The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved

Inside America’s Underground Food Movements

An instant classic for a new generation of monkey-wrenching food activists.

Food in America is cheap and abundant, yet the vast majority of it is diminished in terms of flavor and nutrition, anonymous and mysterious after being shipped thousands of miles and passing through inscrutable supply chains, and controlled by multinational corporations. In our system of globalized food commodities, convenience replaces quality and a connection to the source of our food. Most of us know almost nothing about how our food is grown or produced, where it comes from, and what health value it really has. It is food as pure corporate commodity. We all deserve much better than that.

In The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved, author Sandor Ellix Katz (Wild Fermentation, Chelsea Green 2003) profiles grassroots activists who are taking on Big Food, creating meaningful alternatives, and challenging the way many Americans think about food. From community-supported local farmers, community gardeners, and seed saving activists, to underground distribution networks of contraband foods and food resources rescued from the waste stream, this book shows how ordinary people can resist the dominant system, revive community-based food production, and take direct responsibility for their own health and nutrition.

Chapter Topics Include:

Item Information

Edition: Paperback
Pages: 6 x 9, 400 pages
ISBN: 9781933392110
Old ISBN: 1-933392-11-8
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
Release Date: 2006-10-24

About the Author

Sandor Ellix Katz is the author of Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods (Chelsea Green, 2003) who travels widely teaching people simple fermentation techniques. A native of New York City, he now gardens, saves seeds, tends goats and chickens, and produces biodiesel from used fry oil in an off-the-grid community in the hills of Tennessee.

Introduction

Iwas inspired to write this book by two years of traveling around the United States and Australia talking to people about fermentation, following the publication of my previous book, Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods (Chelsea Green, 2003). Mostly, we discussed the incredible array of wonderful foods and drinks that result from the miraculous actions of microorganisms, but inevitably the conversation would stray into other realms of fermentation, specifically social ferment. The word ferment, along with the words fervor and fervent, comes from the Latin verb fervere, to boil. Just as fermenting liquids exhibit a bubbling action similar to boiling, so do excited people, filled with passion and unrestrained. Revolutionary ideas, as they spread and mutate, ferment the culture. Agitation of fermenting liquids stimulates the process and quickens fermentation, as evidenced by increased bubbling action. Agitation similarly stimulates social ferment.

The kinds of places I have visited to talk with groups and teach workshops have often been food co-ops, farmers’ markets, community spaces, and farms. I’ve met people who are reclaiming their connection to food in many exciting and hopeful ways: folks dedicated to growing food using methods that build soil fertility and raising animals with compassion; gardeners and farmers reviving nearly abandoned seedsaving practices as a critical link in food independence; urban community gardeners creating green oases and bringing the cityscape back to earth; people organizing around themes of food justice, food security, and food sovereignty; scavengers who glean from orchards, fields, and dumpsters; caring folks who redistribute discarded food to hungry people; healers who use food as medicine; passionate advocates of whole, traditional, slow, and raw foods; people fueling cars with used deep-frying oil—the list goes on. The diverse activists I meet everywhere make me feel part of a broad movement to build alternatives to the dominant food system and transform the world one bite at a time.

Here is a small glimpse of the revolution I see happening: It’s not a militant confrontation at all but rather a quiet culinary mutiny. It’s what’s known as “the bread club” in a Western town of about eight thousand people, which I cannot identify without jeopardizing the club’s continued existence. The club started in 2002 as the pickup site for bread baked by B., a fellow fermentation enthusiast I met in my travels, in the wood-fired brick oven he built himself.

From the start there was an underground aspect to the bread distribution. “I would gladly bake the way I do legally if I could,” says B. “The fact is it is impossible on my scale. For me to build a certified kitchen with attached oven, I would have to go greatly into debt and then bake my ass off just to pay off that debt, probably seven days a week, and then I’d grow to hate baking and hire other people to bake, and then I would just be a business owner. And so I bake underground, every other week, because I love to, and after two and a half years I still love it, and I actually make a little bit of money doing it. I just imagine all the underemployed people I know being able to do something like this, and be proud of it, and make a little money, and not be a minimum-wage slave, but it’s not legal. And that’s wrong.”

In the current regulatory environment, the rules make small-scale traditional food production and distribution almost impossible. Selling home-baked bread, or any food prepared in a home kitchen, is prohibited by most, if not all, health codes in the United States. Livestock for sale (with the exception of poultry, in most places) may not be slaughtered by the farmers who raise them; instead they must be trucked to anonymous factory-like commercial slaughterhouses. Milk and other dairy products may not be sold without pasteurization, which diminishes nutritional quality, digestibility, and flavor. Cider, too, is nearly always required to be pasteurized or irradiated. In other words, real food, increasingly illegal, is being replaced by processed food products. Laws dictating food standards are driven by the model of mass production, where sterility and uniformity are everything, rendering much of the trade in local food technically illegal. Eating well has become an act of civil disobedience. The bread club is political resistance.

“The first few weeks it was just a pickup spot for my sixty loaves of bread,” B. continues, “but as the weeks went on, people would pick up their bread and stick around for a while, visiting, especially after T. and M. started bringing their homemade goat cheeses to sell.” In addition, the bread club now features raw milk, free-range eggs, and seasonal produce from several gardeners. Occasionally, locally caught salmon, locally gathered seaweed, wild-harvested mushrooms, and honey are available, as well as glasses of homemade wines for an optional donation. People also bring prepared dishes such as quiche, muffins, cheesecake, cinnamon rolls, and pie.

“It evolved on its own without any real agenda by any of us,” reflects B. “It wasn’t long before it became a two-hour social and market gathering that has continued ever since. There is no advertising, just word of mouth, and it seems every week there are at least a couple of new faces. It seems there are always at least fifteen to twenty people there, and throughout the two hours, I would say that at least sixty people come through. Everyone who comes knows someone, although now there are people who know someone who knows someone. Most are from our town, but some come from a bigger town thirty minutes away.” Food always brings people together, and the production and marketing of local food offers great opportunities for community organizing.

“We’ve always wondered if/when the health department might pay us a visit, but none of us are overly worried about it. If it happens, it happens. I secretly envision everyone nicely but forcefully throwing the poor person out on the street, telling him that this is none of his business. We think about different ways to describe it, like a ‘private food buying club,’ but we haven’t really needed to defend it yet. I wonder whether such a visit might be inevitable as the club gets more well known. I also wonder to what extent they can prosecute us. What if we just refuse to stop gathering? Would they try to fine us, or would they have to come in and arrest all of us and cart us away? Hopefully we can just remain under the radar, but in other ways, if they do crack down, I almost hope for confrontation, because I think this is a rebellion that might explode in their faces if they try. You just don’t mess with people’s food. We will see. I think that although we are breaking the letter of the law, we are actually honoring the spirit of the law, and that gives us a certain righteous power.”

The bread club is not an isolated phenomenon. Many different people—in many different places and motivated by many different concerns—are building resistance movements that reject dead, industrialized, homogenized, globalized food commodities in favor of real, wholesome, local, unadulterated food. In these pages, you will meet a few of them.

Of course, political ideology is hardly the first thing that motivates most individuals’ food decisions. Around the world, including here in the United States, many people are not lucky enough to have choices concerning the type, quality, variety, or sources of the food they eat. Access to food and available resources are major factors in most people’s daily decision making. So are their concepts of good nutrition, and the insidious sway of marketing.

For me, food is above all a sensual experience. I love the smells, flavors, textures, and colors of food, and how satisfied it can make me feel. I salivate just thinking of harvesting fresh fruit in the summertime. In technicolor odorama, I can vividly recall the tastes of the sweet succession of fruits as the season progresses: juicy sweet mulberries that inspire me to climb trees in their pursuit, black raspberries, wineberries, plums, peaches, blackberries, blueberries, cherry tomatoes, pears, apples, figs, passionfruit, persimmons, pawpaws. . . . Being in a plentiful patch of ripe fruit always forces me to surrender to my greedy desire. I literally stuff my mouth with berries, then crush them and luxuriate in the juicy rush of sensations. Yummm!

The food-related political activism that I feel most passionate about is an extension of this sensual pursuit in that it seeks to revive local food production and exchange and to redevelop community food sovereignty. There is no sacrifice required for this agenda because, generally speaking, the food closest at hand is the freshest, most delicious, and most nutritious. This revolution will not be genetically engineered, pumped up with hormones, covered in pesticides, individually wrapped, or microwaved. This is a revolution of the everyday, and it’s already happening. It’s a practice more of us can build into our mundane daily realities and into a grassroots groundswell. This revolution is wholesome, nurturing, and sensual. This revolution reinvigorates local economies. This revolution rescues traditional foods that are in danger of extinction and revives skills that will enable people to survive the inevitable collapse of the unsustainable, globalized, industrial food system.

The production and exchange of local food is not the only way people are protesting the corporate, chemical, and genetically modified (GM) food agenda. Other important food-related activist work is being undertaken in the arenas of policy and regulation: there are campaigns that oppose GM foods and demand that they be labeled as such; that support meaningful organic standards, pesticide limits, fair trade, and farm worker rights; and that challenge the fast-food industry.

People are also confronting the forces of globalization directly, wherever the transnational entities such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) or the World Economic Forum hold their international meetings. These global corporate alliances promote “free trade” as the ultimate good, imposing it upon people around the globe. “WTO has become a global constitution based on the logic and primacy of trade and commerce,” writes Vandana Shiva. “The right to trade without limits, without barriers has been elevated to the supreme right. The right to protect living resources, livelihoods, and lifestyles has been reduced to a ‘barrier to free trade.’”1 Protests and civil-disobedience actions have been a continual presence at the meetings of these globalizing entities, along with escalating repression and aggression by authorities. Many more people are engaged in activism around the larger universe of related issues, such as control of indigenous lands, economic justice, war, environmental destruction, cultural survival and cultural appropriation, access to health care, and so on.

With so much to be done, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by it all. When you’re feeling overwhelmed, or even just busy, constant convenience consumerism is at your service. Most people in our culture are overworked and stressed. Convenience is our consolation, but the everincreasing expectation of it also drives very destructive societal choices. Convenience is insidious, inviting us always to fall back into fast food and all the other alluring empty promises of globalized corporate food.

Taking care of ourselves, producing good-quality food, and supporting local producers and markets have to be recognized as activist work. To me, activism is an attitude: emboldened and empowered. I like the quote attributed to Gandhi: “Be the change you want to see in the world.” It’s important to hold social institutions accountable because they exert so much power, but ultimately no institution can bestow upon us the worlds we dream. Nothing is more revolutionary than actively seeking to embody and manifest the ideals we hold.

The vision of transformation that informs my activist impulse is an ideal, a dream that sustains me and gives me some small sense of hope and belief in the future. It is an abstraction that guides me. But my passion for food is not at all abstract. Food is the stuff of our most basic material reality. Food nurtures us, comforts us, and structures our lives. Our daily habits and routines revolve around it. It is fully sensual, composed of smells, flavors, textures, and aftertastes. Eating is a full-body experience, involving the nose, the mouth, the hands, the teeth, the tongue, the throat, the vast array of internal sensations relating to digestion, and the renewing pleasure of defecation.

Although food is such a fundamental need, most of us are dangerously disconnected from its source. In the United States in 2002, fewer than 2 percent of people were involved in direct agricultural production.2 Supposedly we have been freed from such drudgery to pursue higher callings. But what some disparage as drudgery is in truth the rhythm of basic sustenance and survival. This rhythm, defined by the seasons and the specificity of place, gives shape to different cultures and provides the context for building community.

Throughout time, most people have been directly involved in obtaining food through wild-food gathering, hunting, and subsistence agriculture. How to feed oneself is among the most vital skills that each generation imparts to its offspring. The essence of empowerment is an integral aspect of any organism’s integration into its environment. The mass disconnection of human beings from the harvesting and cultivation of our own food reflects a broader disconnection from the natural world, our physical environment, the land, wild plants and animals, the cycles of life and death, our very bodies. This disconnect is a source of spiritual longing, leaving us searching for reconnection and yearning for meaning.

Our food system desperately demands subversion. We face unprecedented environmental and nutritional crises. Chemical monocrop agriculture is not only depleting the soil of nutrients and producing nutritionally impaired crops but also eroding the topsoil, breeding resistant pests, and poisoning our food and water supplies. GM crops and the “life industry” of patented genetic material raise the stakes, increasing chemical use, farmer dependence on large corporations, the loss of biodiversity, and the potential for huge-scale health and environmental disasters.

Our system of transporting even the most basic of foods across vast distances requires petroleum, control of which has been at the center of global political conflict in recent times, and sources of which are finite and likely to become scarcer in the near future. This petroleum-based global transport system is also, of course, a driving force behind global warming. Livestock produced by the twisted logic of economies of scale is not only treated cruelly but pumped up with synthetic hormones, antibiotics, and other chemicals that pose numerous health risks, not only to meat eaters and milk drinkers but to everyone who drinks water. Fish too are toxic, containing in their flesh alarming levels of mercury and other heavy metals absorbed from our polluted waters. And as a result of all this ingestion of toxic chemicals, human cancer rates are soaring. Diseases directly related to diet, such as diabetes and obesity, have also reached epidemic proportions, especially among children.

All these crises of our postagrarian, postindustrial, postmodern time converge in the food we eat. Food is among our most basic daily needs. We can get it—cheaply and in great variety and abundance—at any of dozens of huge retail chain stores. We can choose from literally tens of thousands of products that have been shipped across the globe and packaged in wasteful, polluting marketing wraps: meat raised in truly gruesome conditions; produce grown with toxic chemicals; and exotic tropical specialties from places where the legacy of colonialism leaves people growing luxury export crops instead of food they can eat. Food in the supermarket is anonymous, detached from its origins, lacking history, nutrient density, and life force. It is food as pure commodity, and we need better food than that.

Activists all around the world are devoting themselves to the creation of better food choices. The chapters of this book explore ten different themes of food-related issues and activist projects. Far from comprehensive, this book aims to inspire you to become a food activist yourself, and in that process to become more connected to the sources of your food and water. The food system on whose fringes we all are doing our work may seem monolithic and indomitable, but we are nourishing ourselves and one another by our actions, and creating exciting alternatives. To continue with the fermentation metaphor: we are seed cultures, agents of continuity and change, working now and in the future to thrive and proliferate as conditions allow, liberating ourselves and one another and all who will join us from the perils of dependence on dead, anonymous, industrialized, genetically engineered, and chemicalized corporate food.

NOTES

1. Vandana Shiva, Tomorrow’s Biodiversity (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000), 45.

2. Farm and Farm-Related Employment Data Set, www.ers.usda.gov/Data/FarmandRelatedEmployment/ (U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, for the year 2002; accessed May 1, 2006).

Table of Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Local and Seasonal Food versus Constant Convenience Consumerism

2. Seed Saving as a Political Act

3. Holding Our Ground: Land and Labor Struggles

4. Slow Food for Cultural Survival

5. The Raw Underground

6. Food and Healing (or, Beware the Neutraceutical)

7. Plant Prohibitions: Laws against Nature

8. Vegetarian Ethics and Humane Meat

9. Feral Foragers: Scavenging and Recycling Food Resources

10. Water: Source of All Life

Epilogue: Bringing Food Back to Earth

Notes

Index

Excerpt

An Excerpt from Chapter 5: The Raw Underground

Everything we eat starts out raw. Cooking transmutes the raw products of agriculture into many wonderful forms, but in the application of heat, certain nutrients are diminished. Enzymes critical for digestion and nutrient assimilation are destroyed, as are bacteria that both protect the raw food from pathogenic bacteria and contribute to our intestinal microbial ecologies. Raw food is literally alive with these bacteria and enzymes. I love hot food, and I’m not promoting a raw-only dogma. However, most of us would do better to incorporate more raw foods into our diet. This chapter explores various movements promoting raw foods.

Unfortunately, raw foods are increasingly viewed as dangerous, and laws enacted in the name of public health and safety are requiring more and more foods to be sterilized prior to sale, by pasteurization or irradiation. Pasteurization, named for pioneering French microbiologist Louis Pasteur, involves heating the food to the point at which most bacteria die. Specifically, the food is heated to at least 161.5°F (72° Centigrade) and held at that temperature for at least fifteen seconds. Ultra-high-temperature pasteurization means heating the food to an even higher temperature (at least 280°F/138°C) for at least two seconds, for more thorough sterilization and longer shelf life.

Pasteurization has come to refer to a range of sterilizing processes. In 2002, as part of its massive “farm bill,” the U.S. Congress explicitly granted the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) the power to approve any technology capable of killing pathogens as a form of “pasteurization,” not requiring special labeling.1 Irradiation, one such process, uses high doses of radiation—“seven million times more irradiation than a single chest X-ray,” according to the Centers for Disease Control2—to kill pathogens and extend shelf life. This technology, developed in the 1970s by the U.S. Department of Energy as part of its Byproduct Utilization Program, uses cobalt 60 and cesium 137, both nuclear industry by-products. Irradiation, sometimes referred to as “cold pasteurization,” is often applied to fruit juices, fruits, vegetables, spices, meats, and seafood. Yet irradiation has been shown to diminish the nutritional value of food. Irradiation also alters the molecular structure of the food and generates free radicals and radiolytic products, including benzene, formaldehyde, and other known mutagens and carcinogens, as well as “unique radiolytic products” for which no rigorous safety testing has ever been performed.3 Nevertheless, Congress has prohibited the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) from restricting distribution of irradiated foods through school lunch and child nutrition programs.4

Irradiation has been embraced by global food traders because it acilitates long-distance transport of their products. Irradiation plants are being constructed around the world and are considered an essential element of a food-exporting economy. As more foods are routinely irradiated—without being labeled as such—I wonder whether all commercial food will come to be irradiated over time, required to be devoid of life forces.

Is raw food dangerous? It certainly can be. Food can be a vector for the spread of a host of diseases, including bacterial food poisoning, such as from Salmonella, Listeria, and E. coli. But the reasons these pathogens are so prevalent in our food all have to do with the scandalous practices of factory farming and industrial food. Raw food is not inherently dangerous. Most often, food is contaminated in the course of its processing, handling, and storage or as a result of diseased animals. Healthy plants and animals produce safe food. Go outside of the factory-farming system and find (or help create) sources you can trust. If we do not eat raw food, and every food we eat is cooked, pasteurized, or irradiated, then we fail to obtain important nutrients, and our health will suffer.

Challenging Milk Dogma

Many different foods are now routinely sterilized, but the food most strongly associated with pasteurization is milk. In most places milk cannot be legally sold unless it is pasteurized. In its raw, unprocessed form this most basic food is widely viewed as a threat to public safety. Nevertheless, a growing movement of people around the world are coming to the conclusion that milk as it is when it comes out of the udders, without being processed by pasteurization, irradiation, or homogenization, is superior to the processed product available legally. Raw-milk enthusiasts are banding together to form distribution networks, and they are finding small-scale dairy farmers willing to join them in circumventing or defying mandatory pasteurization laws. The raw-milk underground is one of the most widespread civil disobedience movements in the United States today.

Milk in its raw state, like any food in its raw state, is alive. It tastes better than pasteurized milk, is more nutritious because its vitamins haven’t been degraded by heat, and is easier to digest because the naturally occurring enzymes and bacteria that break it down inside our bodies haven’t been destroyed. The bacteria found in healthy milk also protect the milk from developing pathogenic bacteria, functioning as a built-in immune system.

Mark McAfee owns Organic Pastures, a 350-cow dairy that is the largest raw dairy in the United States, in California, one of the states where raw milk is legal for retail sales. “Twenty-four million servings and zero reported illnesses,” states the crusading McAfee, describing his company’s safety record. “Eleven thousand tests and no human pathogens!” McAfee has even inoculated pathogenic bacterial contaminants such as E. coli O157:H7, Listeria, and Salmonella into his raw milk and into pasteurized milk. In the raw milk, none of the pathogens were able to survive, because the naturally occurring bacteria and the acids they produce do not allow them to. However, in the pasteurized milk, which is devoid of bacterial and enzyme activity, the introduced pathogens easily proliferated. McAfee is so proud of his milk’s testing record that he posts test results on his Web site.5

In addition to bacteria, milk naturally contains many enzymes, almost all of which are inactivated by pasteurization. One enzyme, lactase, digests lactose, the milk sugar that so many people cannot digest. Pasteurization is what makes milk indigestible for many people; among people who do not drink milk because they cannot tolerate lactose, many find that they can digest and enjoy milk raw, due to the presence of lactase. Another enzyme, phosphatase, is essential for the release and absorption of the minerals phosphorus and calcium. Calcium is a major nutrient people seek in milk, and pasteurization renders it largely unavailable. And still another enzyme, lactoperoxidase, produces hydrogen peroxide, another built-in system for protecting the milk from potentially pathogenic bacteria. Beyond destroying these and other enzymes and bacteria, pasteurization diminishes milk’s content of heat-sensitive vitamins (including B6, B12, and C) and otherwise alters many other of its nutritional qualities. Real milk—from healthy animals and consumed raw—provides important nutrients.

Pasteurization is not the only problem with contemporary milk production. As has been the case in other food industries, control of our milk has been concentrated in a handful of corporations. Dean Foods is the largest milk corporation in the United States, processing more than two billion gallons of milk per year, and it owns many regional milk labels, including Alta Dena, Berkeley Farms, Borden, Brown’s, Mayfield, Meadow Gold, Mountain High Yogurt, Purity, Shenandoah’s Pride, and Horizon Organic Milk, as well as soy processors Silk, Sun Soy, and White Wave. According to the USDA, producers with sales of $800 million or more accounted for 69 percent of U.S. dairy sales in 1998.6 Industry concentration continues to increase.

Much of this milk—nobody knows exactly how much, but then it all gets mixed together in bulk tanks anyway—is produced using the recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH), a genetically engineered drug that increases milk production in cows. This hormone is manufactured by Monsanto and is banned all around the world except in the United States, Mexico, and Brazil. Canada banned rBGH after a group of scientists convened by the government reviewed the rBGH studies that were the basis of the U.S. approval; their report concluded that the FDA approval process “was largely a theoretical review taking the manufacturer’s conclusions at face value. No details of the studies nor a critical analysis of the quality of the data was provided.”7

In overstimulating milk production, rBGH also causes udder infections. Milk from infected udders is really a mixture of milk and pus, the polite euphemism being “high somatic cell count.” The drive to maximize production creates disease, and pasteurization makes the diseased product somewhat safer. To try to avoid infection, use of rBGH is usually accompanied by even heavier dosing of cows with antibiotics, leading to heightened risk of antibiotic-resistant diseases in both cows and humans. Milk from cows treated with rBGH also has elevated levels of insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1), a compound found in all milk, but at higher concentrations in rBGH milk, that is linked to breast, prostate, lung, and colon cancer in humans.

Beyond all these health implications of contemporary methods of milk mass production, another compelling reason to seek out real milk—local raw milk—is taste. Milk from healthy animals, in its raw state, is much more satisfying and delicious than the processed product you can buy in the supermarket. As is the case with any other food, farm-fresh and unprocessed tastes best. Try some and see for yourself; chances are, there is a real milk distribution network near you.

A Brief History of Mandatory Pasteurization

Perhaps you are wondering how raw milk came to be illegal and associated with disease if all these virtues I’m singing are for real. The reality is that not all milk is created equal. Traditionally, cows have been pastured (not pasteurized), given plenty of space to graze on grass. This is how ruminants thrive. This practice makes for mostly healthy animals and safe, nutritious milk. Ruminants evolved grazing, and milk (as well as meat) from grass-pastured animals is more nutritious than that from animals fed primarily grain, especially in terms of beneficial omega-3 fatty acids8 and a nutrient called conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), an important omega-6 fatty acid that is found in milk from grass-fed animals in concentrations up to five times the amount found in milk from grain-fed animals.9

As a result of rapid urbanization, particularly during the nineteenth century, many dairies expanded their herds to meet rising demand for milk, while simultaneously pasture land was getting crowded out. This forced urban dairies to search for more space-intensive methods. Meanwhile a domestic liquor-distilling industry began to develop in the United States, which produced lots of waste in the form of spent grains known as “swill” or “slop.” The urban dairies found in the distilleries’ by-product a cheap alternative to pastures for feeding their cows. The two industries joined together, first in New York City, and slop dairies became widespread around the United States by the 1830s.

Slop diets kept cows lactating, but it made them unhealthy. “The milk was so defective in the properties essential to good milk that it could not be made into butter or cheese,” writes naturopathic doctor and dairy farmer Ron Schmid, author of The Untold Story of Milk.10 Instead of keeping cows outside grazing in pastures as cows always had been, the new dairy industry confined their cows and fed them slop. Their feces were concentrated rather than dispersed, and they wallowed in it. Nonetheless the milk produced by the slop dairies was popular, because it was cheap. By 1852 three-quarters of milk sales in New York City were of slop milk. Problems were developing as well, specifically rising mortality rates among infants, leading to debates over “the milk problem.”

Two distinct milk reform movements emerged in the 1890s. One, advocated primarily by medical doctors, called for “certified milk.” The “milk cure” was a long-established healing regime prescribed by many medical doctors of the time, and good-quality milk was regarded by the profession as an important factor in maintaining health. Milk certifying commissions were formed by medical associations in many areas. The commissions established hygiene and care standards for farms, performed inspections, and gave their seals of approval to milk from farms meeting the standards.

The other reform movement advocated pasteurization as the most effective means of making the milk supply safe. The two contrasting approaches to safe milk—certification and pasteurization—are not mutually exclusive. It is possible to have a regulatory scheme in which some or most milk is pasteurized (and clearly labeled as such), while other milk that meets some specified standard can be sold raw (and clearly labeled as such). Such is the situation in California and several other states today, and historically, both regulatory schemes overlapped in most places.

Pasteurization is simple, and it dramatically improved infant survival rates. A powerful advocate for pasteurization was New York philanthropist Nathan Straus, a partner in Macy’s department store. Straus funded the establishment of “milk depots” around New York, where slop milk was pasteurized and sold cheaply starting in 1893. Between the milk depots and the new system of chlorinating the New York City water system, the epidemic of infant mortality rapidly receded. The diseased milk from the slop dairies was rendered safer by pasteurization, but still it lacked the nutrients, enzymes, and bacteria found in raw milk from healthy pastured cows. Pasteurization was and is “a quick, technological fix.”11 Nevertheless, quick technological fixes have their appeal. New York’s success with pasteurization spurred its rapid spread. In 1908 President Theodore Roosevelt, an old friend of Straus, ordered a study of milk pasteurization, and the Surgeon General declared: “Pasteurization prevents much sickness and saves many lives.”12 A 1911 National Commission on Milk Standards recommended mandatory pasteurization—except for certified milk. By 1917 pasteurization was legally required or officially encouraged in forty-six of the fifty-two largest U.S. cities, and over time, systems of milk certification gradually died out in most places.

The rise of mandatory pasteurization solidified the myth that raw milk is inherently dangerous—regardless of the conditions of the animals it comes from. This has become dogma. The people charged with protecting the public health are so thoroughly indoctrinated with the idea that raw milk is inherently dangerous that raw milk is always the presumed culprit if someone who has drunk it falls ill. “Allowing the sale of raw dairy products goes against everything I ever learned and everything that public health stands for,” said Suzanne Jenkins, head epidemiologist at the Virginia Department of Health, in 2004.13 Public health authorities have a difficult time recognizing that the quality of the milk is determined by how the animals are kept.

As the pasteurization-promoting Straus said, “If it were possible to secure pure, fresh milk direct from absolutely healthy cows, there would be no necessity for pasteurization. If it were possible by legislation to obtain a milk supply from clean stables after a careful process of milking, to have transportation to the city in perfectly clean and closed vessels, then pasteurization would be unnecessary.”14 A hundred years later, we have refrigeration, and it is possible to obtain pure, fresh milk that meets all of Straus’s criteria. When healthy cows are removed from confinement and allowed to graze in pastures, their milk is healthy and safe.

Unfortunately, most places do not permit or regulate the retail sale of raw milk. In most of the United States and much of the rest of the world, it is simply illegal to buy or sell raw milk. As more and more people learn about the benefits of raw milk and want to start drinking it, a grassroots underground has emerged, linking consumers directly to dairy farmers with small, pastured herds.

The Grassroots Raw-Milk Movement

I’ve been astounded by how widespread the raw-milk underground has become. It really is a grassroots movement because obtaining raw milk, in most places, involves community-organized effort bringing people together for a purpose, and generally that purpose involves breaking the law. It’s happening all over. The New Yorker reported in 2004, “In a Hell’s Kitchen basement the other day, Manhattan’s first shipment of raw milk—unpasteurized, unlicensed, unhomogenized, and illegally transported across state lines—was delivered to the grateful, if wary, members of a private raw-milk coven.”15 An Atlanta raw-milk organizer I know is part of a “totally illegal” goat milk co-op: “I split the drive once every five weeks with five other women to a farm that’s one hour away. We buy raw milk, cheese, and yogurt she makes.”

In many places a gray area exists between raw-milk that is specifically illegal and that which is specifically legal. It is in this quasi-legal realm that much raw-milk distribution takes place. For example, in Australia real milk is being distributed and sold as beauty products: “body milk” and “body cream.” There is no law prohibiting this and no way to control what people do with their body milk when they get it home. Where I live, in Tennessee, as in several other states, farms may sell raw milk directly off the farm “for pet consumption only.” A Wisconsin cheesemaker is marketing her raw cheeses as “fish bait.”

The most widespread means of circumventing laws prohibiting the sale of raw milk is to redefine the relationship between the parties so that no sales transaction takes place. Generally the way this works is that a group of consumers will enter into a “cow-share” or “goat-share” contract with a farmer, whereby they technically own the animal and pay the farmer to maintain it on their behalf. In this way the sales transaction is eliminated, and so laws restricting the sale of raw milk are not actually broken. The economic exchange is for a service, which the farmer provides by feeding, caring for, and milking the animals. Rawmilk drinkers from an area often enter into a share together and take turns picking up the milk. This is a great food-consciousness and community-building exercise: shareholders get to know each other, and they all get to experience the farm and the farmer and the animals at regular intervals. And they get good, real, raw milk.

Grassroots raw-milk distribution networks like this are happening all over the United States. The website of the Weston A. Price Foundation’s Campaign for Real Milk lists hundreds of contacts around the United States. Though the details of state laws vary widely and are shifting somewhat, people everywhere want access to better milk.

Interest in raw milk has been growing thanks in large part to a woman named Sally Fallon. Sally has devoted herself to spreading the nutritional teachings of Weston A. Price, an Ohio dentist who in the 1930s traveled the world exploring the relationship between diet and health and wrote the book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration (1939). Price’s studies of isolated populations still practicing traditional diets led him to the conclusion that traditional diets—featuring milk and other animal fats with enzymes intact as well as live ferments, and excluding processed foods and refined sugar—held the keys to human health.

Weston Price’s research remained relatively obscure until Sally Fallon began popularizing it in her 1999 book, Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook That Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats. She formed the Weston A. Price Foundation (WAPF) with the ambitious mission of “restoring nutrient-dense foods to the human diet through education, research and activism.” The foundation now has more than three hundred local chapters in the United States and more than fifty chapters abroad, mostly in Canada and Australia, but also in Brazil, China, and elsewhere. Sally’s work has galvanized a grassroots movement of people organizing access to real milk and other farm products at the local level.

The first time I met Sally Fallon was at a conference of the Northeast Organic Farming Association in 2003. Sally delivered a keynote address that posed the question, “What kind of economic and political system would we have as a consequence of making food choices that are truly healthy and fundamentally supportive of optimal development and superb well-being, instead of merely convenient?”16 In exploring this question, she made it vividly clear that she is much more than a nutrition guru.

Sally Fallon has a radical analysis, and her dietary ideas are interwoven with an economic and political vision. Her vision of health encompasses not only individual nutrition but community well-being, with milk as the centerpiece of an economic revival. The farmers producing raw milk and dairy products are finding prosperity providing raw milk from pastured cows directly to consumers. The direct-to-consumer raw dairies stand in stark economic contrast to the standard arrangements that are driving small dairy farmers out of business at an alarming rate: purchasing all the inputs (such as grain, rBGH, and antibiotics), then selling the milk to bulk processors, who pasteurize, homogenize, package, and market the milk and receive most of the profits. Providing healthy milk directly to consumers is dramatically more lucrative for the farmers. It takes prosperity back from the mass processors and returns it to the farm and the community.

“The one major impediment to this happy picture,” says Sally, “is the anti-raw-milk agenda—scare-mongering propaganda and compulsory pasteurization laws.” But rather than accepting these laws as prohibiting a raw-milk revival, she sees the possibility that they can actually benefit farmers and appealed to the assembled organic farmers to join the raw-milk underground:

In fact, now that we are rolling back the propaganda and creating more and more customers for raw milk and related products, these pasteurization laws can actually work to the benefit of farmers. If people can’t get raw milk in stores, they will make the effort to come to the farm, or pay you for the service of delivering your products to their doorstep. The farm-share system also allows you to provide other value-added products which health laws prevent you from selling directly—farmbutchered meat, sausage, baked goods, and so forth could be “provided,” not “sold,” to farm-share owners. Like communitysupported agriculture, this is a structural revolution.

The people who are part of this growing market for raw milk defy any easy political categorization. The raw-milk scene is very “family values”—because the people who get most passionate about milk are mothers. “Passionate moms will win!” is Mark McAfee’s raw-milk-movement mantra. Sally Fallon is a passionate mom who became a nutrition crusader as a result of what she learned while trying to feed her kids well. S., the organizer of the Nashville-area raw-milk underground, is another passionate mom. She’s a Christian who homeschools her two kids, and for a while she embellished her e-mails with a quote from George W. Bush: “The proper response to difficulty is not to retreat, it is to prevail.” I’m not accustomed to being allied with people who find inspiration in Bush, but I am never one to demand total ideological agreement.

S. sent an e-mail to Tennessee raw-milk enthusiasts recommending that we support a Republican candidate for governor who had been sympathetic to the legislative effort to legalize on-farm raw-milk sales. “According to my sources, if all the raw milk supporters out there got busy and started supporting her we could see some real progress made for the raw milk bill,” wrote S. “I know some of you are Democrats, but I guess how you vote will depend on how much you want to see raw milk legalized in this state. You may have to hold your nose and vote for the Republican gubernatorial candidate this time, if raw milk is important to you.” Raw milk is important to me, but not more important than environmental protection, or health care, or the rights of queers and immigrants to exist, or of women to control their own bodies, or of workers to organize into unions. Even if I were a single-issue voter, raw milk wouldn’t be that issue.

It’s interesting how an issue such as raw milk, which is a question of freedom from regulations ostensibly designed for consumer protection, challenges peoples’ political ideologies and alignments. Is the state really just trying to protect milk drinkers? How much influence do the The Raw Underground milk processors—the major organized stakeholders—have in blocking legal reforms that would regulate direct farmer-to-consumer raw-milk sales? How much freedom should people have to reject the prevailing public health dogma and assume the risk of drinking raw milk? Is the answer different if they are feeding it to their children? Though we have not explored the differences in our political values, S. and I find common ground to stand upon. Our shared interest in the availability of raw milk—as well as a shared sense of the absurdity of the very concept of the state prohibiting the trade of a food in its unadulterated form—speaks to the broad appeal of issues related to food quality. “How can we buy raw oysters, sushi, and other raw things at restaurants, and not have the freedom to buy fresh milk off the farm?” asks S. “Official health restrictions are discriminating and arbitrary.”

Notes

1. “Food Irradiation,” U.S. Centers for Disease Control Division of Bacterial and Mycotic Diseases, www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dbmd/diseaseinfo/foodirradiation. htm.

2. John E. Peck, “Nuking Food for Profit,” Z Magazine, February 2003, http://zmagsite.zmag.org/Feb2003/peck0203.html

3. Public Citizen Critical Mass Energy and Environment Program, The Cancer Prevention Coalition, and Global Resource Action Center for the Environment, “A Broken Record: How the FDA Legalized – and Continues to Legalize – Food Irradiation Without Testing It for Safety” (October 2000), 11, www.citizen.org/documents/brokenrecordfinal.PDF

4. Peck, “Nuking Food for Profit.”

5. www.organicpastures.com.

6. Don P. Blayney and Alden C. Manchester, “Large Companies Active in Changing Dairy Industry,” FoodReview, 23, no. 2 (May-August 2000), 9.

7. Shiv Chopra et. al, “Gaps Analysis,” Health Canada, April 21, 1998, cited in Smith, Seeds of Deception, 84.

8. Union of Concerned Scientists, “Greener Pastures: How Grass-Fed Beef and Milk Contribute to Healthy Eating,” March 8, 2006, www.ucsusa.org/food_ and_environment/sustainable_food/greener-pastures.html.

9. Ron Schmid, The Untold Story of Milk: Green Pastures, Contented Cows, and Raw Dairy Foods (Washington, DC: New Trends Publishing, 2003), 315.

10. Ibid., 32.

11. Ibid., 54.

12. Ibid., 58.

13. Laura LaFay, “The Milk Maneuvers: Why is Gov. Warner’s Pro-Pasteurization Stance Causing Such a Commotion?” Style Weekly (Richmond, VA) December 29, 2004, www.styleweekly.com/article.asp?idarticle=9612.

14. Lina Gutherz Straus, Disease in Milk, The Remedy Pasteurization: The Life Work of Nathan Straus (New York: Dutton,1917), 214, cited in Schmid, The Untold Story of Milk, 67.

15. Frederick Kaufman, “Contraband: Psst! Got Milk?,” The New Yorker, November 29, 2004, 62.

16. Sally Fallon, “The Politics and Economics of Food,” Keynote Address at the Northeast Organic Farming Association Conference (Ahmerst, Massachusetts, August, 2003), www.westonaprice.org/farming/polecon foods.html