permaculture

["Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lflj@intrex.net>]

The New York Times <http://www.nytimes.com/>
August 8, 2007
Should This Milk Be Legal?
By JOE DRAPE

THERE was the name of a Web site scrawled on cardboard and quickly torn
to bits by an anonymous farmer in the Greenmarket at Union Square. Then
came the paperwork, legal enough presumably, to protect the source of
the illicit substance. Finally, Yaron Milgrom-Elcott received the
monthly drop site: an address near Chelsea, open for two hours, show up
or lose the white stuff.

Mr. Milgrom-Elcott never missed a drop. Each month, he joined mothers
with newborns and Wall Street titans in search of a box of
unpasteurized, unhomogenized, raw milk. He is also part of a movement of
perhaps hundreds of thousands across the country who will risk illness
or even death to drink their milk the way Americans did for centuries:
straight from the cow.

Twenty years ago, the Food and Drug Administration
banned interstate sales of unpasteurized milk. This spring the agency
warned consumers again that they were risking their health drinking raw
milk.

Still, individual states determine how raw milk is bought and sold
within their borders. While its sale for human consumption is illegal in
15 states, New York is one of 26 where it can be bought with
restrictions. The chief one is that raw milk can only be sold on the
premises of one of 19 dairy farms approved by the state. Clandestine
milk clubs, like the one Mr. Milgrom-Elcott joined, are one way of
circumventing the law, and there are others.

Raw milk drinkers may praise its richer flavor or claim it is more
nutritious than pasteurized milk. No matter why they drink it, the
demand for it is booming. In 2000, the Organic Pastures Dairy Company in
the San Joaquin Valley near Fresno became California’s first raw milk
dairy with certified organic pasture land. This year its co-founder,
Mark McAfee, expects it to gross $6 million — up from $4.9 last year.

His raw milk is sold in 300 stores in California, where it is legal. He
also has an $80,000 a month mail order business, shipping creams and
cheese as well as milk to all 50 states. He believes he reaches 35,000
customers a week for his raw milk products. Because the laws allow
interstate shipping of raw milk that is not meant for human consumption,
Organic Pastures milk is labeled as pet food.

“I like to go into the warehouse and see the addresses — it goes all
over creation,” he said. “We don’t have the same customers day in and
day out. We’re the entry point. We hear back that shipping is too
expensive but that they found a local provider, either a farm or on the
black market. They have got to have it.”

Mr. McAfee said he knows firsthand of more than six dairies in
Pennsylvania, some of them Amish, that supply the black market in New
York and Boston. “They’re sending in 200 cases of milk every month,” he
said.

Some drink it for the same reason raw milk cheeses are popular: the
taste. “I first discovered it two summers ago in France,” said Mr.
Milgrom-Elcott, who is pursuing a doctorate in medieval Jewish mysticism
at New York University

“There is a richness and density unlike processed milk, plus there’s
this complexity of flavor.”

Others believe that it is good for them. Pasteurization — a process of
heating and quickly cooling milk to kill pathogens such as E. coli,
salmonella and listeria — also destroys beneficial bacteria, proteins and 
enzymes,
they say. Advocates attribute stronger immune and better digestive
systems to raw milk. Many have incorporated it into their diet
as part of a broader philosophy to treat their bodies and the planet
properly.

Nina Planck, the author of “Real Food: What to Eat and Why,” defied the
F.D.A.’s warning and drank raw milk while she was pregnant. She not only
continues to drink it while nursing her 9-month-old son, Julian, but
also allows him the occasional sip. She has an arrangement with a couple
of farmers to deliver it to New York City.

“We drink raw milk because we trust the traditional food chain more than
the industrial one,” said Ms. Planck, who knows a number of farmers from
her days as director of the New York City Greenmarkets and through her
boyfriend, Rob Kaufelt, the owner of Murray’s Cheese in Greenwich Village.

“We’re willing to spend more money the higher up the food chain we go,”
she said. “We’re not alone, either. You cannot categorize the people who
are drinking raw milk. They are people from the blue states and red
states, farmers and yuppies and Birkenstock wearers.”

Food scientists can hardly believe that so many consumers have turned
their back on one of the most successful public health endeavors of the
20th century. In 1938, for example, milk caused 25 percent of all
outbreaks of food- and water-related sickness.

With the advent of universal pasteurization, that number fell to 1
percent by 1993, according to the Center for Science in the Public
Interest a nutrition advocacy group in Washington.

David Barbano, director of the Northeast Dairy Foods Research Center,
operated by Cornell and the University of Vermont
and supported by the dairy industry, grew up drinking raw milk on a
family farm. He does not remember ever getting sick, but says science
has never found any evidence that it was more beneficial than
pasteurized milk. In fact, he said, raw milk has very little vitamin D,
which is added to most pasteurized milk.

“There is always going to be a percentage of raw milk that carries
disease-causing bacteria,” said Dr. Barbano, who is a professor of food
science at Cornell. “As long as I have pasteurized milk available for
me, and I guess more importantly for my daughter, the risk is not worth
any benefit anyone has been able to prove.”

Sally Fallon, president of the Westin A. Price Foundation, another
nutrition advocacy group, argues that the risk to raw milk drinkers is
insignificant, and the demand for product is growing steadily. In 1998,
when the Washington-based foundation created the Web site realmilk.com
<http://realmilk.com/>, it barely had half a page of sources where raw
milk could be purchased legally. Now, the list has grown to more than
two dozen pages, and Ms. Fallon puts the number of raw milk drinkers at
half a million.

“We are trying to be pragmatic and create demand,” said Ms. Fallon of
the 10,000-member, 400-chapter foundation, which has mounted legal
challenges to raw milk regulations in several states. “Even though it is
illegal in some places, it is very available through cow sharing or cow
herding programs.”

In Virginia, for example, Chip and Susan Planck — Nina’s parents — pay
$40 a year plus $25 monthly to own a share in one cow, the only legal
way to get raw milk in that state. In return, they get a gallon of raw
milk a week. It is technically not a sale but compensation for the cow’s
room and board.

Last year the Hawthorne Valley Farm in Ghent, N.Y., offered a buyers’
club program to its raw milk customers in the hopes of giving a bigger
boost to a steadily growing market. It was designed to encourage those
customers in New York and beyond to order in bulk but send only one
representative a week to pick up the order.

When the New York State Department Public Interestand Markets caught
wind of it, however, it asked Hawthorne to end the program and the farm
complied. Still, Abe Madey, the farm’s dairy manager and cheesemaker,
says business is steady. About 100 regular customers, many of whom drive
two hours from New York City, purchase up to 7,500 gallons annually of
raw milk worth about $45,000 to the farm, he said.

The milk club that Mr. Milgrom-Elcott belongs to, and others like it, is
far more problematic, according to Jessica A. Chittenden, a spokeswoman
for the Agriculture and Markets department. She says the 41 milk
inspectors charged with the monthly testing of New York’s 5,000 dairy
farms had not yet turned their attention to the clandestine dropoffs.

“It is under review,” said Ms. Chittenden, adding that the department
cited five of the raw milk permit holders for violations in the past
year. “Our utmost concern is for public health. We are trying to insure
that the safest products are out there.”

For a few months anyhow, Mr. Milgrom-Elcott can shed his identity of a
potential law-breaker. His wife, Miriam Sheinbein, just finished her
third year at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and is currently
serving a brief rotation in San Francisco. In California, raw milk is
legal and widely available. While Ms. Sheinbein, who is 19 weeks
pregnant, has decided to forego the delicacy until the baby is born, Mr.
Milgrom-Elcott is delighted to take his habit above-ground.

“It’s hard to live without,” he said.

But then again, Mr. Milgrom-Elcott’s secret life in New York was not
without its thrills.

“We also bought crème fraîche from the milk club,” he said. “It was
nearly as ethereal as our fromager’s in Aix-en-Provence.”