FREE RANGE: Charmaine Jongerden and Lucas Davis with Maple, a Jersey cow at Home On The Range raw milk dairy farm in Chilliwack, British Columbia. (Tyler Davis)
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REAL milk for British Columbia |
| Raw milk enthusiasts want right to choose | ||
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Have you ever had a glass of real milk? Are you sure about that? The milk you buy in your local grocery store is either pasteurized or ultra-pasteurized milk harvested from conventional cows kept in confinement. By confinement, I mean you have to wear a space suit to get near them. These cows are not natural cows. They are highly-engineered freaks of nature. As recently as a century ago, a cow produced an average of two or three gallons of milk per day. Today’s conventional industrial dairy cow gives up to three or four times as much milk! What’s wrong with that, you ask. If science has helped us produce more milk per cow, then that means we can give more people milk for less money. That’s a good thing, right? Wrong. The increased milk yeild comes at a cost. Not only does the milk produced from these cows contain an unnatural and disarmingly high amount of growth hormones (which in some studies have been linked to excessive tumor growth and cancer), but the cow herself is weak and disease-prone. Her milk is always laden with pus, and she is fed a steady stream of antibiotics to keep the sustained mastitis from overwhelming her system and killing her. Did you catch that? The milk you buy at the supermarket is riddled with antibiotics, growth hormones, and pus. Pus. Just the sound of that word gives me the willies. The milk is so unhealthy for you, in fact, that milk manufacturers have to pasteurize it or ultra-pasteurize it to make it “safe” for human consumption. What is pasteurization? Well, I’m glad you asked. Pasteurization is a quick heat process designed to kill unpleasant bacteria and protect us against infectious diseases. But, it is no guarantee of cleanliness. Every single outbreak of salmonella from contaminated milk in recent decades have occurred in pasteurized milk — milk that’s supposed to be “cleaned.” Besides not being the fail-proof protector that we’re told it is, pasteurization does a lot to milk to rob it of its value to us as a source of good nutrition. From Sally Fallon’s Nourishing Traditions (available in our bookstore), we read this succinct summary:
Raw milk to the rescue! Raw milk got a bad reputation in the 20’s when poor animal nutrition and dirty production methods led to increased epidemics of TB, infant diarrhea, undulant fever and other diseases. That’s when pasteurization became the law of the land. But today’s ultra-clean methods of production, stainless steel tanks, milking machines, and refrigerated trucks keep milk clean. I still wouldn’t want to drink raw milk that was full of pus, antibiotics, and growth hormones. But raw milk from healthy, pastured cows eating their natural diet of green grass has a lot of advantages. It contains lactic-acid-producing bacteria that protect against pathogens. It contains milk’s natural and full array of vitamins and minerals. It contains the enzymes your body uses to help digest it, easing your pancreatic load and preventing degenerative diseases. And, it comes rich with butter fat — good wholesome cream that I use to make fresh butter & cheese. YUM. Compare this to the denatured, pasteurized, antibiotic-laden, growth-hormone riddled, pus-filled milk that comes from industrial cows fed a conventional diet of grains, soy, bakery waste, and pellets containing chicken manure, and the choice is clear. I drink raw milk. Correction, I drink real milk — natural, God-given milk ================================= Raw deal. . .or are they just milking the system?Alice Jongerden never planned on running a dairy farm and she never planned on doing anything that, if not illegal, comes pretty close.
Jongerden and her husband home-school their children and they simply wanted to buy raw milk for the family. She couldn't find a farmer in Chilliwack who would sell her the unpasteurized, unhomogenized milk, because it's illegal. So they bought a cow and quickly realized they had more milk than they could consume.  Alice Jongerden has received a cease and desist order from Fraser Health over the production of raw milk from these cows in Chilliwack.Paul J. Henderson/Times"We didn't want to throw it away, we want to share this with other families so we called Gordon [Watson] and he said he knew some people," she said. Watson is a raw milk advocate who runs a website devoted to the health benefits of what he and others call "real milk." A year and a half later and Home on the Range Raw Milk Dairy has approximately 250 members who own shares in the 16 cows. These cow owners who come from Abbotsford, Langley, Vancouver and as far away as Vancouver Island, get dividends paid to them in the form of milk. "We have people that ride two hours on the bus to get one quart of milk," Jongerden said. It may sound like a legal loophole to the law of selling milk and that may form part of the legal battle currently underway that may shut them down. "We all have rights to our property," Jongerden said. "The premise is if we own the cows then we can drink the milk. So people have purchased a cow and since they can't care for it, that's what we do." Just this month an Ontario farmer, Michael Schmidt, was found guilty of contempt of court for defying a court order to stop selling and distributing raw milk. Watson and Jongerden emphasize that Schmidt was not found guilty of selling raw milk, but of contempt of court. But Schmidt had the same method of selling shares, so the local raw milk enthusiasts may have a tough legal battle on their hands. When contacted by the Times, a spokesperson for Fraser Health, who gave the cease and desist order, declined to comment because the matter is currently before the courts. Out in a field on rented property in Chilliwack, Jongerden visits with the 16 cows and one calf. She talks to the animals the way one might talk to pets and that's because the dairy has a philosophy that goes beyond the production of raw milk. "People want it the way it used to be," she says. "This is a whole thing they are supporting." The issue around raw milk is that it is not pasteurized to kill germs and bacteria. The B.C. Ministry of Health's website says that while many people who grew up on farms and who drank raw milk never got sick, "public health authorities know of many cases of people who became sick from drinking raw milk." It continues: "Mandatory pasteurization of milk has eliminated large outbreaks of milk borne disease in Canada. However outbreaks still occur and remind us of the hazards of drinking raw milk." But people who believe that raw milk is not only harmless, but has health benefits tend to believe it with a zeal that is hard to match. The natural health philosophy, debated by government and mainstream dairy operations, is that we have, in a way, become too clean. Humans not exposed to the bacteria that occur in raw milk become more susceptible to disease Paul J. Henderson, The Times, Chilliwack British ColumbiaPublished: Tuesday, November 04, 2008 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Raw Milk Enthusiasts want the right to choose = Epoch Times
Schmidt’s crime? He was distributing milk — raw milk, that is, the kind that has been banned for direct sale in Canada. But while selling raw milk is illegal, it is legal to drink it if you own the cow. So Schmidt and other farmers like him got around the ban by selling shares in the animals, so-called cow-shares. This way, the shareholders own the cows and can legally obtain raw milk while the farmer looks after the herd. However, Schmidt stands accused of selling and distributing unpasteurized milk. The case is scheduled to go to trial in January 2009. Shortly after the raid on Schmidt’s farm, the Ontario Ministry of Health issued a warning of the health risks posed by untreated milk, which range from mild illness to death. Young children, pregnant women, the elderly and those with weak immune systems are particularly vulnerable to becoming seriously ill, the Ministry said, because bacteria found in raw milk include E.coli 0157, the strain found in the water that caused the deadly outbreak in Walkerton in 2000. Despite these warnings, there is a burgeoning black market for unpasteurized milk in Canada, and Schmidt’s case has raised awareness of the ongoing raw milk saga across the country. Advocates of raw milk question the logic of keeping the sale of it illegal when it is widely sold in many European countries and in 28 U.S. states. They argue that they should have the freedom to choose. “We can just walk right over the border to Washington and buy it and bring it back and the Canadian government allows for that. We can go and get it and consume it here but we just can’t produce it here, so there’s something wrong with that,” says Alice Jongerdan. Jongerdan runs Home On The Range, a cooperative dairy farm in Chilliwack, British Columbia with her husband and five children. With its balance of protein, fats, calcium and enzymes, Jongerdan says raw milk is “a perfect food.” While pasteurization rapidly heats the milk in order to kill the bad bacteria, proponents of raw milk claim the process also destroys the availability of calcium as well as enzymes and other qualities that give raw milk its rich taste and high nutritional value. Many credit raw milk with alleviating conditions such as asthma, insomnia, Crohn’s disease and allergies. Jongerdan says she knows of people who are lactose intolerant who can drink raw milk without any ill effects. A 2006 British study found that drinking just a few glasses of raw milk a week reduced a child’s chances of developing eczema by close to 40 per cent and hay fever by 10 per cent. However, an August news release from Health Canada warned that “any possible benefits are far outweighed by the serious risk of illness from drinking raw milk.” Home on the Range has 12 Jersey and Gurensey cows which produce milk for about 200 households from Chilliwack to Vancouver. Jongerdan, who grew up on a dairy farm in Ontario, also supplies yoghurt, butter, butter oil, cream cheese and colostrums (milk produced just before and after giving birth). 
Cow shareholder Gordon Watson with raw milk from Home On The Range dairy farm She says since she’s been operating the cow-share, nobody has become sick.
“We’ve put thousands of gallons of milk out over the last year and we’ve not had anybody ever get sick from it and that was before we even tested the cows. We do everything we can to make it clean and follow the rules.” But she received an order to cease distributing raw milk for human consumption after an inspection of the farm in July by a health officer. Raw milk is classed as a health hazard under B.C.’s Health Act. Gordon Watson, one of Jongerdan’s shareholders, is challenging the order in the B.C. Supreme Court. He says he has been trying for years “to get the government to agree that raw milk should be legal.” “The point is raw milk dairying can be done safely. And I’ve been trying to get the government of BC to acknowledge that.” Watson points out that there are many other foods legally for sale that can make people ill, a case in point being the current deli-meat Listeria outbreak which has so far killed 12 people with another seven deaths under investigation. “This society puts up with all sorts of risks for food. There’s a whole list, and the first one on the list is sushi, then there’s raw sprouts, raw fruit juices…. There’s all sorts of things that are sold and people understand there is a risk in eating these things and people assume that risk.” While the sale of raw milk is banned in Australia, Ireland and Scotland, it has always been legal in England. The royal family, it is said, has used “green top” milk for 500 years. In some European countries it is sold from vending machines at farms and on country roadsides. In the U.S., raw milk is sold — with a warning label — in retail stores in California, Washington, South Carolina, Arizona and Connecticut. In states where it is illegal to sell it there are cow-share programs which are “holding up quite well legally,” says Sally Fallon, founding president of the Weston A. Price Foundation. Based in Washington, D.C., the foundation has been lobbying for 10 years for “universal access to clean raw milk to those people who choose to use it,” she says. Raw milk got a bad name when, around the turn of the last century, cows started being fed brewery swill. The swill made the milk watery so chalk was added to improve the look. This, along with the fact that the milk was produced in dirty conditions, resulted in high infant mortality rates. The advent of refrigeration and pasteurization along with cleaner production methods changed all that. However, pasteurization doesn’t make milk 100 per cent safe. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), between 1960 and 2000 in the U.S. there were at least 12 outbreaks associated with pasteurized milk. In 1985, a type of pasteurized cheese sold in California killed more than three dozen people. The CDC also estimates that since 1998, 800 people have become sick from drinking unpasteurized milk or from eating raw cheese. However, Fallon maintains that if some basic rules are observed, the risks from raw milk are minimal. “There are risks as there are with any food, and the number one way to control those risks is to make sure the cows are eating green grass and hay and not in confinement. We do not recommend raw milk from confinement dairies.” In December 2006, soon after the raid on Michael Schmidt’s farm, MPP Bill Murdoch introduced a private member's resolution calling for an all-party task force to examine the issues surrounding the sale of unpasteurized milk. He says today that since many people are obviously drinking raw milk, he wanted to see if it could be determined once and for all whether the product is safe. But the bill was defeated. “I honestly think we should look at it because there’s two sides here and I think we should have real experts look at it to see whether nowadays it’s as bad as it was 50 years ago. Milking has changed so much in the last 50 years that maybe its okay now,” Murdoch says. But that may not happen any time soon, at least in Ontario. “It’s certainly something we’re always looking at but I don’t anticipate any changes in the current system as it is now,” says Mark Nesbitt, spokesperson for the Ontario Health Department. South of the border, however, Fallon predicts a different scenario. “It’s changing as we speak. We have some rough waters ahead but I’m confident that within 20 years there will actually not be any pasteurized milk left, it’ll all be raw.” Sep 10, 2008
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