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.

UK Puts Money Where Mouth Is

[The Times of London](http://property.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/property/gardens/article5761956.ece) reported today (to me via [Kitchen Gardeners International](http://www.kitchengardeners.org/2009/02/uk_allotment_gardens.html)) that the UK National Trust (sort of the like a sierra club meets meets historical society) is pushing a list of 40 sites that they want to turn into found agricultural allotments (and more on the horizon), plus they are officially seeking to have Gordon Brown plant a vegetable garden at 10 Downing St (just like we used to have at the White House).

DILF Brit TV gardener Monty Don is on board, saying politicos should have compulsory vegetable gardens “and if they don’t keep it up properly they should lose their jobs and I promise you the country would be better run…. Allotments connect ordinary people to the beauty and richness of growing things. In an age of deceit and spin and collapse there is absolute integrity in growing food.”

Here here.

And if you haven’t seen [This Lawn Is Your Lawn](http://www.kitchengardeners.org/2008/07/this_lawn_is_your_lawn_video.html), check it out, then go check out [Eat the View](http://www.eattheview.org/) and get involved.

Listening: “This Land Is Your Land” sung by Woody Guthrie (from the video) and “Peggy O” sung by [Hardy & Massengill](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehn2AY0zdEk), both great songs of the American experience, sung by three heroes of real American folk music.

If it grows together…

Years ago, when I was a young and impressionable apprentice, I asked my chef whether there was a general rule for the pairing of wines, cheeses and foods. His answer was a complete surprise to me.

First of all there was one.

I was sure I had asked one of those questions that, by the nature of the question, oversimplifies the whole subject and would, in turn, solicit rebuke, at which I was expert. He looked at me and said, “If it grows together, it goes together.” It makes sense: Chianti and Cacio, Echezeaux and Escargots, Peanut Butter and Jelly.

It’s easy to forget sometimes that a hundred years ago, just about everyone (who could afford food at all) was really enjoying food in a way that seems luxurious or even out of reach now. It was a simple thing to catch a trout in a stream and fry it in a pan with some butter, and maybe a handful of watercress you shoved in your pocket while you were fishing. There wasn’t any mercury in the stream, and the banks had yet to be paved. PCBs hadn’t even been invented yet. And the apples in your area made great cider, or the grapes, wine. And over the course of time, people made wines that went better with the foods they had.

Look at the Loire Valley, or Brittany, or Normandy, with all those cows. If the first wine they made in Brittany didn’t go very well with fish, they probably didn’t make it again. If the first ciders of Normandy upset the stomach with dairy, you can bet that recipe got axed. People ate and made wine in these places for a thousand years before anyone even noticed that the neighbors were doing something different. And by then, who gave a shit? *Zees ees ow wee make zee wine een Burgundy. Scrouw zose guys een Bordeaux.*

One could even argue that since all of these things were fed from the same land, they had comparable or complementary mineral contents. (Though that might be a stretch.)

We don’t really have that tradition here. Did concord grape wine really go all that well with corn? Probably not. But Europeans who came here were used to making wine, and if concord grapes were all they had, then god damn it, they were making some concord grape wine. Travel and shipping were well-established before Gallo had planted a vine. By the time they had vinifera grapes (other than zinfandel [nee primitivo]) in California, they had trains, too.

But you know what? I’ve noticed a new tradition forming: people are making wines that suit the local harvest, even though they don’t have to.

Look at Oregon pinot noirs. I don’t know that there’s a better red wine suited to salmon than a young Argyle or Beaux Freres. As the world of charcuterie has blown up in the Pacific Northwest, so too have characterful dry reds. Moving away from California’s fruity hegemony, L’Ecole No 41 and Columbia have released Cab Francs and blends that remind me of Bougueil. Plus the value brands seem more food friendly than ever: Duck Pond, Cloudline, Domaine Ste Michelle.

Maybe vintners are doing this on purpose, bringing their wines home. Maybe they’re sick (like the rest of us) of mimicking everything that scores well with Robert Parker. Or maybe good food and good wine just go well together.

Listening: Tortoise “In Sarah, Mencken, Christ and Beethoven There Were Women and Men” TNT

My Veggie Sense Is Tingling

I don’t want to get my dander up too far about this, but there is the most [asinine article about irradiation]( http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/business/02irradiate.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1) in the NY Times today.

It opens with the spurious notion that nine years before the spinach and peanut scares, the food industry was working their worry dolls over the health of the public. I remember way further back than nine years ago, the debate of irradiation had started- it was in food magazines as early as 1992. The basic issues raised then, though, still remain unchanged, and I don’t think the answers are in dispute:

- What is irradiation really doing to our food? (We don’t actually know)
- What’s to keep food processing plants from using it as a crutch to avoid maintaining the sanitation of its plants and the health of its workers? (Nothing)
- How will people react to a pork chop that can last a month? (Poorly)

Of course, the article asserts right up front that “the federal government says that it is safe,” which of course we can believe, right? Because all the studies were done with government dollars by independent labs that were in no way beholden to the food industry, right? While we have some idea about what irradiation does to food (including destroy nutrients), just like PCBs, styrofoam and margarine seemed safe at one time, we have absolutely no real idea about what eating irradiated foods does to our bodies. The studies are light, the timeframe is short and the funding is biased.

As for the responsibility of these companies, let’s not forget that- since the USDA gets about $7 a year for inspection funding and that their advisors come largely from agribusiness- the more or less self-policing that goes on in the food industry has already led us to salmonella, e coli and botulism scares all over the country. I think RD from Boston, commenting on the NY Times site, said it best:

>It would be akin to using “febreeze” to clean a room while ignoring the underlying cause (i.e. rotting garbage you should have taken out a week ago)

If you honestly believe that widespread irradiation will not lead to degradation of sanitation in American food processing, you really don’t understand how this works. Let’s not forget we could have predicted [the peanut scare]( http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/27/health/27peanuts.html
).

As for people reacting poorly to irradiated food, it can only help. Whether it’s hard science or heebee-geebees, I don’t really care. Keep that shit away from me.

The thing that made the article so unbelievably incomplete, however, was an utter lack of mention of the problem that has led us to the issue of irradiation: our wholly unsustainable food supply.

In our effort to get lettuce from California and grapes from Chile out to us in the hinterlands, we burn up oil in transport and plastics for packaging; we have to process much of it to keep it from spoiling on its long journey (and to monetize it as much as possible); and finally we have to put untold money and effort into government agencies that have to inspect this very long supply chain to make sure that we’re not poisoning ourselves, which of course we are.

This system, however, is a fly swatter wielded against the rhinoceros of the food industry. If we actually paid enough inspectors to go out and inspect the packing and processing facilities that output the majority of the food in this country, our food would cost as much as it does *everywhere else in the world*. This is what I mean when I say we don’t pay enough for our food. We don’t factor in the environmental costs of pesticides, the economic cost to our farmers, but most frighteningly of all, *we don’t factor in the simple, unadulterated fact that none of the food produced in this system is truly safe*. **The health of our food supply cannot be guaranteed in the current model; that cannot be disputed.** A dangerous food supply is an unsustainable food supply.

Lest you think I have blinders on to the failures of local agriculture, I grant that things can go wrong on every level. However, it is much easier for a farmer to keep track of even a few hundred acres of production than it is for all the government in the world to keep track of millions. And what’s more- and this is what kept our society safe since time immemorial- is that if local agriculture were the rule (as it was until 1940) and the spinach produced in California were tainted with E Coli, then *only people in California would get sick*. Does this suck for people in California? Yes, but it is then a *local* health issue. It doesn’t cause a nation- or world-wide scare.

Discussing the pros and cons of irradiation until we are blue in the face does not relieve us of the onus the question: why do we need it? The New York Times, of all media, should be able to ask such a question.