~SPECIAL ALERT TO EVERYONE THAT EATS ~
Swat Team Conducts "Food Raid" in Rural Ohio
The USDA just released their plans to put a law into action that will put
all small farmers out of business. Animals for the sale of meat or milk will
only be allowed in commercial farms. December 3, 2008
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
http://www.mannastorehouse.com 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
<http://steveandpaul arunyan.blogspot .com/>. 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 3^rd 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 http://www.westonap rice.org/.
familiar with the Ohio situation has reported that:"Interestingly, I believe
they [Manna Storehouse] said a month or so ago, an undercover ODA official
came to their little store and claimed to have a sick father wanting to join
the co-op.
Both the owner and her daughter-in- law had a horrible feeling about the
man, and decided not to allow him into the co-op and notified him by
certified mail. He came back to the co-op demanding to be part of it. They
refused and gave him names of other businesses and health food stores closer
to his home. Not coincidentally, this man was there yesterday as part of the
raid."
which backfired when it became known that the Amish believe in a literal
interpretation of "give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would
borrow of thee turn not thou away" (Matthew 5:42)
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 http://www.unitedbu
yingclubs. com/, 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!
These buying clubs have persisted and flourished over the years due to their
ability to purchase high quality organic foods at reduced prices in bulk
quantities. Most cooperatives have participated greatly in the local
agrarian economies, supporting neighborhood organic farmers with purchases
of produce, eggs, chickens, etc. The groups also purchase food from a number
of different local, regional and national distributors, many of them
family-based businesses who truck the food themselves. Some of these food
cooperatives have become large enough to set up
mini-storefront operations where members can drop in and purchase items
leftover from case lot sales. Manna Storehouse had established itself in
such a manner, using a small enclosed breezeway attached to their home. It
was a folksy place with old wooden floors where coop members stopped by to
chat and snack on bags of organic corn chips.
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. One blog, commenting on the
bizarre and troubling Manna Storehouse situation, observed that:
"No one is saying exactly why. At the same time the FDA says it it safe to
eat the 40% of tainted beef found in Costco's and Sam's all over the nation.
These farm raids are very common now. Every farmer needs to fully eqiped
[sic] for the possibility of it happening to them. The Farmer To Consumer
Legal Defense Fund http://www.ftcldf. org/ was created just for this
purpose. The USDA just released their plans to put a law into action that
will put all small farmers out of business. Animals for the sale of meat or
milk will only be allowed in commercial farms, even the organic ones."
December 3, 2008 7:09 PM file://localhost/comment.g
John Loeffler
Western Bureau Chief
Steel on Steel Radio
Program
IRN/USA Radio News
P.O. Box 3358
Hayden Id 83835-3358
Tel: 208-765-8337
Fax: 208-765-2033
Email: john AT steelonsteel.com
Web: www.steelonsteel.com
Distributed by: www.ChristianWorldviewNetwork.com
[Homestead] SWAT TEAM FOOD RAIDS,
Lynda, 12/06/2008