I enjoyed reading “The Revolution Will Not Be Pasteurized.” The article is of particular interest to me because my family drinks unpasteurized milk. We have a milk cow that my mom and wife milk twice a day. We run the milk through a filter, cool it quickly, but do not pasteurize it.
There’s a debate about whether it should be legal or not to sell unpasteurized milk. Currently it’s illegal in half of the US states. Many people I know think it’s outrageous for the government to enforce that law. If people want to drink it, why should the government stop them?
Here’s the problem: dairys are dirty. I mean really dirty. The larger the dairy, the dirtier it is. Cows go to the bathroom at the most inconvenient times. They kick over the pail. They step in the pail. The pail or machine or milk jar may not have been sterilized properly. The teats may not have been washed thoroughly. The cow may have ate something diseased or become sick and passes tainted milk.
If the government allowed the sale of unpasteurized milk, more people would get sick. That’s the entire reason we started pasteurizing it. According to Nathanael Johnson, “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.” The FDA claims that raw milk can be dangerous to health and is not healthier as claimed by raw milk advocates.
Yes, there might be healthy bacteria that are killed with pasteurization. (I’m sure we kill healthy bacteria when we cook meat, too.) Yes, there are some small farmers who are meticulously clean and could keep most of the harmful pathogens out of the milk. But what happens when one of their employees fail? And how could it be guaranteed as safe as pasteurized milk? How many people can get sick before they shut a dairy down?
I can see both perspectives. It makes sense to make selling unpasteurized milk illegal. It also makes sense to allow people to drink what they want, even if it ends up hurting them. Which is why they let they let us drink the raw milk from our own cow, but don’t allow us to sell it.
So, should the government make it legal to sell unpasteurized milk even though there is evidence of increased health risks? Or is the current system necessary to protect public health, even though people want to do it? Or is the government plain wrong, raw milk isn’t dangerous at all, and is actually more healthy than pasteurized milk? (If making that last claim, please cite a reputable scientific study, as I am interested.)
Cows must have some friends in high places. If a shipment of ground beef somehow gets contaminated with pathogens, our federal government does not have authority to recall the beef, only to request that the company issue a recall. When the voluntary recall is initiated, the federal government does not release information on where the contaminated beef is being sold, considering that information proprietary. Apparently it is more important to protect the cows than the people eating them. Now I need to be careful where I go next, because (for their own protection) there are laws in thirteen states that make it illegal to say anything bad about cows.
Were the walls of the meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to raise, kill, and eat animals the way we do. Tail docking and sow crates and beak clipping would disappear overnight, and the days of slaughtering four hundred head of cattle an hour would promptly come to an end—for who could stand the sight? Yes, meat would get more expensive. We’d probably eat a lot less of it, too, but maybe when we did eat animals we’d eat them with the consciousness, ceremony, and respect they deserve.
Killing animals is probably unavoidable no matter what we choose to eat. If America was suddenly to adopt a strictly vegetarian diet, it isn’t at all clear that the total number of animals killed each year would necessarily decline, since to feed everyone animal pasture and rangeland would have to give way to more intensively cultivated row crops. If our goal is to kill as few animals as possible people should probably try to eat the largest possible animal that can live on the least cultivate land: grass-finished steaks for everyone.
One of the odder ironies of animal rights [is] it asks us to acknowledge all we share with animals, and then act towards them in a most unanimalistic way.
Our teeth are omnicompetent—designed for tearing animal flesh as well as grinding plants. So are our jaws, which we can move in the manner of a carnivore, a rodent, or an herbivore, depending on the dish. Our stomachs produce an enzyme specifically designed to break down elastin, a type of protein found in meat and nowhere else. Our metabolism requires specific chemical compounds that, in nature, can be gotten only from plants (like vitamin C) and others that can be gotten only from animals (like vitamin B-12). More than just the spice of human life, variety for us appears to be a biological necessity.
Even with … cautious parameters, selected in a biased manner to draw a maximally optimistic conclusion, the number of species doomed each year is 27,000. Each day it is 74, and each hour 3.
If past species have lived on the order of a million years in the absence of human interference, a common figure for some groups documented in the fossil record, it follows that the normal “background” extinction rate is about one species per one million species a year. Human activity has increased extinction between 1,000 and 10,000 times over this level in the rain forest by reduction in area alone. Clearly we are in the midst of one of the great extinction spasms of geological history.
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