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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] More on ODA’s Manna Storehouse raid
  • Date: Sat, 06 Dec 2008 16:17:16 -0700


December 4, 2008...6:31 pm
More on ODA’s Manna Storehouse raid
http://thebovine.wordpress.com/2008/12/04/more-on-the-oda-manna-storehouse-raid/

Our earlier post “ODA ’swats’ Manna Storehouse co-op” is proving to be
tremendously popular. Following up some of the traffic sources and ping-backs
I eventually found more details on the story, which is looking more and more
bizarre. Here’s some of what Berit Kjos is saying about it over on the True
Discernment blog. From the looks of things, somebody up there must think
Amish farmers are more of a threat than those “terrorists” we hear so much
about.

“On Monday, December 1, a SWAT team with semi-automatic rifles entered the
private home of the Stowers family in LaGrange, Ohio, herded the family onto
the couches in the living room, and kept guns trained on parents, children,
infants and toddlers, from approximately 11 AM to 8 PM. The team was
aggressive and belligerent. The children were quite traumatized. At some
point, the “bad cop” SWAT team was relieved by another team, a “good cop”
team that tried to befriend the family.

The Stowers family has run a very large, well-known food cooperative called
Manna Storehouse on the western side of the greater Cleveland area for many
years.There were agents from the Department of Agriculture present, one of
them identified as Bill Lesho. The search warrant is reportedly
supicious-looking. Agents began rifling through all of the family’s
possessions, a task that lasted hours and resulted in a complete upheaval of
every private area in the home. Many items were taken that were not listed on
the search warrant. The family was not permitted a phone call, and they were
not told what crime they were being charged with. They were not read their
rights. Over ten thousand dollars worth of food was taken, including the
family’s personal stock of food for the coming year. All of their computers,
and all of their cell phones were taken, as well as phone and contact
records. The food cooperative was virtually shut down. There was no rational
explanation, nor justification, for this extreme violation of Constitutional
rights.

Presumably Manna Storehouse might eventually be charged with running a retail
establishment without a license. Why then the Gestapo-type interrogation for
a 3rd degree misdemeanor charge? This incident has raised the ominous specter
of a restrictive new era in State regulation and enforcement over the
nation’s private food supply.

This same type of abusive search and seizure was reported by those innocents
who fell victim to oppressive federal drug laws passed in the 1990s. The
present circumstance raises the obvious question: is there some rabid new
interpretation of an existing drug law that considers food a controlled
substance worthy of a nasty SWAT operation? Or worse, is there a previously
unrecognized provision(s) pertaining to food in the Homeland Security
measures? Some have suggested that it was merely an out-of-control,
hot-to-trot ODA agent, and, if so, this would be a best-case scenario.
Anything else might spell the beginning of the end for the freedom to eat
unregulated and unmonitored food….”

“….The issue appears to be the discovery of a bit of non-institutional beef
in an Oberlin College food service freezer a year ago that was tracked down
by a county sanitation official to Manna Storehouse. Oberlin College’s
student food coop is widely known for its strident ideological stance about
eating organic foods. It seems that the Oberlin student food cooperative had
joined the Manna Storehouse food cooperative in order to buy organic foods in
bulk from the national organic food distributor United, which services buying
clubs across the nation. The sanitation official, James Boddy, evidently
contacted the Ohio Department of Agriculture. After the first contact by
state ODA officials, Manna Storehouse reportedly wrote them a letter
requesting assistance and guidelines for complying with the law. This letter
was never answered. Rather, the ODA agent tried several times to infiltrate
the coop, as described above. When his attempts failed, the SWAT team showed
up!

Food cooperatives and buying clubs have been an active part of the American
landscape for over a generation. In the 1970s, with the rise of the organic
food industry (a direct outgrowth of the hippie back-to-nature movement) food
coops started up all over the country. These were groups of people who freely
associated for the purpose of combining their buying power so that they could
order organic food items in bulk and case lots. Anyone who was part of these
coops in the early era will remember the messy breakdown of 35 pounds of
peanut butter and 5 gallon drums of honey!…

“….The state of Ohio boasts the second largest Amish population in the
country. Many of the Amish live on acreages where they raise their own food,
not unlike Manna Storehouse, and sell off the extras to neighbors and church
members. There is a sense of foreboding that this state crackdown on a
longstanding, reputable food cooperative operation could adversely impact the
peaceful agrarian way of life not only for the Amish, but homeschoolers and
those families living off the land on rural acreages. It raises the
disturbing possibility that it could become a crime to raise your own food,
buy eggs from the farmer down the road, or butcher your own chickens for
family and friends – bustling activities that routinely take place in
backwater America.

The freedom to purchase food directly form the source is increasingly under
attack. For those who have food allergies and chemical intolerances, or who
are on special medical diets, this is becoming a serious health issue. Will
Americans retain the right to purchase food that is uncontaminated by
pesticides, herbicides, allergens, additives, dyes, preservatives, MSG, GMOs,
radiation, etc.? The melamine scare from China underscores the increasingly
inferior and suspect quality of modern processed institutional foods….”

Read the whole thing here.
http://truediscernment.wordpress.com/2008/12/05/swat-team-conducts-food-raid-in-rural-ohio/

Update 12/06/2008: Some have been questioning the authenticity of this
story, here is a local news source link: Local food cooperative searched by
state
http://www.morningjournal.com/articles/2008/12/03/news/mj309059.txt

The Farmer To Consumer Legal Defense Fund
http://www.ftcldf.org/

THE LATEST: Seems the head of the Stowers household was serving in Iraq while
his family was being held at gunpoint by American authorities.






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