Death By Supermarket (21 page)

It appears that there are quite a few people (including companies that make chemotherapy drugs) are making an awful lot of money from Americans’ consumption of rBGH milk.

Unlike factory milk, natural milk contains minimal contaminants. When I began researching this book, I had not had a glass of milk in going on ten years—something that has radically changed since I met Mark McAfee, owner of Organic Pastures in Fresno, California.

MARK MCAFEE GIVES THE
impression of being someone you could trust with your life.
²³¹
A certified paramedic for 16 years in Fresno, having run more than 14,000 service calls, McAfee said, “It was a constant adrenaline rush dealing with tragic, life-changing events of strangers.” As paramedic of the year in 1994, Mark was at the top of his game. “I said to myself, I’ve saved many lives, and delivered many babies—I want to leave it there and do something else for the rest of my life.” Mark had grown up on a farm. “In 1970, McAfee Quality Dairy was a small place, and I was the first slave. I learned to feed calves, milk cows, and work my butt off. Dairy farming was in my blood.” In 1996 Mark and his wife, Blaine, decided to take over the family’s 600-acre dairy farm and manage it organically. “I took my ability to be a student and learned organic production and the clinical health benefits raw milk can bring people, which are tremendous.”

Perhaps the most stunning of all raw milk’s attributes is the fact that unlike pasteurized milk, raw milk contains enzymes, without which life cannot be sustained. If you read
Ethan Frome
(1911), by Edith Wharton, the drama of star-crossed lovers Ethan and Mattie, you’ll remember that the pivotal moment revolved around a pickle dish. When Ethan’s wife, Zeena, found her prized pickle dish broken, she immediately suspects their affair. Zeena owned a pickle dish because the historical human diet contained fermented and otherwise enzymatic rich foods such as pickles,
sour kraut, live beer, whole, raw milk, and ice cream (made without heat), as well as raw cream, yogurt, cheese, cottage cheese, and kefir. Enzyme and probiotics (healthy live organisms) in “sour” and clabbered (curdled) milk were consumed as digestives. Sour milk is made by allowing milk to ferment (curdle) at a warm temperature. This occurs when “good” bacterial flora such as
lactobacillus acidophilus
are present.

You don’t have to consume clabbered milk (which might be a stretch for our palates these days), as simply drinking raw milk provides a biodiversity of good living bacteria that recolonize your gut with friendly bacteria (which heals the GI tract and builds immunity). However, pasteurization kills the good bacterial flora and leaves nothing but the unfriendly lactophilic germs. If pasteurized milk isn’t constantly refrigerated, lactophilic germs quickly multiply, which produces acids that cause milk to putrefy. That’s why you gag sour (rotten) milk into the sink after swigging out of the milk carton.

For an optimal healing approach, an enzyme-rich food should be incorporated with every meal. The easiest, of course, is a glass of natural milk. Raw milk contains much more than enzymes. Whole, raw, living milk contains butterfat filled with vitamins A and D
₃
, which are necessary for the assimilation of calcium and protein. Butterfat is also the richest known source of conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), which, as stated earlier, reduces cancer and atherosclerosis risk, increases metabolic rate and burns fat.
²³²
Raw milk and its by-products are also great alternatives for vegetarians as raw milk provides complete proteins. (See
page 19
for amino acids/ complete protein.)

Mark said, “Raw milk is a medical super-food with no side effects or two pages of contraindications that include death. With rare lactose intolerance, a healing food for asthma, a healing food for IBS, Crohn’s, ulcers, and ear infections, it’s no small wonder why moms prefer it to visits to the pediatrician for yet another immune-system-destructive round of antibiotics. The more progressive doctors now prescribe raw milk to rebuild the immune system and avoid illness to begin with.”

Mark’s dairy, Organic Pastures, produces and retails certified organic raw milk and dairy products. They own 400 cows of which they milk 250, using a Grade-A approved, 60,000-pound mobile milk barn—the only one of its kind in North America. The mobile barn is moved from pasture to pasture weekly, making it possible to milk 100 cows an hour, eliminating the necessity for manure lagoons (disease-breeding pits where manure is pumped) or herding the cows into damp, concrete-floored barns for milking.

The milk is chilled to 36 degrees Fahrenheit within 30 seconds of milking. Prior to bottling, the raw milk is tested to assure it exceeds the standards of the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA). (The CDFA is a state agency that works to ensure the safety and quality of food.) “The law stated that milk after pasteurization must have less than 15,000 bacteria per milliliter,” Mark said, “Organic Pastures raw milk averages about 1,500 bacteria per milliliter. In all the years of intensive testing by the CDFA, Organic Pastures’ milk has never once tested positive for
Salmonella, Listeria monocytogenes
, or
E. coli O157:H7
. ”

And the cows have names: Buddy, Rachel, Mousey, Mabel, Teresa. To get healthy, clean milk, Mark said, “You have to care for cows like family. My wife sings to them and walks around and talks to them. The health of milk has everything to do with the way the cow is treated. You have to follow Mother Nature’s blueprint. A cow would never chose to stand on concrete or next to hundreds of other cows in a big manure pile. She’ll go find a luscious pasture to mingle with a small group of cows and find something green to eat.” Organic Pastures keep their herds fairly small and always have the cows in a lush green environment. Cows are grazed progressively, meaning that when a pasture gets depleted, cows are moved to fresh pastures, which are irrigated year-round.

Organic Pastures doesn’t own, purchase, or breed selectively bred cows. A selectively bred cow couldn’t survive in a pasture-grazing dairy, McAfee said. “Because selectively bred cows need a specialized high protein, high concentrated diet or they will waste away and die.” A selectively
bred cow produces up to 25 gallons of milk per day. A strictly grass-fed dairy cow produces up to 3 gallons of milk per day. “It’s about striking a balance with the organic matter cows would normally eat and added nutrition to slightly increase milk supply.”

Supplementation ups milk production to 4 to 6 gallons per day. To get that slight increase in milk production, Organic Pastures cows are fed 5 pounds of organic corn, and up to 25 pounds of organic alfalfa per day are added to their 30 to 40 pounds or so of pasture grass. In winter, cows are fed 40 pounds of organic hay.

Unlike pasteurized (sterilized) commercial milk, which is a pus-filled, commingled brew of thousands of selectively bred cows’ milk, containing rBGH (hormones), antibiotics, drugs, GMO, and fertilizer residues, raw milk is produced by small herds of happy cows that are pasture grazed on species-appropriate food and milked with sanitary milking machines that transport the milk in sanitary stainless-steel tanks and refrigerated trucks. Clean raw milk not only contains nature’s nutrients, it thwarts pathogenic bacterial growth, what Mark calls “bad bugs.” When cows are pasture-grazed in clean environments bacterial problems do not arise, do not arise as often, or are often self-corrected. In one study, calves that had tested positively for
E. coli O157:H7
were divided into two groups. One group was sequestered in a barn, and the other group was set free to graze in a pasture. During a six-month testing period, the pasture calves showed no signs of
O157:H7
. Meanwhile, every barn calf tested positive.
²³³

Despite all the evidence that demonstrates the health benefits of raw milk, the government has unilaterally rejected it. The FDA’s website states, “[R]aw milk can harbor dangerous microorganisms that can pose serious health risks to you and your family. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 800 people in the United States have gotten sick from drinking raw milk or eating cheese made from raw milk since 1998. Raw milk is milk from cows, sheep, or goats that has not been pasteurized to kill harmful bacteria. This raw, unpasteurized milk can carry dangerous bacteria such as
Salmonella, E. coli
, and
Listeria
, which
are responsible for causing numerous food-borne illnesses. These harmful bacteria can seriously affect the health of anyone who drinks raw milk, or eats foods made from raw milk. However, the bacteria in raw milk can be especially dangerous to pregnant women, children, the elderly, and people with weakened immune systems.”
²³⁴

The same concern does not seem to be extended toward factory meat and the potential for contamination in factory meat, which has resulted in hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations and thousands of deaths. Eric Schlosser, author of
Fast Food Nation
, has written extensively about the centralization and industrialization of our food-supply system, which has increased food-borne illnesses. His research has demonstrated how fast-food chains and agribusinesses have thwarted effective government regulation, and how federal agencies that are supposed to regulate these companies have fallen under their control.
²³⁵

Mark was well aware of the FDA and California Department of Food and Agriculture’s (CDFA) negative position on raw milk. “Organic Pastures Dairy Company started out as an innocent concept in my heart where cows would truly be happy and the pastures would truly be green. In California that’s exactly what the ‘Got Milk’ campaign artificially created in the minds of the consumer. The ugly truth is that CAFOs create stinky manure lagoons with 10,000 cows in cramped stalls being force-fed grain and injected with growth hormones and antibiotics, so they can be milked three of four times per day.”

Mark’s vision of the happy cow ultimately alienated him and his dairy from other California dairies and processors who didn’t share his vision, pushing him near the precipice of a cliff, alone. “I didn’t know when I conceived of organic pastures with cows actually grazing on them that I would ever be the foremost producer of raw milk perhaps in the world. My plan was to simply be organic and treat the cows with the regard they deserve.”

From 1999 to 2007, all was well with Organic Pastures. The McAfees, their cows, the business, and consumers were flourishing in the new world of raw, living milk that Mark and Blaine had created.

Enter Stephen Beam, Ph.D., chief of dairy food safety at the CDFA, who sits on the Science and Research committee at the National Conference on Interstate Milk Shipments (NCIMS) and the FDA’s Pasteurized Milk Ordinance. (The NCIMS is a nonprofit organization whose goal is to “assure the safest possible milk supply for all people.”) Mark said, “Beam is as anti-raw milk as you can get.”

In early 2007, Dr. Beam, [CA] assemblywoman Nicole Parra and Eric Stein, deputy secretary for legislation and policy, met secretly to create a “new standard” for California raw milk. This standard required raw milk for human consumption to contain “less than 10 coliform” per milliliter. The “less than 10 coliform” standard was originally developed in the 1930s as a way of determining whether milk had been pasteurized or was still in a raw state. Coliform wasn’t “good” or “bad,” as coliforms merely contain bacterial colonies that make lactase, a digestive enzyme. As lactase breaks down lactose (milk sugars), consumers—especially those with lactose intolerance—wanted some coliforms in their raw milk. Mark said, “Coliforms at low levels actually inhibit
E. coli
and other bad bugs.”

The new “less than 10 coliform” standard deemed AB 1735 was buried deep in otherwise unremarkable CDFA policy legislation that was to be put before Governor Schwarzenegger. No hearings were held, no announcements made, and no dairy people consulted, so that raw dairy producers had no opportunity to discuss or debate it. Schwarzenegger signed the bill. And it was only then that Mark even heard about it.

California was ground zero for raw milk, as the life of Organic Pastures would affect raw milk sales in the rest of the country. The new standard would be enforced beginning January 1, 2008.

The fight was on. Organic Pastures led the charge by immediately sounding the alarm with 5,000 emails sent out to consumers. An emergency meeting was requested with Dr. Beam. The Sacramento meeting was attended by the who’s who of the CDFA. Beam announced that the less than 10 coliform standard was made to “harmonize with the FDA raw milk policy.” Mark replied, “There is no FDA raw milk standard. It doesn’t exist.” The meeting dissolved into a yelling match and was called short.

Nicole Parra was paying attention, though, and looked into the matter. She found that there was indeed no such FDA policy on raw milk. She changed sides then and tried to have the bill rescinded but was thwarted by the powerful Western United Dairymen processors. Still, Mark wasn’t alone anymore. Along with Parra, Walter Robb, the co-president of Whole Foods, joined his efforts, as did former Veterans Administrator, pathologist Ted Beals, M.D., Australian biologist Ron Hull, Ph.D., 1,400 consumers, sundry scientists, and Sally Fallon, the president and founder of the Weston A. Price Foundation. Perhaps the most pivotal was Christine Chesson, a concerned mom with a master’s degree from Columbia in mathematics, political connections, and money. Christine had three kids who drank Organic Pasture’s raw milk. “For the first time in all their young lives the kids were healthy all winter long with no need for drugs or antibiotics,” Mark said.

The first call Christine made was to her college friend from UCLA [CA] Senator Dean Florez. Florez toured Organic Pastures in early 2008, learned the facts about raw milk production, and quickly called hearings to discuss the future of raw milk in California. The hearings were attended by all of the supporters, but boycotted by the FDA and CDFA. Prior to the hearings, Mark had worked with Dr. Hull and Dr. Beals to create a new, enhanced Gold Standard Food Safety program for California milk producers for the Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points (HACCP) program (a food safety program in use across America that was originally developed by NASA.) “The goal of HACCP is to reduce or eliminate biological, chemical, or physical contaminants in food supply,” Mark told me. “The problem with pure HACCP is that it ignores the value of living foods such as the biodiversity of good bacteria and active enzymes, and kills them all by irradiation or heat, which is called ‘Kill Step.’ Our RAMP program uses the same protocol to measure risks and document them and thereby reducing them dramatically but yet does not use Kill Steps.”