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Harper's this month has a great article on the battles over raw milk, pasteurization, industrial dairy production, and associated issues. It's a particularly good piece because it doesn't simply grab a side -- there are dangers to raw milk, and increasingly, we're finding there are dangers to industrially produced milk. Figuring out the correct equilibrium is a tricky business. This passage, however, was particularly striking:
When state veterinarians came to search Organic Pastures for E. coli, they were surprised to see that the manure they pulled from the cows’ rectums was watery and contained less bacteria than usual. Patrick Kennelly, chief of the food-safety section at the California Department of Health Services, confronted McAfee with these facts in an email, writing, “Not only is this unnatural, but it is consistent with the type of reactions that an animal might have after being treated with high doses of antibiotics. . . . Why were your cows in this condition, Mark?”McAfee does not use antibiotics on his organic farm. The state tests all shipments of his milk for antibiotics residue and has never found any. Allan Nation, a grazing expert, offered another explanation: the cows had been eating grass. Grass-fed cows carry a lower number of pathogens, he said. And for a few days in the spring and fall, when the weather changes and new grass sprouts, the cows “tend to squirt,” as Nation put it. But grass-eating cows have become so rare that, to California health officials, they seemed unnatural. The norms of industrial dairying had become so deeply ingrained that a regulator could jump to the conclusion that all milk is dirty until pasteurized.On the other hand, pasteurization wasn't some evil plot. Here was the situation before regulators got involved:
Around the time that Chicago passed the first pasteurization law in the United States, in 1908, many of the dairies supplying cities had themselves become urban. They were crowded, grassless, and filthy. Unscrupulous proprietors added chalk and plaster of paris to extend the milk. Consumptive workers coughed into their pails, spreading tuberculosis; children contracted diseases like scarlet fever from milk. Pasteurization was an easy solution. But pasteurization also gave farmers license to be unsanitary. They knew that if fecal bacteria got in the milk, the heating process would eventually take care of it. Customers didn’t notice, or pay less, when they drank the corpses of a few thousand pathogens. As a result, farmers who emphasized animal health and cleanliness were at a disadvantage to those who simply pushed for greater production.The problem is that pasteurization has had its own consequences. Since farmers know they can rely on the heating process to kill bacteria, they pay little attention to the condition of the farm. "Modern dairies, to put it bluntly, are covered in shit. Most have a viscous lagoon full of it. Cows lie in it. Wastewater is recycled to flush out their stalls. Farmers do dip cows’ teats in iodine, but standards mandate only that the number of germs swimming around their bulk tanks be below 100,000 per milliliter." I should probably stop quoting now, but read the whole piece. It's fascinating.
