In its pursuit of Dan Brown, the state of Maine has made much about public health and the states raw milk permit program that his one-cow dairy didnt register for, to justify the case. But at its heart, the case is about the Food Sovereignty ordinances adopted by eleven towns around the state, including Browns town of Blue Hill, since 2011.
As part of the research for my book, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Food Rights, I found that the enforcement campaign that resulted in the court suit against Brown actually began within days of the planning by coastal farmers for the Food Sovereignty campaign in 2010, that would lead to eleven towns adopting the ordinances. Maine agriculture and public health officials teamed up to conduct an intensive search for illnesses they could attribute to raw milk, and they conducted an inspection with lab tests of the farm of one of the Food Sovereignty organizers.
Shortly after Blue Hill passed its ordinance in spring of 2011, the agriculture officials explicitly targeted Dan Browns tiny farm, to give the state its case challenging Food Sovereignty. A state judge last year gave the state a victory in its assault against Brown and Food Sovereignty by ruling that the states public health argument in favor of state domination trumped Browns argument that the state constitutions home rule clauses allowed the Food Sovereignty ordinances. Brown eventually was forced to abandon farming, declared bankruptcy, and has turned to lobster fishing to earn a living.
Now, as the case is about to go before the Maine Supreme Court Tuesday in the form of an appeal of the judges ruling, Browns legal team, led by the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, has come up with an argument in favor of Food Sovereignty based partly on food safety. A legal brief presented to the court by FTCLDF lawyer Gary Cox contends that food sold directly by producers to consumers is inherently safer than factory food that goes through many hands.
If the purpose of the State law is to ‘assure the safety of food,’ then the Blue Hill ordinance creates a regulatory program that is safer than the State regulatory program. Specifically, the Blue Hill ordinance limits the commercial sale of food directly from the producer to the consumer. In that transaction, there is a single link in the chain of distribution. If anyone gets ill or sick from consuming this food they know where they got the food and who produced it. Consequently, the direct producer-to-consumer transaction ensures that the producer will do anything and everything to keep his/her food safe because there is no place for the producer to hide if the consumer gets ill or sick.
Compare that direct retail sale to the typical grocery store sale, for example a sale of corn chips (think Fritos or Doritos) that is regulated by the Departments regulatory program. The corn is grown in Iowa, it is sent to a processing plant in Montana where it is ground into corn meal, the ground corn meal is then sent to a production facility in Illinois where it is converted into a deep fried corn chip, the corn chips are then sent to a packaging facility located in New York where the chips are placed and sealed in plastic bags and packages, and then the packaged corn chips are trucked to a distribution center in Maine for eventual distribution across Maine for delivery to grocery stores where the corn chips sit on shelves waiting to be purchased by a consumer.
Under the States regulatory program, if those corn chips make somebody sick then who is responsible? What caused the sickness? Where did the bacteria, parasite or virus originate? How can the corn chips be traced back to the culprit? Is everyone involved in the chain of distribution jointly liable? How many people handled the chips, whether in their raw ingredient state or in their final state?
Consequently, is it safer for one farmer to sell his food directly to a consumer than it is for five, six or seven middlemen to handle the food from locations across the country before the food is finally purchased and consumed? Query: which regulatory program assures food safety? It is the local food system such as Blue Hills that is safer.
Moreover, the Brown brief concludes, the existence of a regulatory program does not assure that food is safe. To the contrary, people get sick all the time from eating tainted food even though a regulatory program is in place.The only purpose served by the States regulatory program is to give the State of Maine a cause of action against the food producer. It does not assure that the food remains safe for consumption nor does it make food produced under its system safer than food produced in the direct producer-to-consumer system.
Therefore, the Blue Hill ordinance does not frustrate the purpose of State law. To the contrary, it is more of a guarantee that locally produced food that is sold directly to the consumer is safe for consumption
Information on the Maine Supreme Court hearing Tuesday morning can be found at two Facebook pages, one on behalf of Dan Brown and the other by Food for Maines Future. Background on the case is at the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund site. The hearing will be held at 11:40 a.m. Tuesday at the Maine Cumberland County Superior Courthouse, 205 Newbury St., Second Floor, in Portland. Livestreaming will be available via the state court system.
There is no question that farm direct sales to consumers innately is a more value added and safer food chain.
The extended food chain has at its core a perverted and inverted purpose that allows for the extended corporate food chain to protect itself. The long food chain with many handlers loves the loss of liability and confusion and game of “who has the hot potato”. One of the reasons that corporate America loves its convuluted and extended food chain system is to help confuse….who to blame. The loss of consumer-farmer connection is also a loss of value to the farmer and nutrition to the consumer. Everyone loses except the middle men brokers and distributors.
I am trying my best to educate the wrong ears. Pretty soon the wrong ears will be sitting with us and constructively negotiating a future that is pro nutrition and pro people. The wrong ears only have a few years left before their pasteurized fluid milk sales are next to nothing and not worth their time or money. They will make much more money on yogurt, dried powdered milk and cheese pizza, China and India. Times are changing quickly. Nothing speaks louder than dollar voters. Consumers are screaming safe raw milk!!
I hope the wrong ears heard this.
And one more time: According to these 2 US government studies raw milk actually has a negative risk factor.
1. Raw Milk Consumption among Patients with NonOutbreak-related Enteric Infections, Minnesota, USA, 20012010 An estimated 1.7% per year or 1 in 59 raw milk consumers in Minnesota may have acquired an illness caused by 1 of these enteric pathogens.
2. From the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. An estimated 15% per year or 1 in 6 Americans get sick and 3,000 die each year from foodborne diseases.
It looks like the US Center for Disease Control has inadvertently demonstrated that people who don’t drink raw milk are 9 times more likely to contract a so called foodborne illness than people that do. Or in other words raw milk prevents 1.3 million cases of foodborne disease and 90 deaths every year in the US.
Here’s another non sequitur: Christopher Gardner, a researcher at Stanford University, said he wanted to find out if there really was any effect on lactose intolerance from drinking raw milk. When he found out that most of his over 500 lactose intolerant volunteers actually had no trouble digesting lactose(instead of admitting that he had just proven that lactose intolerance has nothing to do with lactose), he decided instead to do a study on 16 lactose malabsorbers.
What’s so absurd about this is that lactose malabsorption is not really a problem in this country while lactose intolerance most certainly is. Most lactose malabsorbers are not even mildly lactose intolerant. They claim to have proven us wrong when in fact they have actually proven us right.
Living in the Wasteland of the Free by Iris Dement
http://youtu.be/Ak6E6IL4PT4
Mark,
What’s especially notable about Food Sovereignty as practiced in Maine is that the people of the 11 towns that have formally adopted the direct-sales model voted it in themselves, in the same way they vote for any other local ordinance. While some people in favor of Food Sovereignty might have preferred provisions for farm inspections or standards, that isn’t what the town residents voted for. Perhaps as such ordinances come up in other places, there will be different wrinkles added. Or residents might turn down proposed ordinances entirely, as they have in at least one Maine town.
That’s part of what makes this particular case and the Maine Supreme Court’s ruling especially intriguing. Will the seven justices take it upon themselves to invalidate an open and legal vote by a town’s residents?
Our fore fathers were sold the thought ( in their time) that industrial solutions to creste cheap milk was true brilliance. Now we know that they not only lost their freedoms, but they lost their product value, their dairy farms, their immunity and nutrition as well.
What is the grand culture of our time that is being sold to us?? Will our grand children look back and remark about how foolish we were?
Lets hope not. Let us be enlightened so our grand children look back upon this time and regard us as innovators and truly insightful.
I have often wondered why we don’t see food safety regulations that take food distribution range into account. Maybe the petroleum lobby has something to do with it. I can’t imagine they would be keen on anything that would incentivize less transportation of products.
I have often wondered why we don’t see food safety regulations that take food distribution range into account.
Thats because current regulation has little to do with food safety but rather with palatability, preservability and economy of scale. Nutritious, wholesome, healthy clean (toxin free) food has been sacrificed in order to achieve the latter three objectives.
If the powers that be (FDA, CDC, etc.) were truly concerned about food safety they would ensure that our foods were free of pesticides, herbicides, GMOs, hormones, antibiotics, heavy metals, fluoride, chlorine, etc. But no, they choose to endorse every one of those compounds and then some, visa vie their regulation. Food safety is a regulator/industry misnomer designed to deceive.
Mark
I believe our grandchildren will look back upon this time and remark, Why didnt they stand up and defend our freedom to choose, rather then get sidetracked and preoccupy themselves with the establishments deceptive notion of safety.
If history proves itself correct many of our children will probably be repeating our same old mistakes and preoccupy themselves with innovations that satisfy their innate desire to control.
Judge Andrew Napolitanos comment in Ds post above sums up well the ongoing predicament we currently find ourselves in.
Ken
Your comment is brilliant. I like the idea that our kids will look back and see us as not standing up for freedoms. They could very well do just that.
Perhaps our question for today is this: should we now stand up as the grandchildren of our great grand parents and say to them …why didn’t you stand up for our freedoms 100 years ago? becuase now they are lost?
Great question to ponder. The answer is complex but it is here. The reason we do not do this is because we have a perspective on history and evolution of water and sanitation and perhaps even biology.
In 1880s, there were no flushing toilets, no chilling systems, clean water was not protected, little appreciation for pathogens or biology, typhoid was rampant, TB was everywhere, milkers put their bare feet in the milk on cold mornings when hand milking.
We know this because we are students of history. We do not blame our grand parents for reacting with a new innovation called parboiling to stop the mass loss of children from filthy raw milk.
Now…we see the greater picture and we know about biology and pathogens and we also know that humans have become immune depressed becuase of other new methods designed to improve and save lives….ie Antibiotics…
Life on earth is an evolution of learning and reactions to our threats of the day.
What are our threats today?
We now must rebuild our immunities lost and not rely solely on the new fashioned antibioics that violate the biologic sactity of life and bring on even greater maladies. We now must embrace nature and bring forth her best. That is how we live life to the fullest and healthiest.
One of other threats is also our threat of the loss of Freedom. I totally agree.
How do we regain our freedoms lost by our grand parents and their ignorance of the greater picture of health and immunity when they rejoiced at the discovery of anti biotics and the novel solutions provided by pasteurization in 1890-1930.
Teaching and teaching some more. Nature has all the secrets. She contains the methods to live life to its fullest…but so does mankind. Our use of antibiotics as a modern tool can not be thrown out with the last 100 years of industrial solutions. We must take the best ideas and add more to them and go forward.
Raw milk safety systems and prevention through nutrition are at the top of that list. Freedoms returned will be hard fought. But…the return of our freedoms will be much easier if we have science and data on our side.
You need to remember….I was the guy screaming into a micro phone outside of James Stewards court house demanding the return of freedoms four years ago. All that yelling did very little. What is doing so much more is collecting mountains of great test data from six LISTED RAWMI dairies ( soon to be 11 ) and providing that data to Dr. Cat Berge for her peer reviewed published paper on the relative risk of raw milk produced under a RAMP plan. That is going to liberate us all from the FDA and its raw milk oppression.
Freedom and Food Safety. They are cousins and go with each other, especially in this day and age of immune depression and poor, incomplete nutrition.
Most milk produced in New Zealand is A1 milk, defined by the presence of particular beta-casein proteins. A2 milk contains only the A2 form of beta-casein.
Some scientists think the difference may influence human health, particularly the incidence of type-2 diabetes, although the issue has yet to be properly studied.
http://www.newsuk24.com/news/study-finds-milk-may-be-harmful
http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/farming/dairy/9895302/Study-finds-milk-may-be-harmful
The governments conscience appears to waiver only when it stands to lose tax revenue. Since their cheep food policies dont permit them to tax a food item such as raw milk, their so-called conscience remains firm!
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health-and-fitness/health/alcohol-consumption-killed-33-million-in-2012-who-report/article18609780/
Ken
Meanwhile, the news today talked about the large number of drowning deaths every summer – maybe governments should ban swimming.
A consequence of McNeills argument is that, during this phase of endemicisation, rural migrants to urban areas would be at high risk of epidemic disease relative to the native-born population, amongst whom such diseases would have become confined mainly to childhood. As population densities rose and contacts between rural and urban areas increased then the frequency of epidemics would increase nationally, until these epidemic diseases became endemic diseases of childhood throughout the population. Endemicisation at the national level is thought to have occurred during the eighteenth century in England, resulting in high infant and child mortality rates and falling young adult mortality rates over the century. In particular, exogenous infant mortality, attributable largely to infectious diseases, peaked in the mid-18th century, while endogenous infant mortality (reflecting conditions inutero and during birth) fell, together with declining maternal mortality. This pattern is consistent with improving young adult health as immunity of this age group to epidemic diseases rose, and increasing infectious disease mortality in children and infants as the same epidemic diseases became endemic in the population.
http://www.scar.org:8000/people/davenport/davenport2.pdf
http://www.ancient-origins.net/news-evolution-human-origins/life-expectancy-myth-and-why-many-ancient-humans-lived-long-077889#sthash.Ved63a4J.dpuf
http://contagions.wordpress.com/2010/03/23/federal-mortality-cenus-1850-1880/
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/200811/common-misconceptions-about-science-ii-life-expectancy
“They who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” by Franklin for the Pennsylvania Assembly in its Reply to the Governor (11 Nov. 1755)
My great grandparents had a dairy just outside of Pittsburgh,Pa around 1900. They, like most farmers and other types of workers were just trying to eek out a living. It’s doubtful they were seeking riches, they were just trying to survive. It would seem that no farmer would want anyone to become sick by their products, word would spread fast and they would be out of business. Milk sickness was very commonly known, it had many names, some knew or had ideas what caused it, plus some know of other things that made milk bad (they may not have known about illness at the cellular level, their common sense told them what to avoid) Snakeroot was a major cause of milk sickness (Not only is the milk poisonous, so is the meat) When my dad was a kid on the dairy, he said there were certain plants you didn’t want the cow to eat as it would make the milk bad. They burned some of the fields to kill the weeds.
http://www.lib.niu.edu/1996/ihy960456.html
This woman figured it out and tried to inform other and the establishment didn’t acknowledge it until 50+ yrs AFTER her death. To them, her observations were meaningless.
Innovation is a wonderful trait in a society where freewill, diversity of thought, and the laws of nature are respected.
The term clean food is evolving to take on a new meaning. Rather then use the term as a benchmark to demonize essential microbial communities in the name of food safety; this new meaning or focus is measured in terms of the absence of toxic chemicals, drugs, heavy metals, hormones and GMOs. This is the type of enlightenment I am partial to, for it represents an insightful reflection of constructive innovation that our grand children will truly benefit from.
I have not, nor will I fault past generations for doing what they believed they had to do. I do however marvel at the prevalence of human credulity and the willingness to accept at face value the doctors advice. Indeed, the doctors status rose to that of a priest and medicine became the new religion with its corresponding rituals, i.e. vaccinations represented a form baptism, antibiotics = holy ointments and pasteurization became the new holy water. People had an almost unshakable belief in these rituals and many still do.
I agree, food freedom and food safety, (chemical, drug, hormone, heavy metal and GMO free food), work hand in hand, especially in this day and age of immune depression and poor, incomplete nutrition. Microbes are merely here for the ride and they will do what they have to in order to survive while they continue to clean up our messes.
Ken
I know, from personal experience, what a cow ingests certainly effects the taste of the milk, but I had no idea about the extent.
Whenever I want to look up something on my computer about raw milk, it sends me to ALL articles regarding pasteurized milk, or today it’s sending me to links about zithromax and tamiflu. Go figure. I guess my computer is tired of the subject because when I use DH’s computer I get all kinds of info on raw milk. 😉
I agree with Ken about not blaming our forefathers. No one should do that because they only did what they could and communication was no where near what it is today. And you’re right, too, Sylvia about our ancestors having enough trouble eeking out a meager living without worrying about much else. Also, the idea that some dairiers would stick their feet into the milk bucket (per one of Mark’s posts) is a trifle disturbing. I would guess this was not done with milk to be consumed by the family, probably only milk they intended to use for other purposes. I haven’t bothered to check that out, however.
Ken
Maybe those who stick their feet in the bucket are on the same page as those meat butchers who make pink slime and toss contaminated meats/meat by products into or on foods to be consumed? Or those who use contaminated equipment (cantaloupes, pasteurized dairy), or those who work in the restaurant industry who spit into the foods and don’t wash hands,etc.. Or maybe they thought a milk bath for the feet would be soothing. If a cold day, maybe they were in fear of frost bite and thought the warm milk may defrost their toes?
Shelly,
As I explained in my “Shameful” post of May 2, the only way to do what you are suggesting about listing deaths from pasteurized vs raw milk is to go through the CDC data on a manual basis. The CDC should do that, but as I said, the CDC will never ever do comparative annual stats on pasteurized vs raw milk illnesses and/or deaths… because the data doesn’t look as bad as they’d like. You could go through the Real Raw Milk Facts web site I linked to, and manually total their data (extracted from CDC data) on a year by year basis and come up with some annual statistics.
I do agree with you that the pasteurizing of milk sold us all down the river but I do not hold our ancestors responsible for that because they knew little if anything about nutrition and immunity in the way we understand it today. Again, they were sold a bill of goods by people they trusted.
Growing up we mostly kicked a ball around in the dirt ( i.e. rolled up socks) around, but golf balls are jut too small and expensive for that never mind the grass and then you lose them in some hole or another. On the other hand I was the hit of the town when my aunt from America brought us a beach ball which was the biggest lightest volleyball we had ever seen . We used bike tire patch stuff to keep it alive for years.
When I look back and face my grand kids, all I hope to say and instill in them is that we cared, therefore we spoke up.
I believe many do NOT speak up because they don’t see anything wrong. They are, in a sense, brainwashed. More and more people are slowly opening their eyes and minds to the various issues (I’ll stick to food in this post).
When the “organic” movement started, it was a tiny little nitche in this huge country. As far as I can tell, it was ignored by tptb. It slowly grew and as it grew, tptb began slandering it, the “regulations/laws” regarding “organic” has metamorphosed into what it is today. Depending on what YOUR definition of “organic” is, may or may not match tptb.
As more and more documentaries come out; food, Inc, Fed up, etc. and use of social media continues, etc, more eyes will open and minds change and with that change will come more people speaking out and refusing the current SAD diets. It is a very slow process.
http://www.ingredientsfilm.com/