Anyone who receives any of the Natural News mailings will know that they have been involved in a major campaign to support raw milk producers in California who have been targeted by local and federal officials. The latter have not only closed down the the raw milk operations but trashed their products and their premises and imprisoned their operatives.
Motivation seems to be a combination of the official view that raw or unpasteurised milk and milk products are inherently unsafe (not a view that we or Natural News share) and a desire to collect sales taxes. The particular organisation that has been targeted, Rawsome Foods, is not a retail store but a private members club, therefore not subject to local or federal taxes. Members of the club own a percentage of the animals that produce their raw milk; Rawsome Foods merely acts as a distribution point for the foods so cannot therefore be classed as a retail outlet.
As they do, Natural News has got extremely exercised about what has been going on –you can read posts here and here and here and here and all over the Natural News site – and although their purple prose does need to be taken with a certain number of grains of salt, the raw milk battle is yet another illustration of the serious divide between some arms of so-called democratic government and the people they are meant to govern. A divide which is certainly not exclusive to the US!
I’ve been reading this stuff myself Michelle and it is truly shocking. If people want to drink raw milk then why should anyone have the right to stop them? I think the unatural pasturised dead milk and other horrible man made manufactured foods are what is causing many of our modern diseases. Unpasteurised milk is probably safer! I’d probably be dunked as a witch or burnt at the stake if they searched my house! haha. Natural is usually best! Thanks for posting. I will have to read up and catch up on this. They do scaremonger a bit but at least they’re telling us about this stuff which I’m sure the US government would very much rather we didn’t know!
Children who cannot tolerate pasturised milk have less difficulty digesting raw milk, curious, but fact.
The theory, as I understand it, is that there are so many good bacteria and live enzymes in raw milk,all of which aid digestion. And it tastes so much better!
What is not widely realised is that the law against the retail sale of raw milk applies only to cows milk. It is not against the law for retailers to sell un-pasteurised goat and sheep milk. Perhaps the solution – at least in the short term – is to drink goat and sheep milk and lobby retailers to sell the unprocessed variety?
As the editor of a health site it is odd, for me at least, to read your views on milk consumption. Would you mind doing a separate post on why you think milk consumption is beneficial to humans?
I’d appreciate seeing your arguments articulated clearer.
Hi Lucy – As it happens, I actually do not think that animal milk consumption is beneficial to humans. I can see why humans have found it convenient to supplement their diet with animal milks but it seems quite illogical to me that humans should choose to drink the milk of another species (a species, moreover, with a very different digestion system to our own) when no other animals do so. And even more illogical that they should be surprised when that milk does not agree with them.
However, we live in an imperfect world and millions of people do, and no doubt will continue, to drink the milk of other animal species. Since I am unlikely to be able to change that, I am more interested in minimising the damage and in health terms, and I do believe that raw milk is less damaging to health than pasteurised milk.
Just for the record, we do not actually run ‘health’ sites but a series of sites designed to help make life easier for those who live on restricted diets. While we would like to encourage them to live healthier lives and eat healthier food, our main consideration is just to ease their lots without, necessarily, preaching at them…