For the love of good milk

[Guest guest]

Carol Vachon has given his spiel on the benefits of raw milk many times over the last 20 years. But there was something special about the lunchtime presentation he made to a group of about 40 students in the food sciences building at Université Laval last week.

"For the past 100 years, the scientific world has been completely closed to raw milk, making research with humans impossible (or) even to compare it with milk sold in stores," said Vachon, a hormonal research scientist and former university biologist who is Quebec's best-known crusader against the Canada-wide ban on raw milk consumption.

He says there is a growing interest "in this important food source, which has been the victim of mass hysteria. The truth seems to finally be getting out."

When it comes to raw milk, however, just what the truth is depends on whom you ask.

While the manufacture of cheese made from raw milk has been legal in Quebec since 1991 - albeit under such rigid conditions that it remains a niche market - the sale and consumption of unpasteurized or "raw" milk has been banned here since the 1960s.

Forty years later, there is widespread support among scientists, bureaucrats, the dairy industry and consumer groups in the province for the maintenance of the ban and the rules that control the manufacture and sale of cheese made from raw milk.

All milk sold in Quebec is pasteurized - heated to 73 degrees Celsius for 15 seconds, followed by a rapid cooling to 10 degrees - by industrial dairy companies like Agropur before ending up on store shelves.

"There is no debate, no discussion in Quebec or anywhere in Canada that makes me think the laws and status concerning raw milk will change here any time soon," said Michel Houle, a food inspection councillor for the past 28 years with the Ministère de l'agriculture, des pêcheries et de l'alimentation du Québec the provincial ministry responsible for the enforcement of food laws in the province.

"Raw milk is - and will continue to be - seen here as a public health risk."

Microbiologist Jacques Goulet agrees. The professor with the food sciences department at Université Laval since 1974 - whose office is one floor below the classroom in which Vachon made his presentation - says milk earned its commercial billing as a "nearly perfect food" because it offers a well-balanced combination of chemical substances the human body needs to stay healthy - provided it has been properly pasteurized.

"We know that pathogenic bacteria and some viruses, like the polio and encephalitis viruses, can be transmitted by milk," Goulet said. "So I'm strongly convinced that raw milk and products made from raw milk are not safe products to consume."

In Ontario, where raw milk has been banned since 1938, the sale of shares in dairy cows - an attempt to widen a loophole that allows milk farmers there, like in Quebec, to consume their own production of raw milk but not sell it to others - led to a police raid on a dairy farm in 2006.

The farmer, Schmidt, who has continued to deliver raw milk to his cow-share owners, goes on trial in Newmarket on May 23.

In the United States, where the sale of raw milk is illegal in 18 states and can only be sold as pet food in four others, consumer interest for what is marketed there as a health-food product has risen in recent years.

The Boston Globe recently reported that 24 Massachusetts dairies are now licenced to sell raw milk, twice as many as only two years ago.

Sales of home-delivered raw milk, too, have risen tenfold in five years to about 950 litres a week for one Boston-area buying club.

In Quebec, there is little enthusiasm among producers, who appear to accept the status quo.

"The dangers of consuming raw milk are well documented and established," said François Dumontier, head of communications for the 14,000 producer-members of the Fédération des producteurs de lait du Québec, who run 7,300 dairy operations that produce 3 billion litres of milk each year, a whopping 40 per cent of the national total.

Almost one-quarter of Quebec-made milk - 23 per cent - is consumed as pasteurized milk, while the rest is used to make cheese, yogurt, butter, ice cream and other products.

While he acknowledged that most of his group's members probably consume unpasteurized milk from their cows, Dumontier noted they are legally entitled to do so - at their own risk.

Jean-Claude Poissant is one of them.

"I've always drunk (raw milk) and I've never been sick," said the dairy farmer in St. Philippe de Laprairie, about 30 kilometres south of Montreal. "I know the quality of my milk (and) I know it's great."

Vachon, for his part, has been Quebec's most vocal advocate for the legalization of raw milk since the late 1980s.

A familiar face at food, nutrition and agricultural shows across the province, he believes raw milk has been given a bum rap as a public health risk.

And he blames the continued ban on "mass hysteria" that followed mass poisonings decades ago involving raw milk - outbreaks he blames on the long-gone, unsanitary conditions of milk production and storage.

One of the worst happened in Montreal in the spring of 1927, when an epidemic of typhoid fever that made 5,110 people sick and killed 537 others was blamed on raw milk.

Although it took the Quebec government three decades to react legislatively (doing so earlier, explained Houle, would have been futile in a predominantly agrarian society where most milk was produced, supplied and consumed locally within rural networks of families and neighbours), it eventually acted on the advice of scientists and public health officials and made pasteurization mandatory.

As a result, Vachon says, generations of Quebecers have been - and continue to be - deprived of a wholesome and natural food that tastes better than industrialized milk products and offers better protection against a host of illnesses, thanks to the many proteins and antioxidants it contains.

Worse, he said, is his belief that the pasteurization process used to make milk safer is actually harmful to the same chemical elements that make it beneficial to humans.

"You destroy a lot of the good properties of milk," he said. "And raw milk tastes a lot better, too."

In addition to the anecdotal evidence about the benefits of raw milk that Vachon offered in his presentation - and which are detailed in his book, Pour l'amour du bon lait (For the love of good milk) - the results of some recent scientific studies suggest there are, indeed, benefits from the consumption of raw milk.

A European Union-funded study at the Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine at the University of Basel, Swizerland, followed the nutrition habits of 15,000 children age 5 to 15 living in a half-dozen European countries where raw milk sales are legal. The study, which followed the children from 2001 to 2004, suggested that those who drank raw milk regularly had roughly one-third less incidence of asthma and allergies.

"Raw milk is legal everywhere in the world except in North America," Vachon told students during his lecture. "Almost every dairy farmer in Quebec drinks it and you don't hear about them getting sick or dying."

He called for the creation of a provincial regulatory system and federal approval for the sale of a food product that he says is less bacterially dangerous than raw hamburger and chicken.

Vachon's message was well received by at least one student - a dairy farmer's daughter and fourth-year agricultural student who has had raw milk her entire life.

"What (Vachon) said confirmed what I've always thought about (raw milk)," said Geneviève Drolet, 22. "We always drank it in my family and nobody ever gets sick. I swear by it."

MARK CARDWELL, Freelance