make the decision that feels best for them. All I ask is that they dont impose that decision on me.
This was a well-written article, David, and is the way most people feel about foods and many other freedoms. It should be up to us to decide, each on our own. But making something illegal doesn’t work to stop people from using illegal things. That has been proven in the past, numerous times.
Thanks, D. I should have proofed more closely–I corrected the congressman’s name.
who will listen.
I wrote emails protesting the gross errors.
Back to my original statement. I have learned not to expect fairness. Instead I expect bias, lying, cheating, injustice and misinformation campaigns. When the very worst is expected then anything sightly good or slightly fair or slightly kind is a blessing. It is almost as if, my regulators inspect, test and build great standards for raw milk with ever increasing safety…only to eat their young.
Bottom line.
This is a war of information and a war of market protection. The real facts are irrelevant…77 deaths from pssteurized milk or cheeses do not matter. The very best way to win is market building and the creation of a solid foundation of data that affirms the safety of raw milk…inspite of all the misinformation campaigns. It is a dollar voting challenge. When this current generation of agency employees die off, if we have built our track records and markets well, future regulators will think more clearly.
I am not very confident that Senator Massie and his horsemen will get much progress riding the Food Freedom Horse. All the arguments will be fought on the food safety issue. In my experience….food freedom always loses to food safety arguments. We must dominate the food safety fight!!!!
Then we can fight the good fight on food freedom.
Until then, we are trumped by the big cry videos paraded by the FDA that they mascarade as science and risk assessment data. Why do they do this??? Because they lose when the real data is shown and CDC facts emerge. They have failed…they have no case!!
By the end of this year a major food safety article will be published that will show that raw milk produced on RAWMI LISTED dairies is very low risk. In fact, so low a risk that it is perhaps one of the safetest foods that a human can consume. This very long slow process of education warfare is frustrating and demanding. But… We must all appreciate the progress being made, Massie and his 18 brave congressman are showing us just the trend. His quote ” the lactose lobby has become a little intolerant of our raw milk freedom bill”. I love it.
All the fight comes from the Lactose Lobby….it was once just Ron Paul….now it is 18 new congressional faces wanting raw milk interstate commerce!!
Back to building markets and educating. This battle will be won with teaching both the consumers about nutrition and farmers about safety. Teach…teach…teach!!! Take measure in another ten years!!! Let conventional dairies put cheese on pizza and sell dried powdered milk to China. Us raw milk dairymen will nourish Local America and its families with delicious-non allergenic- digestible- nutritious fluid raw milk!!
Wednesday, April 9 at 1:30pm in PDT
California State Capitol
1315 10th Street, Sacramento, California 95814
The bill is going to be heard on April 9th in the Assembly Agriculture Committee at 1:30 pm in the State Capitol, room 126. Please plan to attend & invite others to attend as well. People will be able to state their name, affiliation, and the fact that they support the bill.
Thanks, Cuz…I’m impressed that this story resonated so strongly within the family.
Dr. Besser on the evening news did not do his homework either and misquoted CDC data and denied all studies on raw milk!!!
The media is really lazy and unethical.They are eating CDC data and do not vet it themselves. The idea that an outbreak is equal to the number of illnesses….this is so basic yet so twisted. Not one of these media stories ever mentions the massive number of ( 422,000 since 1972 )people sickened and the 77 killed by pasteurized milk!!
Corruption is rampant!!! Compete denial of six internationally published and peer reviewed studies on raw milk….when Besser said there is no science to back up all the medical claims….it made me sick to my stomach.
Lies….denial and lies. PARSIFAL, GABRIELA, Amish, PASTURE cohorts….do studies even matter???
http://www.farmtoconsumer.org/news_wp/?page_id=15307
The information you provide, Mark, is priceless. So, let’s get it out there, not just in comments on this blog, but further. It must be published! Books, website, Apple IBooks, a paper published for free at SSRN.Com … podcasts, etc. My nephew tells me that a website now costs only $50/yr and a domain name $10 – anyone can put one together as WordPress to create a site is bundled into webhosting packages. This information, studies, stats that you have are vital. 77 killed by pasteurized milk – how many people know that? Practically NONE! That information needs to get out there. It’s vital.
There are tons of blogs and other alternative sites talking about the nutrient value, and all the other blessings of raw milk and giving the right and proper statistics, but it doesn’t seem to get to anyone but the foodies who read those sites. Most people believe what they hear on the *daily news lies* or what they read in the mainstream. For as savvy as this nation claims to be about the internet, they don’t bother to do much research. They just settle for anything MSM where they constantly quote the disinformation repeatedly spewed by the CDC, FDA, USDA and about a hundred other agencies who don’t know jack. Facts don’t help us if no one sees the REAL facts.
We really need to figure out a way to go at this thing sideways, because upfront doesn’t seem to be helping/working. We can always hope the Citizen’s Petition of Mark’s opens up some eyeballs in all the right places. OR – how successful do you think we’d be at getting vending machines for raw milk in the USA?
Mark, good point on the distinction between the food freedom and food safety issues. The judges and some of the legislators will decide risk entirely on the basis of the videos, and ignore the data and the U.S. Constitution. I would suggest that it isn’t an either-or proposition, but rather a two-front war. We have to continue fighting the food freedom war even as we gather forces on the food safety war, and improve the data. You and RAWMI are leading the food safety side, and progress will occur over a period of years, and gradually be recognized by more on the policy/science side. The dairy industry, which is driving much of the opposition, will be last to fall into line, and it will only come kicking and screaming.
In the meantime, interest in raw milk by poorly informed consumers is expanding. They need to make informed decisions in the context of a bitter and debilitating propaganda war being fought out day by day. This blog post was an effort to begin clarifying for them what has become a maddening decision because of all the conflicting information out there.
Mark, a lot of people (myself included) spent lots of time with Kimberly Kindy, the Washington Post reporter, and feel similarly about what eventually came out and, more important, what didn’t come out. I will just say in her defense (and I have no inside info) that the editors may have taken charge of whatever she had written, and done lots of cutting and slashing and re-ordering. Editors are often more wedded to CDC and FDA than reporters.
Shelly and D–
It is definitely frustrating trying to break through the noise created by the mainstream media. Big picture, though, it’s important to appreciate how much influence they have lost over the last 20 years or so, and how much influence blogs and social media have gained by filling in the vacuum. Case in point: the NYTimes purchased the Boston Globe back in the early 1990s for $1.1 billion. Last year, the NYTimes sold the Boston Globe to the owner of the Boston Red Sox. Price? $70 million. The paper had lost more than 90% of its value. Why? A combination of factors, but I would argue that one big problem for it (and other big city papers) has been that they have given people too little of what they want (the real story) and too much of what they don’t want (government propaganda).
The Washington Post may be consistently beclowning itself journalistically.
This recent, ongoing example pertains also to the Washington Post (URL first: http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/03/washington-post-falls-for-left-wing-fraud-embarrasses-itself.php)
Posted on March 20, 2014 by John Hinderaker in Environment, The War on the Koch Brothers
Washington Post Falls For Left-Wing Fraud, Embarrasses Itself [Updated With Post’s Response]
Todays Washington Post features an article by Steven Mufson and Juliet Eilperin headlined, The biggest lease holder in Canadas oil sands isnt Exxon Mobil or Chevron. Its the Koch brothers. The article was based on a newly-issued two-page report by the far-left International Forum on Globalization. . . .
The body politic vitally needs free communication channels.
Anything less is totalitarian, a subterfuge of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (virtue).
Have a glorious week, all.
Mr. J. Ingvar Odegaard
Yep, and WaPo is continuing it’s disturbing trend. Check this out:
[quote]
Seymour Hersh is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist whose 40+ years career includes the exposing of the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up, as well as the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. His December 19 report, Whose Sarin? -was his first report to expose the Syria chemical attack hoax based on close contact with US Intelligence officials. While Whose Sarin was originally prepared for the Washington Post, the newspaper rejected it and a media blackout followed in American press. Currently, Hershs newest investigative findings are going unacknowledged in mainstream US media.
[end quote]
Taken from this article: http://www.globalresearch.ca/media-blackout-over-syria/5376861
That article is not about raw milk but it IS about how the media operates on even the really big issues. Raw milk doesn’t need hunting dogs who sit up and beg, we need pitbulls for advocacy. Thomas Massie may turn out to be a pitbull, only time will tell.
http://www.ronpaulchannel.com/
the item below is a bit lengthy, yet directly on-point this thread ; A Must-Read, is = Into the Buzzsaw 18 tales of media censorship … plenty of hard evidence for some “conspiracy theories”. One of them being, how 2 journalists were treated for exposing the dangers of Bovine Growth Hormone. Lately, Mark McAffee is experiencing what they explain happens to the investigator with integrity = “a deep sense of loss and betrayal”
^^^^^^^
Into The Buzzsaw: 18 Tales Of Media Censorship by Michelle Goldberg
…Between them, the authors of the incendiary new book “Into the Buzzsaw,” have won nearly every award journalism has to give — a Pulitzer, several Emmys, a Peabody, a prize from Investigative Reporters and Editor, an Edward R. Murrow and several accolades from the Society of Professional Journalists. One is veteran of the Drug Enforcement Administration and a best-selling author, another is a Nieman Fellow at Harvard.And most of them are considered, at best, marginal by the mainstream media. At worst, they’ve been deemed incompetent and crazy for having the audacity to uncover evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors committed by government agencies and corporate octopi. Edited by ex-CBS producer Kristina Borjesson, “Into the Buzzsaw” is a collection of essays, mostly by serious journalists excommunicated from the media establishment for tackling subjects like the CIA’s role in drug smuggling, lies perpetuated by the investigators of TWA flight 800, POWs rotting in Vietnam, a Korean war massacre, the disenfranchisement of black voters in Bush’s election, bovine growth hormone’s dangers and a host of other unpopular issues. Borjesson describes “the buzzsaw” as “what can rip through you when you try to investigate or expose anything this country’s large institutions — be they corporate or government — want to keep under wraps. The system fights back with official lies, disinformation, and stonewalling.Your phone starts acting funny. Strange people call you at strange hours to give you strange information. The FBI calls you. Your car is broken into and the thief takes your computer and your reporter’s notebook and leaves everything else behind … The sense of fear and paranoia is, at times, overwhelming.”The majority of the eighteen pieces in Borjesson’s book are about hard-working mainstream journalists, dedicated to the ideals of their profession, who stumble into the buzzsaw and have their careers and reputations eviscerated. Though the subjects and personalities involved are wildly diverse, the stories echo each other in disturbing ways. Journalists are sent by their bosses to do their jobs — in the case of Borjesson, to investigate the crash of TWA Fight 800 as a producer for CBS news. Sometimes what they find is impolitic, other times it brings threats of corporate lawsuits. Suddenly, editors kill the story, or demand changes. In some instances, like that of TV reporter Jane Akre, who was investigating the use of Monsanto’s Bovine Growth Hormone, reporters are ordered to insert outright lies in their pieces or face firing. Other times, like with Gerard Colby’s book about the Du Pont family and Gary Webb’s San Jose Mercury News series about the CIA’s role in the crack epidemic, the bosses are spooked after the fact and withdraw their support from work already published, hanging reporters out to dry.In the aftermath of Enron, plenty of journalists came forward to publicly wring their hands about the press’s failure to catch the story before it destroyed the life savings of thousands. Since then, though, there’s been little sign of renewed vigilance towards malfeasance at other companies, even though many have written that Enron’s business practices weren’t particularly unusual. Without addressing Enron directly, “Into the Buzzsaw” makes it pretty clear why this is by showing how journalists who took on companies like Monsanto and Du Pont were abandoned by their own editors and publishers and embroiled in lawsuits.When they speak out, buzzsaw victims are usually treated as paranoid conspiracy theorists. Competing outlets valiantly defend the status quo –The New York Times, The Washington Post and the LA Times launched concurrent attacks on Gary Webb’s series, eventually derailing his career and causing his paper to print a retraction (though not of any specific facts mentioned in the story). Writing of this episode in is book “Whiteout,” Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair said, “From the savage assaults on Webb by other members of his profession, those unfamiliar with the series might have assumed that Webb had made a series of wild and unsubstantiated charges, long on dramatic speculation and short of specific data or sourcing. In fact, Webb’s series was succinct and narrowly focused.”Borjesson was subject to similar attempts at character assassination by her former peers. After Borjesson was fired from CBS, she was asked to develop a pilot for a new investigative series to be overseen by Oliver Stone. She gathered over thirty eyewitnesses who disputed the official government story, but before production even started, other journalists started sneering at the project. Newsweek called Stone the “latest conspiracy crank to delve into the mysterious crash.” Time Magazine chimed in with an article headlined “The Conspiracy Channel?” The New York Times dismissed Borjesson’s reporting simply because government agencies denied its truth (never mind they were the very agencies Borjesson was investigating). There’s something of an X-Files feel to a lot of these stories, though not in the way that condescending guardians of official truth think. Rather, their surreal feeling comes from the first-person experiences of people finding the institutions they’ve served all their lives suddenly turning on them. As Borjesson writes, “Walk into the buzzsaw and you’ll cut right to this layer of reality. You will feel a deep sense of loss and betrayal. A shocking shift in paradigm. Anyone who hasn’t experienced it will call you crazy. Those who don’t know the truth, or are covering it up, will call you a conspiracy nut.”In fact, that’s just what a lot of these writers have been called. Once a journalist has been tossed out of the inner circle, anything they write can be smeared as sour grapes or mere ranting. The media has already branded them unreliable, so their charges are extremely unlikely to be taken seriously.A similar thing happens to other progressive media critics. It’s not that the media isn’t interested in media stories — see the blanket coverage of Tina Brown’s foibles at Talk. It’s just that few are interested in critiques that challenge the very essence of journalists’ romantic dreams of themselves as Robert Redford playing Bob Woodward in “All the Presidents Men.” Right-wingers like “Bias” author Bernard Goldberg tend to get much more attention, perhaps because their insights don’t threaten most journalists’ cherished self-conceptions.While most alternative press readers are familiar with Noam Chomsky’s scrupulous documentation of the way government lies become the media’s conventional wisdom and with Robert McChesney (who wrote Buzzsaw’s conclusion) and Mark Crispin Millers’ analysis of corporate consolidation, they are routinely written off by those policing the perimeters of acceptable debate. They hardly ever appear in major newspapers or on network TV. While not quibbling with their facts, most media people tar them as alarmists or unrealistic utopians.Indeed, some of the writers in Buzzsaw say that, before their own experiences, they were among the scoffers. Webb writes, “If we had met five years ago, you wouldn’t have found a more staunch defender of the newspaper industry than me … I was winning awards, getting raises, lecturing college classes, appearing on TV shows, and judging journalism contests. So how could I possibly agree with people like Noam Chomsky and Ben Bagdikian, who were claiming the system didn’t work, that it was steered by powerful special interests and corporations, and existed to protect the power elite?”But, like most of the contributors to “Into the Buzzsaw,” he did his job too well and the powers that be hurled him onto the other side of the looking glass. “And then I wrote some stories that made me realize how sadly misplaced my bliss had been,” he writes. “The reason I’d enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn’t been, as I’d assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job … The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn’t written anything important enough to suppress.”The routine maginalizing of media critics is one reason “Into the Buzzsaw” is so important. It might be possible to discredit one erstwhile insider, but to argue that more than a dozen veterans of organizations like CBS News, CNN, The AP, The BBC and The San Jose Mercury News are all crazy in exactly the same way would be to engage in conspiracy-mongering more far-fetched than anything these authors are accused of. And while plenty of lefty writers have excoriated media monopolies, rarely has the precise way that corporate ownership and intimidation warp newsroom values been made quite so explicit. The value of these testimonies is largely in their minute accumulation of detail (which occasionally makes for tedious reading but enhances credibility).Borjesson is especially systematic, laying out every meeting, every conversation, every contradiction in government statements.Some contributors aren’t quite so convincing. The book as a whole would have been stronger without April Oliver’s self-serving piece about her involvement in CNN’s Tailwind debacle and subsequent firing. She doesn’t bother to refute the charges made against her or defend the finer points of her work, which makes her essay seem like a self-serving screed. But that’s just one weak spot in an otherwise appallingly convincing book, a book that suggests that the truth about our media-military-industrial complex might go beyond even our paranoid imaginings.Beyond the specifics of each story, “Into the Buzzsaw” is about how the elite sector of the media to bestows the imprimatur of truth on its own interpretations of the world. In the current landscape, of course, these same outlets largely take it upon themselves to determine which books should be deemed serious. It will be interesting to see if “Into the Buzzsaw” gets any play in the outlets it exposes.Don’t count on it. Michelle Goldberg is a freelance journalist based in Brooklyn.
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=12753Back to FreedomOfThePress.net
http://www.nj.com/salem/index.ssf/2011/11/nj_residents_go_to_great_lengt.html
The major newspaper in New Jersey quoted me as follows on the front page above the fold in the print version as follows:
Joseph Heckman, a Rutgers University professor of soil science who writes and lectures on raw milk, counters that pasteurized milk sometimes, in fact, makes people sick and sometimes has resulted in death. Four years ago in Massachusetts, three people became infected with listeria and died from drinking bacteria-contaminated milk, he said.
If youre going to criticize raw milk on the basis of safety, then lets look at pasteurized milk and its record. Its not a perfect record, he said. They like to say pasteurization guarantees safety and it does not.
That article which allowed it to be said that pasteurized milk has it on risks, was soon followed by a strong editorial against NJ raw milk legislation.
One thing one can do is comment or write a letter after an article to tell the facts.
[quote]
It is quite exasperating to be aware of all this and try to convey it to the public. The demonizing of raw milk by the FDA and the medical establishment overpower even strong, independent people who have no problem challenging establishment fallacies in the fields of economics and politics. But when health and medicine are involved, they suspend their power of judgment and obediently agree to whatever their doctor says no matter how much in conflict it is with reason and science. They think of doctors as some kind of gods, when theyre nothing but smart humans just as capable of being corrupted by a false paradigm as our economists and political philosophers. Todays doctors are ignorant of the truth, but sadly their patients continue to obey them with an undeserved reverence for irrational prescriptive advice regarding the consumption of raw milk.
[end quote]
Read more at http://libertycrier.com/war-raw-milk/#PxFuZUJTFg3YxRlv.99
And David, the one memory I have of Costa Rica is how they hung wooden Macaws on trees everywhere for the tourists to admire. https://www.google.com/#q=Mccaws+on+trees+for+the+turists+
Lism is english for (you tell me, it’s YOUR LANGUAGE) but I suspect it means spread through the masses.
It’s not just a war of words it’s a war of ideas, how they are presented is a definitely a difference maker for the pacified uneducated candy eaters.
….Life is so much easier now that I’m a Calvinist