I was catching up about a week ago with a neighbor I hadn’t spoken with for a couple months because we had both been in winter hibernation mode. When I asked about her three-year-old son, she shook her head. “It’s been one thing after another, sore throats and colds. We’ve been in and out of the doctor’s office.”
I inquired if she had ever thought of feeding him raw milk to build up his immune system, and she said no, but she was open to anything that might help. “I’ll pick some up at Whole Foods,” she said.
I explained that that wouldn’t work, since we were in Massachusetts, not California, and then offered to get her some on my next trip to the New Hampshire farm where I obtain mine, in a few days. She seemed appreciative. (Interestingly, not many people I meet in the Boston area, including those who are otherwise very health conscious, know much about raw milk and how limited its availability is.)
So I picked up my milk a couple days ago, but on my way back home, I got to thinking. What if the milk doesn’t agree with her son or, worse yet, makes him ill…would I be responsible?
Then, as if the timing was planned, I received an email from Mary McGonigle-Martin, which is very similar her March 20 comment on my December posting, “E.coli and Raw Milk: A Family Web of Intrigue and Resentment”.
That posting stirred a flurry of comments about the situation involving a California girl, Lauren Herzog, who became sick after consuming raw milk at the home of her father’s girlfriend, Chelsea Higholt.
The comments on that posting have continued.
In early March, Chelsea posted a long comment, objecting to assertions from someone named “Michael”, whose comments I can’t find. It seems that Michael criticized Chelsea, much like Melissa Herzog originally criticized Chelsea, for serving raw milk to Lauren.
In her March 20 posting, Mary McGonigle-Martin lucidly describes how her son, Chris, became sick and was taken to the same California hospital as Lauren Herzog last September:
“Words cannot really describe what we experienced watching our son hooked up to machines that allowed him to live as his body slowly recovered.
”He was on a ventilator for a total of nine days and kidney dialysis for about two weeks. He had tubes coming out of both sides of his chest for two weeks to drain fluid that had built up in his body. On the right side of his upper chest was a central line for feeding him, drawing blood and injecting medication. On the left side of his chest was a catheter for kidney dialysis.
”Imagine that your child is in this condition with his arms tied to the bed so he can’t pull the tubes out of his mouth or nose. This is what could happen if your child is contaminated with the e-coli bacteria.”
Well, I thought, imagine my neighbor’s child “is in this condition.” It probably goes without saying that after reading Mary’s terrible story, I decided not to give my neighbor any raw milk for her son. Instead, I decided to encourage her to buy it herself from a farm in the area.
I take several messages from this ongoing, and passionate, discussion. For one, I think it’s necessary to respect the power of what I might term “wild food” like raw milk. For whatever reasons, it can make people sick, especially children and others whose immune systems might not be fully operational. Just like wild grown herbs and plants and fruit juice can make people ill. Of course, processed and cultivated foods (everything from tacos to spinach) can make people terribly ill, and kill them, though here the causes are more likely man-made than nature-made.
That leads to my second point, which is that these wild foods must be handled with care, especially when it comes to serving them to others who may or may not appreciate their power. As enthusiastic as I might be about the benefits of raw milk, I need to restrain myself in handing it out to others. I’ve taken to warning guests in my home who are interested in raw milk that they should try it first in small quantities; most are scared off by my cautionary words, since they were already nervous from a lifetime of pro-pasteurization propaganda. I feel badly, but then I realize they’re probably best off making such decisions for themselves, not at my urging.
All of which takes me to a third point, which is that the decision to consume such wild foods is likely best made as part of a larger decision about taking responsibility for one’s health. And appreciating that with such responsibility comes risk.
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