Bogus Raw Milk Article In the LA Times

This [poorly researched article about raw milk](http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-he-nutrition2-2009mar02,0,4757880.story) appeared in the LA Times today. What balanced journalism, with hardly a mention that a viewpoint other than industry science even exists.

Here’s my response:

To whom it may concern (I guess Elena Conis and her editors),

Your article on raw milk today is severely lacking in a number of things, including facts. Frankly, it reads like an advertisement for a huge dairy company.

Pasteurization is necessary to keep fresh milk products for inordinately long periods of time, ostensibly for our safety, but mainly to monetize it as a commodity for large, sometimes international, dairy companies. The safe handling of unpasteurized milk can only be done on a local level, with a short supply chain. Local farming with short supply chains doesn’t include profits for ADM or Albertsons, only for the farmer and whomever sells his milk.

People have been eating raw milk for thousands of years. While boiling fresh milk for the benefit of infants is a practice known since antiquity, ubiquitous pasteurization became a crutch for huge, unsustainable and unsanitary dairies. In today’s world, with what we now know about bacteria and animal husbandry, raw milk can be produced safely and easily monitored- just in case- for children and adults with normal immune systems. More people are sickened each year by eating expired Bisquick than by raw milk.

Raw milk is not for everyone, and not practical in every situation, but it is immoral to take away someone’s right to eat something that they want to eat, especially something known to be good and wholesome for them. As for your specious indictment of the “European body of research” in support of raw milk, I would remind you that Europe is, in fact, part of the industrialzed world, and their research into food and medicine has time and time again bested US research which is so often funded by the industries supposedly being regulated.

You close your article with Lloyd Metzger, a food scientist, saying that for beneficial bacteria we should eat yogurt. Does he, and do you, really believe that yogurt- much of which is made from powdered milk- is the same as something that came directly from a living animal, something that we have been eating since before we invented the wheel? Next time you might want to consider the viewpoint of the millions-strong movement for safe, local and sustainable agriculture before you run to industry-funded science to prove the position you clearly had before setting pen to paper.

Thank you.

Joe Fish, Long Beach CA

Effing people.