The Revolution Will Not Be Pasteurized: Inside the raw milk underground

[Guest guest]

These stories have been written about elsewhere, but they are worth resending

in this

most recent story which is careful to tell the whole truth.

-nne

p.s. I have appreciated all the links and stories that Don in Canada has

informed us with

over the months and years.

http://humanrightsamerica.wordpress.com/2008/04/27/raw-milk-panacea-or-poison/

The Revolution Will Not Be Pasteurized:

Inside the raw-milk underground

By ael

The agents arrived before dawn. They concealed the squad car and police van

behind

trees, and there, on the road that runs past Schmidt's farm in Durham,

Ontario,

they waited for the dairyman to make his move. A team from the Ministry of

Natural

Resources had been watching Schmidt for months, shadowing him on his weekly runs

to

Toronto. Two officers had even infiltrated the farmer's inner circle, obtaining

for

themselves samples of his product. Lab tests confirmed their suspicions. It was

raw milk.

The unpasteurized stuff. Now the time had come to take him down.

Schmidt had risen that morning at 4 a.m. He milked his cows and ate breakfast.

He loaded

up a delivery, then fired up the bus. But as he reached the end of the driveway,

two cars

moved in to block his path. A police officer stepped into the road and raised

his hand.

Another ran to the bus and banged on the door. Others were close behind.

Eventually

twenty-four officers from five different agencies would search the farm. Many of

them

carried guns.

" The farm basically flooded, from everywhere came these people, " Schmidt later

told me in

his lilting German accent. " It looked like the Russian army coming, all these

men with

earflap hats. "

The process of heating milk to kill bacteria has been common for nearly a

century, and

selling unpasteurized milk for human consumption is currently illegal in Canada

and in

half the U.S. states. Yet thousands of people in North America still seek raw

milk. Some

say milk in its natural state keeps them healthy; others just crave its taste.

Schmidt

operates one of the many black-market networks that supply these raw-milk

enthusiasts.

Schmidt showed men in biohazard suits around his barn, both annoyed and amused

by the

absurdity of the situation. The government had known that he was producing raw

milk for

at least a dozen years, yet an officer was now informing him that they would be

seizing all

the " unpasteurized product " and shuttling it to the University of Guelph for

testing.

In recent years, raids of this sort have not been unusual. In October 2006,

Michigan

officials destroyed a truckload of Hebron's unpasteurized dairy. The

previous

month, the Ohio Department of Agriculture shut down Carol Schmitmeyer's farm for

selling raw milk. Cincinnati cops also swooped in to stop Oaks in March

2006 as he

unloaded raw milk in the parking lot of a local church. When bewildered

residents

gathered around, an officer told them to step away from " the white liquid

substance. " The

previous September an undercover agent in Ohio asked Amish dairyman Arlie

Stutzman

for a jug of unpasteurized milk. Stutzman refused payment, but when the agent

offered to

leave a donation instead, the farmer said he could give whatever he thought was

fair.

Busted.

If the police actions against Schmidt and other farmers have been overzealous,

they are

nevertheless motivated by a real threat. The requirement for

pasteurization—heating milk

to at least 161 degrees Fahrenheit for fifteen seconds—neutralizes such deadly

bacteria as

Campylobacter jejuni, Listeria monocytogenes, Escherichia coli, and salmonella.

Between

1919, when only a third of the milk in Massachusetts was pasteurized, and 1939,

when

almost all of it was, the number of outbreaks of milk-borne disease fell by

nearly 90

percent. Indeed, pasteurization is part of a much broader security cordon set up

in the

past century to protect people from germs. Although milk has a special place on

the watch

list (it's not washable and comes out of apertures that sit just below the

orifice of

excretion), all foods are subject to scrutiny. The thing that makes our defense

against raw

milk so interesting, however, is the mounting evidence that these health

measures also

could be doing us great harm.

Over the past fifty years, people in developed countries began showing up in

doctors'

offices with autoimmune disorders in far greater numbers. In many places, the

rates of

such conditions as multiple sclerosis, type 1 diabetes, and Crohn's disease have

doubled

and even tripled. Almost half the people living in First World nations now

suffer from

allergies. It turns out that people who grow up on farms are much less likely to

have these

problems. Perhaps, scientists hypothesized, we've become too clean and aren't

being

exposed to the bacteria we need to prime our immune systems.

What we pour over our cereal has become the physical analogue of this larger

ideological

struggle over microbial security. The very thing that makes raw milk dangerous,

its

dirtiness, may make people healthier, and pasteurization could be cleansing

beneficial

bacteria from milk. The recent wave of raw-milk busts comes at a time when new

evidence is invigorating those who threaten to throw open our borders to

bacterial

incursion. Public-health officials are infuriated by the raw milkers' sheer

wrongheadedness and inability to correctly interpret the facts, and the raw

milkers feel the

same way about them. Milk as it emerges from the teat, it seems, is both panacea

and

poison.

Schmidt responded to the raid on his farm by immediately going on a hunger

strike. For a

month he consumed nothing but a glass of raw milk a day. He milked a cow on the

lawn

outside Ontario's provincial parliament. This was a battle, he said, for which

he was

prepared to lose his farm. He was ready to go to jail. Actually, he'd been

awaiting arrest

for more than a decade. For all that time, he told me, he'd carried a camera

with him so

that he could take pictures when the authorities finally came to shut him down.

" And I

upgraded. You know, first it was still, then video, then digital came along. "

The fifty-three-year-old Schmidt doesn't have the demeanor of a rabble-rouser.

His

temperament, in fact, is not unlike that of the cows he tends. A large man, he

moves

deliberately, reacts placidly to provocation. He has thin blond hair, light-blue

eyes, and

pockmarked cheeks. On the farm he invariably wears black jeans, a white shirt,

and a

black vest. In the summer he dons a broad-brimmed straw hat; in the winter, a

black

newsboy's cap.

When Schmidt emigrated from Germany in 1983, he wanted to start a farm that

would

operate in a manner fundamentally different from that of the average industrial

dairy.

Instead of lodging his cows in a manure-filled lot, he would give them abundant

pastures.

Instead of feeding them corn and silage, he'd give them grass. And instead of

managing

hundreds of anonymous animals to maximize the return on his investment, he would

care

for about fifty cows and maximize health and ecological harmony. If he kept the

grasses

and cows and pigs and all the components of the farm's ecosystem healthy, he

believed

the bacterial ecosystem in the milk would be healthy, too.

Schmidt bought 600 acres three hours northwest of Toronto. There he built up a

herd of

Canadiennes, handsome brown-and-black animals with black-tipped horns. Most

cattle

farmers burn off the horn buds—a guarantee against being gored—but Schmidt

believes

it's better to leave things in their natural state whenever possible. The

dangers posed by

the horns (like the dangers of drinking unpasteurized milk) weighed less heavily

on him

than the risk of disrupting some unknown element of nature's design.

The farm flourished under his hand. Schmidt set up a cow-share system whereby,

instead

of purchasing raw dairy, customers leased a portion of a cow and paid a

" boarding fee "

when they picked up milk. People were technically drinking milk from their own

cows. The

animals were, for all practical purposes, still Schmidt's property, but the

scheme made the

defiance of the law less flagrant, and health officials could look the other

way. Then, in

1994, the Canadian Broadcasting Company aired a documentary about Schmidt and

his

unpasteurized product. A few months later he was charged with endangering the

public

health.

Because Schmidt believed that his style of biodynamic farming actually secured

the public

health, he decided to fight the charges. Newspapers began quoting him on the

salubrious

powers of raw milk and the detriments of industrial dairy. At this time, strange

things

started happening around the farm. Vandals broke into his barn. Schmidt found

two of his

cows lying dead in the yard, apparently poisoned. Then an unmarked van ran his

cousin's

car off the road. Men jumped out of the van's back and forced him inside,

holding him

there for two hours. Schmidt hadn't been prepared for the struggle to take this

turn. He

sent his cousin back to Germany, agreed to plead guilty in court, and sold all

but 100 acres

of his farm to pay the government fines and cover his lost income.

Schmidt is a man of Teutonic certainty, but as he walked into the field soon

after he'd sold

the land, he was filled with doubt. The morning sun had turned the sky red, and

mist

hung around the legs of the cattle. While he twitched a stick at his bull,

Xamos, to turn

him away from the cows, Schmidt wondered whether it was even possible to run a

farm in

the manner he wanted. If he started selling his milk at industrial prices it

would erode his

meticulous style of farming. He would lose the direct connection to his

customers. He'd

have to push his cows to produce more milk. He'd be compelled to adopt the

newest

feed-management strategies and modernize his equipment. Schmidt didn't see Xamos

coming, just felt the explosion as the bull struck him. Even as he hit the

ground, the

animal was on him, bellowing. It stabbed with one horn and then the other,

tearing up the

earth and ripping off Schmidt's clothes. One horn sank into Schmidt's belly,

another ripped

into his chest and shoulder, grazing a lung. Only when his wife charged into the

field,

flanked by the couple's snarling dogs, did Xamos retreat. Another man might have

taken

this attack as a sure sign, a demonstration of the folly of seeking harmony with

nature. As

Schmidt lay there bleeding into the earth, however, he felt only humility.

" Nature is

dangerous, yes, " he would tell me later. " But I can't control it, and I can't

escape from it. I

can only learn the best way to live with it. "

By the time Schmidt could walk again, almost six weeks later, he'd decided to

continue

farming on his own terms. He announced his intentions publicly, but the

regulators must

have felt that they'd made their point. For years he continued farming quietly,

as an

outlaw, until the morning that government agents descended on his dairy. After

the

hunger strike and the other public acts of protest, Schmidt settled in for the

long fight. He

hired a top defense lawyer in hopes of overturning Ontario's raw-milk ban.

In the twenty-five years that Schmidt has operated the dairy, no one has ever

reported

falling sick after drinking his milk. Yet raw-milk illnesses do crop up.

According to the

Centers for Disease Control, the United States averages seventy cases of

raw-dairy food

poisoning each year. In the fall of 2006, for instance, California officials

announced that

raw milk tainted with E. coli was responsible for a rash of illnesses. It is

legal to sell

unpasteurized dairy in California, and the tainted milk came from Organic

Pastures, in

Fresno, the largest of several farms that supply the state's health-food stores.

Tony had agonized over buying the raw milk. He'd never brought it home

before.

He knew that milk was pasteurized for a reason, but he'd also heard that the raw

stuff

might help his son's allergies. " There was a lot of picking it up off the shelf

and putting it

back, " he said. his seven-year-old, drank the Organic Pastures milk three

days in a

row over a Labor Day weekend. On Wednesday, woke up pale and lethargic. On

Thursday he had diarrhea and was vomiting. That night he had blood in his stool,

and the

s rushed him to the hospital. Shortly afterward, several other children

checked into

southern California hospitals. All of them had drunk Organic Pastures raw-milk

products,

and they all were diagnosed as being infected with a virulent strain of E. coli

known as

O157:H7. Some of the children recovered rapidly, but two, and

Herzog, got progressively worse.

The O157:H7 strain releases a jet of toxins when it comes into contact with

antibiotics, so

doctors face the difficult decision of allowing nature to take its course or

intervening and

risking further damage. Chris's doctors administered antibiotics, 's did

not, yet

both children's kidneys shut down. While was on dialysis, his body became

so

swollen that his father said he wouldn't have recognized him if he passed him on

the

street. was in the hospital fifty-five days. went home after a

month but then

relapsed and had to return. Both children eventually recovered but may have

suffered

permanent kidney damage.

The illnesses didn't stop raw-milk sales. Even as the state ordered store

managers to

destroy the milk on their shelves, customers rushed in to buy whatever they

could. Several

Organic Pastures customers said regulators had simply pinned unrelated illnesses

on the

milk. They pointed out that siblings and friends of the sick children had drunk

the same

milk from the same bottles and didn't get so much as diarrhea. Tests for E. coli

in one of

the milk bottles in question had also turned up negative. Although it seemed

implausible

that the state would frame Mark McAfee, the owner of Organic Pastures, it

certainly was

possible that regulators were predisposed to declare raw milk guilty. When state

veterinarians came to search Organic Pastures for E. coli, they were surprised

to see that

the manure they pulled from the cows' rectums was watery and contained less

bacteria

than usual. Kennelly, chief of the food-safety section at the California

Department

of Health Services, confronted McAfee with these facts in an email, writing,

" Not only is

this unnatural, but it is consistent with the type of reactions that an animal

might have

after being treated with high doses of antibiotics. . . . Why were your cows in

this

condition, Mark? "

McAfee does not use antibiotics on his organic farm. The state tests all

shipments of his

milk for antibiotics residue and has never found any. Allan Nation, a grazing

expert,

offered another explanation: the cows had been eating grass. Grass-fed cows

carry a

lower number of pathogens, he said. And for a few days in the spring and fall,

when the

weather changes and new grass sprouts, the cows " tend to squirt, " as Nation put

it. But

grass-eating cows have become so rare that, to California health officials, they

seemed

unnatural. The norms of industrial dairying had become so deeply ingrained that

a

regulator could jump to the conclu sion that all milk is dirty until

pasteurized.

Around the time that Chicago passed the first pasteurization law in the United

States, in

1908, many of the dairies supplying cities had themselves become urban. They

were

crowded, grassless, and filthy. Unscrupulous proprietors added chalk and plaster

of paris

to extend the milk. Consumptive workers coughed into their pails, spreading

tuberculosis;

children contracted diseases like scarlet fever from milk. Pasteurization was an

easy

solution. But pasteurization also gave farmers license to be unsanitary. They

knew that if

fecal bacteria got in the milk, the heating process would eventually take care

of it.

Customers didn't notice, or pay less, when they drank the corpses of a few

thousand

pathogens. As a result, farmers who emphasized animal health and cleanliness

were at a

disadvantage to those who simply pushed for greater production.

After a century of pasteurization, modern dairies, to put it bluntly, are

covered in shit.

Most have a viscous lagoon full of it. Cows lie in it. Wastewater is recycled to

flush out

their stalls. Farmers do dip cows' teats in iodine, but standards mandate only

that the

number of germs swimming around their bulk tanks be below 100,000 per

milliliter.

When I was working as a newspaper reporter in Cassia County, Idaho, a local

dairyman,

Brent Stoker, had wanted to raise thousands of calves on his farm and sell them

to dairies

as replacements for their worn-out cows. Stoker's neighbors, incensed by the

idea of all

that manure near their houses, stopped the project. Stoker wasn't an especially

dirty

farmer—dairy associations showed off his farm on tours—but, to survive, dairies

must

produce a lot of milk, which means producing a lot of feces. I called Stoker

recently, to

talk dairy and catch up. He was in the middle of another fight with the

neighbors. This

time he wanted to build a large organic dairy. I said I hadn't taken him for the

organic

type.

" Pay me enough and I am, " he said. Organic may mean no antibiotics and no

pesticides,

but it doesn't necessarily mean grass-fed. When it comes to making milk,

grass-fed cows

simply can't compete. Stoker's current herd of non-organic cows produce a

prodigious

eighty pounds of milk per day. That's mostly because they are fed like Olympic

athletes.

They eat a carefully formulated mix of roughage and high-energy grains. " If you

were to

try to pasture them, you'd lose production down to about forty pounds, " Stoker

said. " Of

course, the cow would last a lot longer. "

Cows are designed to eat grass, not grain. Unlike mammals that can't digest the

cellulose

in grass, ruminants are able to access the solar energy locked in a green

pasture by

enlisting the aid of microbes. These bacteria are cellulose specialists and turn

grass into

the nutrient building blocks that cud-chewing animals need. In return, cows

provide a

place for bacteria to live—the rumen—and a steady supply of food. This

relationship shifts

when a cow begins eating grain. The cellulose specialists lose their place to

bacteria better

suited to the new food supply but not necessarily so well suited to the cow. The

new

bacteria give off acids, which in extreme conditions can send the animal into

shock.

Pushing too much high-energy feed through a cow can twist part of its stomach

around

other organs. This kink backs up the digestive flow to a trickle. The cow will

stop eating,

and sometimes you can see the knotted guts bulging under the skin. Other

disorders also

result from the combination of high-energy feeds and high production: abscessed

liver,

ulcerated rumen, rotten hooves, inflammation of the udders.

It is in a farmer's interest to keep a cow healthy—but not too healthy. If a

dairyman

decreased the grain portion of a cow's rations to a level that eliminated health

problems,

he would lose money. A balance must be struck between health and yield. It's not

surprising, then, that farmers end up sending grain-fed cows off to the

hamburger plant

at a much younger age than their pastured counterparts. On average, dairy

farmers

slaughter a third of their herds each year. As Brent Stoker put it, " We're

mining the cow. "

There are other bacterial opportunists that move in when a cow's gastric

environment is

disturbed by a change in diet. Tired cows and ubiquitous feces combine to create

conditions that are ideal for the transmission of pathogens. In a 2002 survey of

American

farms, the U.S. Department of Agriculture found Campylobacter in 98 percent of

all dairies

and E. coli O157:H7 on more than half of farms with 500 or more cows. When the

milk at

these large farms was tested, the researchers discovered salmonella in 3 percent

of all

bulk tanks and Listeria monocytogenes in 7 percent. If that milk were shipped to

supermarkets without pasteurization, a lot of people would get sick. Healthy

cows with

plenty of energy are less likely to take on pathogens.

I asked Stoker if he'd ever considered returning to a smaller, healthier style

of farming. " If

I had a way to provide for my six kids and have a comparable standard of living

I would do

that, " Stoker said. " The way it is now, I'm more stressed, the animals are more

stressed,

our crops are probably more stressed. There's nothing I would like more than to

go back

to that, but I'm too stupid to figure out how. "

The problem isn't Stoker's intelligence; it's what he calls the " dishonesty of

the market. "

Advertisers promise that consumers can have the healthiest possible food from

happy

animals in idyllic settings at current prices. This obviously is a lie, but it's

a lie that most

people accept. Although American consumers are periodically outraged by the

realities of

modern agriculture, they never stop demanding cheaper food. Stoker doesn't mind

playing

the hand he's been dealt. He's good at producing cheap food. But, he

acknowledged,

" cheap food makes for expensive health care. "

The people who buy from Schmidt are atypical consumers. They pay a

premium

for food they believe will keep them healthy. In their estimation, Schmidt has a

biological

formula working for him that will be to their benefit. The elements of a dairy

farm—the

cows, plants, microbes, and humans—have been together long enough to have sorted

out

their differences. By working within this system, Schmidt can take advantage of

some

natural efficiencies. Although the life expectancy of a conventional dairy cow

is a little

under five years, Schmidt's cows are eight, nine, and twelve years old; they are

glossy-

coated and solid on their feet. Schmidt told me that he hasn't needed to have

someone

trim his cows' hooves in fifteen years. The cows produce only around twenty-five

pounds

of milk daily, one third the production of Brent Stoker's animals, but Schmidt

doesn't have

to pay much for veterinary service. He doesn't have to slap haunches to roust

exhausted

animals from their beds; his cows actually line up on their own for milking.

There's a little

trick he likes to show off when it's time for them to return from the fields.

" Watch this, " Schmidt said, and he pulled open the door. The cows came jogging

in, each

one peeling out of line to take her place, unprompted, in the barn beneath a

white placard

bearing her name: anna, sophia, cantate, laura. They buried their heads in the

hay. He

beamed. So far the microbes that end up in Schmidt's milk have been benign,

possibly

beneficial. He says biodynamic farming doesn't open up new niches for unfamiliar

forms

of bacteria, and it encourages the ones people have adapted to.

It turns out that black-market buyers aren't the only ones who think

germ-infested milk

is healthy. The yogurt giant Dannon has invested heavily in understanding the

benefits of

bacteria, and the company now sells dairy products stocked with healthy, or

" probiotic, "

microbes: DanActive, " an ally for your body's defenses, " which comes in a small

pill-

shaped bottle and provides a dose of an organism owned in full by Dannon called

L. casei

Immunitas; Danimals, a more playfully packaged bacteria-infused drink, designed

to

appeal to children; and Activia, a yogurt containing a bacterium the company has

named

Bifidus regularis, which " is scientifically proven to help with slow intestinal

transit. " Both

Schmidt and Dannon may be working to reintroduce bacteria into the

modern diet,

but Schmidt labors under a principle of submission. He accepts the presence of

unknown

microbes and tries to make his customers healthy by keeping the creeks that run

through

his farm clean, by maintaining the stability of his ecosystem. In contrast,

Dannon's is a

philosophy of mastery.

Milk comes to Dannon's Fort Worth processing plant in tanker trucks, arriving

wild, full of

its own diverse bacteria. It leaves the factory civilized and safe, in

four-ounce cups. It

takes a lot of machinery to accomplish this domestication: miles of

stainless-steel pipes,

huge fermentation vats, and dozens of white-frocked, hairnet-wearing workers.

Although

the process is intricate, the concept is simple: kill the bacteria, then add

bacteria. Workers

pasteurize the milk not once but twice. All yogurt is made when benign bacteria

are mixed

into milk. But Dannon also adds probiotic bacteria, and when I visited the plant

last year,

this is what I asked to see. Dannon employees looked at one another nervously.

The

bacterial strains are proprietary, and so are the methods surrounding their use.

My public

relations minder, Neuwirth, exchanged a few words with J. W. Erskin, the

plant

manager, then nodded.

" We can see the place where it's done, " Neuwirth said.

The room was lined with freezers. Neuwirth opened one, and frost billowed out.

Inside

were stacks of what looked like one-quart milk cartons, encrusted with ice.

" This is for

Activia, right? " Neuwirth asked.

" Yep, " Erskin said. " Regularis. "

The Dannon workers explained that each carton contained thousands of tiny

pellets

consisting of frozen milk and bacteria. You can buy non-proprietary

yogurt-making

bacteria for about $40 a bottle from several suppliers. No one at Dannon would

tell me

the price of the company's proprietary strains, but Erskin said, " When our

little friends die,

it's very costly. "

Workers wait for the moment when the milk reaches the ideal temperature, then

add the

bacteria. Lactobacillus bulgaricus, a yogurt-making bacterium, acts first,

converting sugar

to acid; Streptococcus thermophilus is next. These prepare the substance for the

probiotic

strains. Every bacterial move is choreographed. Although the Dannon people

wouldn't

show me how the healthy microbes fit into this process, they did take me next

door, to the

bottling room, where the precision continued, though in engineering rather than

biochemistry. The most beautiful machine there was the one filling little

bottles with

DanActive. The bottles moved across the ceiling, propelled by compressed air

along a

metal track, halting, then scooting forward, like a line of penguins. When the

bottles

reached the machine, an auger caught them in its threads, sending them spinning

in an

endless line around gears and carousels. The machine cleaned the bottles with

acid,

zapped them with sterilizing UV light, filled, sealed, boxed, and stacked

them—in scherzo

—at 460 containers per minute.

Erskin stood beside me, watching through the Plexiglas window.

" It's like a ballet, " he said.

Dannon's new lines of products lend some credibility to the claims of bacterial

necessity

made by Schmidt and other raw-milk advocates. Albeit cautiously, scientists have

also

begun weighing in on whether such technologies as pasteurization have purged

necessary

bacteria from our food. When I started talking to milk experts, several told me

I needed to

speak to Bruce German. A food chemist at U.C. , German realized early in

his career

that if he could determine what a food perfectly suited to our DNA looked like,

he would

have a Rosetta Stone with which to solve the puzzle of dietary well-being. He

would be

able to examine each molecular component of this food to understand what it was

doing

to make people healthy. No plant would do as a model, since evolutionary

pressure tends

to favor plants that can avoid being eaten. The model food would be just the

opposite:

something that had evolved specifically to be a meal, something shaped by

constant

Darwinian selection to satisfy all the dietary needs of mammals. That Ur-food,

of course,

is milk.

The day I visited German, he was hosting a reception in honor of Agilent, a

company that

had helped develop a machine able to analyze oligosaccharides, sugar polymers

found in

breast milk. As we walked across the U.C. campus, German brought me up to

speed.

He's a slight, energetic man, with smile lines creased into his face. His

excitement for his

work is infectious. Oligosaccharides make up a large portion of human milk, in

which they

are about as abundant as proteins. The curious thing about them, German said, is

that

they are indigestible. Which means, he said, one hand chopping the air, that

they are there

to feed the bacteria living inside a baby's gut, not to feed the baby. As far as

scientists

know, only one microbe thrives on this sugar, a bacterium named Bifidobacterium

infantis

that has a fairly unique genome.

" There's a lot of evidence that we coevolved with this organism, " German

explained. " It's

really specialized to us and vice versa. Mothers recruit this entire life form

to help the

process of digestion. "

Chemists have identified numerous other compounds in milk that are there not

just to

nourish babies but to create a specific microbial ecosystem. Lactoferrin,

lysozyme, and

lactoperoxidase kill off only harmful bacteria, not beneficial bacteria. (These

selective

bactericides, along with oligosaccharides, are also in cow's milk, though in

lower

concentrations.) Consider, German said, what it means that milk, the model food,

has

evolved such a sophisticated chemical system that caters not to us but to our

microbial

friends. It means, he said, raising his eyebrows, that " bacteria are

tremendously important

to us " —so important that researchers studying the microbes living inside us say

it's

unclear where our bodily functions end and the functions of microbes begin.

By any rational measure, this world belongs to microbes. They were mastering the

subtleties of evolution three billion years before the first multicellular

organism appeared.

They continue to evolve and adapt in a tiny fraction of the time it takes us to

reproduce

once. They flourish in polar ice caps, in boiling water, and amid radioactive

waste. We exist

only because some of them find us useful. Ninety percent of the cells in our

bodies are

bacteria. The entirety of human evolution has taken place in an environment

saturated

with microbes, and humans are so firmly adapted to the routine of sheltering

allies and

rebuffing enemies that the removal of either can devastate our defense systems.

For the past century, however, we've done our best to wall ourselves off from

microbes. In

1989, Strachan put forward the " hygiene hypothesis, " which posed that this

separation could be causing the increased incidence of immune disorders. As the

years

have passed, many studies have helped refine his proposal. Scientists found that

hygiene

itself wasn't a problem. People who never used antibacterial soap were just as

likely to

have asthma as those who scrubbed obsessively. In a 2006 study of thousands of

children

living on farms in Shropshire, England, Strachan and another scientist,

Perkin,

found that raw-milk drinkers were unlikely to have eczema or to react to

allergens in

skin-prick tests. " The protective effect of unpasteurized milk consumption was

remarkably robust, " Strachan and Perkin wrote. Then, in May of 2007, a group of

scientists

published a paper after surveying almost 15,000 children around Europe. They

found that

children who drank raw milk were less likely to have any among a wide range of

allergies.

Either there's something about industrial milk that's harmful, Perkin wrote in a

commentary that accompanied the paper, or there's something in raw milk that's

beneficial.

None of these findings mean that raw milk is safe. Every single study contains

the caveat

that raw milk often harbors pathogens. From an epidemiological perspective,

Bruce

German told me, advising raw-milk consumption at this point " would be crazy. "

Health

officials certainly should have a high level of confidence before approving

anything risky.

But in light of the new evidence, it was becoming harder to deny that something

beneficial

was being lost during pasteurization. And health offiicials also have an

obligation to

ensure that they are not outlawing what makes us healthy.

Last March I drove to Fresno to meet Organic Pastures owner Mark McAfee and see

how he

had fared since the E. coli outbreak. The dairy is made up of a few

prefabricated double-

wide trailers on 450 acres of pasture extending out into the hazy flatness of

California's

Central Valley. When I arrived, some 200 cows were chewing their cud on thirty

shadeless

acres of closely cropped grass. McAfee culls about 14 percent of his herd each

year, far

below the industry's average but still above Schmidt's. When you have fewer than

fifty

cows, like Schmidt, it's different, McAfee said. " You have time to give each one

a foot rub

every night. You can do yoga with them every morning. "

After walking through the dairy, we sat down in McAfee's office. Lab results had

found the

exact same sub-strain of E. coli O157:H7 in almost all of the children who fell

ill after

drinking unpasteurized dairy. Yet McAfee remained unfazed. How did it help to

show that

the bacteria from each patient matched, he asked, when one patient, an

eighteen-year-

old in Nevada City, claimed he hadn't drunk the milk? The disease trackers I

talked to

explained this by saying that sometimes germs move indirectly. Someone else in

the

family spills a little milk. You wipe it up. Then you wipe your mouth. But there

was another

theory I'd been hearing from scientists working to explain why O157:H7 had burst

onto

the scene in the 1980s with such virulence. Maybe, they said, it wasn't that the

bacteria

had changed but that we had changed. In Brazil outbreaks of E. coli O157:H7 are

unheard

of, though the bacteria exist there. A pair of recent studies show that

Brazilian women

have antibodies protecting them against O157:H7 and that they pass these

antibodies to

their children through the placenta and their breast milk. I found this

interesting,

especially in light of the fact that in every case I learned about, the victims

of the Organic

Pastures outbreak had just started drinking McAfee's milk. Perhaps those who had

been

drinking the milk longer had developed the antibodies.

" It's an old story, " McAfee said. " You see it again and again in the lists of

outbreaks. City

kids went to the country, drank raw milk, and got sick; country kids didn't get

sick. " But, I

pointed out, this explanation still implicates Organic Pastures. McAfee shook

his head.

" Look, if I made four kids sick, I made four kids sick. But show me the 50,000

kids I made

healthy. We don't guarantee zero risk. We aren't worried about the .001 percent

chance

that someone will get sick; we are worried about the 99 percent assurance that

you are

going to get sick if you eat a totally sterile, anonymous, homogenous diet. "

The problem for McAfee is that the .001 percent is shocking and visible. A dying

child will

make people change their behavior. The diseases that might stem from a lack of

bacteria

are much more subtle. They come on slowly. It's difficult to link cause and

effect.

Businesses that contribute to chronic disease often flourish while businesses

that

contribute to acute disease get shut down. McAfee, now clearly incensed,

dismissed this

line of reasoning. " If my milk gets someone sick, I deserve some blame, but not

all of it.

People have to take responsibility for maintaining their own immune systems. And

we have

to look at an environmental level too. Where did these germs come from? E. coli

O157:H7

evolved in grain-fed cattle. It's amazing to me that we've sat by as factory

farmers feed

more than half the antibiotics in the country to animals and breed these

antibiotic-

resistant bacteria at the same time the food corporations are destroying our

immune

systems. I believe our forefathers would have grabbed their muskets and gone and

shot

someone over this. They would have had a tea party over this. "

Instead of grabbing his musket, McAfee is expanding. He's building a $2 million

creamery,

complete with a raw-milk museum. He expects to finish construction in 2009. I

asked

what he'd do if regulators come to shut that down.

" I have an email list of 8,000, ready for immediate revolutionary action, " he

said. When the

California legislature quietly passed a law late last year with such strict

standards that it

constituted a de facto ban on raw milk, McAfee mobilized these forces. In

January

hundreds of people packed into a committee chamber in Sacramento carrying their

children and wearing black got raw milk? T-shirts. A legislative study group is

now

working to come up with new standards.

Aside from the revolutionaries and reactionaries, what are the rest of us to do?

When

Schmidt's case goes to trial this spring, his lawyer, Clayton Ruby, will

challenge the

constitutionality of mandatory pasteurization. In Canada, Ruby is one of those

lawyers

people threaten to hire in the same way people in the United States used to say

they were

going to hire nie Cochran. He's sure to argue eloquently, but the judge's

decision on

milk will leave unanswered the larger question of how we should mend relations

with our

microbial friends. The court won't tell us whether raw milk is good for people

or how

Schmidt has managed to distribute it for twenty-five years without making anyone

sick.

Someday scientists may answer these questions. But until then, we will have to

conduct

our own calculations to determine what constitutes clean and healthy food.

When I sat at Schmidt's breakfast table early one morning, glass in hand, I

understood the

possible consequences of my choice. All the competing science was there, along

with the

stories of epic sickness I'd heard. And I have to confess, the thought crossed

my mind

that if I got sick it would make a hell of a story. But when it comes down to

it, here's why I

drank the raw milk. The sun had just come up, and we'd already finished three

hours of

work in the barn. I was filled with a righteous hunger. The table was laden with

eggs from

the chickens, salami from the pigs, jarred fruit, steaming porridge, cheese, and

yogurt.

Although dairy isn't for everyone, I come from the people of the udder: my

ancestors

relied so heavily on milk that they passed down a mutation allowing me to digest

lactose.

For many generations my forefathers sat down to meals like this after the

morning

milking. It felt unambiguously right.

This, of course, is the very definition of bias: the conflation of what feels

right with what is

scientifically correct. But as it was, I could only hope that my biases were

rooted in

something more than nostalgia. Perhaps they were. The way a place feels won't

tell you

anything about whether bacteria have breached the wall of sanitation, but it

does reveal

something about the overall health of an ecosystem. Humans have relied on such

impressions to assess the quality of their food for most of history. Someday the

uncertainties of dietary science will fall to manageable levels, but until then

I will rely on

my gut. I drained my cup and poured thick clabbered milk and apple syrup on my

porridge. If any bacteria disagreed with my body, the conflict was too small to

detect.

ael 's last article for Harper's Magazine, " Swine of the Times, "

appeared in

the May 2006 issue.