Anything That Moves

by Dana Goodyear

  Since 1987, when Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen organization sued the Department of Health and Human Services to prohibit interstate commerce in raw milk, it has been a crime to transport it for sale across state lines. The resulting underground market is by definition unregulated; consumers must take it on faith that the milk is clean, something that, without testing, even the farmer can’t know for sure. Good standards for inspection and proper labeling could significantly reduce the likelihood of outbreaks, but for now the two sides—those who call for unfettered access and those who completely oppose it—are deadlocked. “The conversation needs to start with really solid facts about the incidence of bacteria in raw milk,” Jo Robinson, an investigative journalist who runs the website Eat Wild, says. “We’re not doing enough to reduce those risks.”

  • • •

  More than a hundred years ago, Ukrainian scientist Elie Metchnikoff, who was the deputy director at the Pasteur Institute laboratory in Paris, identified the health benefits of bacteria associated with fermentation. (He won the Nobel Prize and is considered the founder of the field of probiotics.) Rawesome extended this idea to all bacteria, claiming that a disease-resistant gut must be populated with the kinds of microorganisms most people strenuously avoid. In order to shop there, you had to sign an agreement saying that you preferred your food to “contain microbes, including but not limited to salmonella, E. coli, campylobacter, listeria, gangrene and parasites” and liked your eggs “completely unrefrigerated and unwashed from the chicken and covered with bacteria and poultry feces.” Members not only rejected government food-safety standards as inapplicable to their nutritional requirements; they found them to be dangerous, because they allow for food to be treated with radiation and antibacterial chemicals. In the 2010 raid on Rawesome, the California Department of Food and Agriculture took samples of cheese made by a dairy in Missouri and found that they tested positive for trace amounts of listeria. “We told them we threw it out, but I don’t think we did,” a former USDA employee who worked at Rawesome for two years told me. “Listeria really didn’t matter.”

  Suspicion of technology runs deep in the raw-milk movement. In the 1930s, a Cleveland dentist named Weston A. Price traveled around the world studying isolated populations experiencing their first exposure to “the displacing foods of modern commerce.” In Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, which has become a central text for the movement, he wrote that people who ate unprocessed, indigenous foods had strong teeth, regular bone structure, and overall good health, whereas those who had adopted an American diet—refined sugar, white flour, pasteurized and skim milk, and hydrogenated oils—had cavities, facial deformities, and other problems, which they passed along to their children.

  Advocates of raw milk hold that pasteurization kills enzymes that make food digestible and bacteria that contribute to a healthy immune system. Drinking raw milk, they say, confers numerous health benefits—vitality, digestive vigor, strong teeth, clear skin—and even has the power to treat serious ailments, such as diabetes, cancer, and autism. Sally Fallon Morell, the founder of an advocacy group informed by Price’s work, recommends feeding raw milk to infants. (A pamphlet from her organization entitled “Homemade Raw Milk Formula for Babies, and Raw Milk for Toddlers & Children,” equates breast milk with unpasteurized cow’s milk, claiming that both contain “active biological systems that naturally protect the milk itself—and the infant who drinks it—from infection.”) Carola Caldwell, a registered nurse who drove several hours from Lake Arrowhead to shop at Rawesome, overrode years of medical training to feed her son raw milk and meat. She told me that the diet had cured him of extreme allergies, chemical sensitivity, and moodiness. “Within three weeks of starting raw food, he became a different child,” she said.

  There has been little science to support these claims. The closest thing to an objective body of data appeared in 2011, with the publication of a large-sample study linking children’s consumption of unheated “farm milk” to reduced rates of asthma and allergies. The researchers, based in Europe, where raw milk is more widely accepted, determined that whey protein was the protective element, but they stopped short of advising people to consume raw milk, because of the risk of pathogens. The next step, they wrote, would be to develop “ways of processing and preserving a safe and preventive milk.”

  • • •

  Raw milk has always been legal in California, but the preponderance of regulation has made it hard to come by. In the late nineties, not long after James Stewart started selling raw milk, the state’s largest provider shut down its raw operation, leaving, by Stewart’s count, eight licensed raw-milk cows. As he searched for new supplies, he heard from Mark McAfee, a former paramedic who had inherited his grandparents’ farm, in Fresno. “I called up James and said, ‘I’ve got two hundred and fifty cows here, all certified organic or on grass,’” McAfee told me. “He says, ‘I’ll be there in three hours.’” According to McAfee, Stewart singlehandedly rebuilt the market for raw milk in Southern California, and introduced him to the nutritionist Aajonus Vonderplanitz, a former General Hospital actor who claims to have cured himself of multiple cancers by eating a diet of raw meat, eggs, and milk, and sharply restricting his water intake. Vonderplanitz, who calls his approach the Primal Diet, says that for a treat he bleeds meat into raw milk: “Tastes like ice cream!” Vonderplanitz became an investor in the farm, and his followers became McAfee’s customers. Organic Pastures is now, by McAfee’s estimation, the largest raw dairy in the world, with 430 cows. It produces 2,400 gallons of milk a day, which retails for $16 a gallon.

  One chilly November day, I drove out to Organic Pastures with McAfee, an energetic, trim man who was wearing a thick parka and clean blue jeans. The first time I had seen him, at a rally before one of Stewart’s court appearances, he was drawing battle lines from a podium. “Look at the frickin’ enemy. Remember who they are: Monsanto, Tyson, Cargill, the FDA,” he said into a microphone. “In ignorance, our great-grandparents traded freedom for safety.”

  Now, in the car, McAfee continued his narrative of struggle. “When people start drinking raw milk, it’s like this awakening,” he said. “It’s a phenomenally transforming immune-system food that is largely oppressed, suppressed, ignored, vilified, hated by processors and those that are involved with the structure of the American Dairy Association,” he said. “It’s a massive food fight.”

  That day, McAfee was waiting for the state to lift a monthlong embargo on his milk. For the second time in five years, Organic Pastures had been implicated in an outbreak of E. coli O157:H7. Five young children had fallen ill; three were hospitalized and treated for hemolytic uremic syndrome, which can lead to kidney failure. The same strain had been found in his calving pen, and he had instituted new safety procedures at the farm. Still, the embargo was costing him $150,000 a week, and he felt that the state was punishing him intentionally. The recall had driven the price of raw milk in some stores up to $40 a gallon, with priority going to mothers. “We’ve been trying to keep the peace with all of our consumers,” he told me.

  McAfee pulled into the farm and stopped beside a village of neat trailers: an office, a retail store, and a creamery, where hundreds of bottles stood waiting to be sent out. He talked with a manager, and said grimly, “It looks like we won’t be getting released today.” We drove down an unpaved road, past McAfee’s house, a large Mediterranean spread with a pool, a pair of pet goats, and a hangar where he keeps a plane. In the dairy barn, a row of cows with steaming, swollen undercarriages lined up to be milked. Workers hosed them down—manure is a major potential source of pathogens—then stripped their teats with iodine. The state requires frequent testing, and McAfee takes expensive precautions to keep the milk clean. But, he said, “Manure is the carrier of the beneficial bacteria found in raw milk. The whole pasteurization community does not understand that at all.”

  Most milk on the market comes from animals fed a diet containing corn an
d soy—typically genetically modified—rather than grass, the food they evolved to digest. Since 2004, milk has been legally identified as an allergen; the FDA and the CDC both cite it first, before shellfish, nuts, and wheat, on their lists of top allergens. Perhaps as a consequence, in recent years people have been drinking less of it, instead choosing alternatives like soy, almond, and rice milk. At the same time, prices for feed and fuel have escalated, and many dairies have gone out of business. There has been a spate of dairyman suicides, several of them in California. But, since McAfee’s previous E. coli recall, in 2006, when six children got sick after drinking his products, Organic Pastures has grown steadily. McAfee is doing far better than most of his pasteurizing counterparts; the company, he says, sold $9.6 million worth of milk products in 2012.

  • • •

  One winter morning, with a heavy fog lying over Los Angeles, the Dairy Fairy, a Rawesome member who quietly assumed Stewart’s procurement responsibilities after the bust, got in her car and headed for the drop. Every week, she takes orders from the Rawesome diaspora for raw dairy, sauerkraut, and meat, most of it transported from Amish country in truck space rented from a large produce operation. To compensate her for her time, she is given a box of groceries, which is meaningful, since she works freelance, and she and her boyfriend spend about $500 a week on food. (Their dog eats raw, too.)

  At first, the drop had gone down in public parks across the city, but the Dairy Fairy had decided that was too risky. One day, at a convenience store, she noticed a man selling cars off the lot. “I was like, That’s kind of shady,” she said. “So I went and talked to the owner. He said, ‘I’m from Egypt—I love raw milk!’ I trade him milk for us to park our truck here.” The beauty of the location, she said, is that trucks come and go all day long; no one notices the milk truck, unmarked and inconspicuous, parked in a corner of the lot.

  The truck was waiting when she arrived. A young couple popped out of the cab; the woman had a pixie cut and was wearing knee-high yellow-and-black athletic socks from a CrossFit gym. The man helped the Dairy Fairy unload from her trunk two cases of black-market raw butter, made with cream from a nonfat-yogurt operation in New England, priced at $16 a pound. “This stuff is sacred!” the Dairy Fairy said. The butter-maker, she said, demanded that they rendezvous in strange spots to make the handoff: cash up front for butter. The last time, it had been at LAX. This time, she had had to meet him by the side of the road in Pasadena.

  As the sun burned through the fog, the former members of Rawesome started to arrive: skinny women on bicycles, old ladies with tote bags, a CPA in a shiny black BMW SUV. Vincent Gallo—pink sunglasses, lumberjack shirt, moccasins—came for his box, which included goat yogurt made by someone who used to work at Rawesome. “I go up in the mountains and get the raw goat milk,” the yogurt-maker said. “I actually have to sign a waiver saying I won’t bring anyone up there or say who they are. They are top secret.” Business was good, he said. “I’m selling a ton of colostrum.”

  An attractive woman with flowing hair opened her box and drank from a quart of milk. “I love how the eggs were so full of poo last week,” she said, with a thick milk moustache. “I got some really pooey ones and I was like, Yeah!” Eating this way, she told me later, made her feel free—liberated from the oppression of modern life, especially that of refrigeration—though it hampered her in certain ways, too. Restaurant meals were impossible: she had to bring her own raw ground bison meat, which she wrapped in prosciutto and smeared with raw butter she carried with her in a mason jar. She just had one thing to tell me: she hoped I wasn’t eating yogurt from the grocery store. “That stuff is so bad for you,” she said.

  A few weeks later, the Dairy Fairy called me. She’d had an uncomfortable conversation with the butter-maker, who runs a successful gourmet business and sees no advantage in exposing his dealings in contraband dairy. “He said, ‘You were the drug dealer! The drug dealer does not talk to the media!’”

  • • •

  To many in the national food-freedom movement, raw milk is the test case. Two years ago, the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, a nonprofit legal organization that helps raw-milk farmers, sued the FDA to lift the ban on interstate sales. (The suit was dismissed.) In responding, the FDA asserted, “There is no absolute right to consume or feed children any particular food.” Statements like this stoke anxiety about the government’s intentions. “Raw milk is just symbolic of this attitude of government regulators that they are the ones that make the decisions about what foods we can have,” David Gumpert, an advocate-journalist who writes a blog called The Complete Patient, says. “You have this trend now toward irradiation. It’s not required, but it’s been sanctioned by the FDA. The next step may be for the FDA to require that all spinach has to be irradiated.”

  In recent years, the FDA has raided Amish and Mennonite farms that supply unpasteurized dairy products to out-of-state food clubs; in 2011, a farmer in Pennsylvania was driven out of business. The raid at Rawesome appeared to be an escalation of a strategy that raw-milkers think aims to kill the business entirely. Mike Adams, the editor of the website Natural News, compared undercover regulating agents to the East German Stasi, and warned of reprisals. “I believe we are very close to entering the age of a shooting war between farmers and the F.D.A.,” he wrote. “I would encourage the F.D.A. agents who are no doubt reading this to strongly consider: Is your war against raw milk worth risking your life?”

  “How far down the rabbit hole do you want to go?” Ajna Sharma-Wilson, the lawyer, asked me. Several months after the raid, she and Stewart and a group of his supporters converged at a hotel in Las Vegas, to attend the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association convention, an event put on by Richard Mack, a former sheriff from Arizona who successfully challenged a provision of the Brady Bill before the Supreme Court and was running for Congress as a Republican from Texas. I met them there. Mack, who told me that he’d spoken at “more Tea Party events than Sarah Palin,” had drawn a hundred sheriffs, from across the country, who feel that the federal government is infringing on individual rights. He had invited the raw-milkers, he told me, because he wanted to educate both the sheriffs and the lawbreakers. “I want them to call their sheriff,” he said. “I want their sheriff to protect them from the FDA.”

  Among the booths—Gun Owners of America, the John Birch Society, anti-income-tax proponents selling a CD called The Politics of Jesus—was a table piled with raw cheeses and fresh produce. The vegetables had come from a sustainable Nevada farm that had recently become a food-freedom darling when a health inspector showed up at a “farm to table” dinner and made the farmer pour bleach on the vegetables, maintaining that, because she could not determine how long ago they had been cut, they were unfit even for pigs.

  At the table were several Raw Milk Freedom Riders, mothers who practice civil disobedience by crossing state lines with raw milk. Their splashiest protest so far has been a raw-milk-and-cookie sit-in on the steps of the FDA, in Silver Spring, Maryland. One of them had a seven-month-old baby on her hip. Sheriff Mack, an imposing figure in cowboy boots, a turquoise shirt, and a loosened teal-colored tie, kept throwing his arm around her and joking that he was going to arrest her for feeding her baby unpasteurized breast milk.

  The mother was around my age and lived outside Washington, D.C.; she had started drinking raw milk when pregnant with her second baby. (This one was her fifth.) I asked her if she wanted to walk around and check out the booths. I kept looking for signs of the culture clash between the raw-milkers and the antigovernment extremists, but I couldn’t get purchase. The raw-milkers claimed to be on board with everything, from putting a stop to roadside sobriety tests to ending seat-belt laws. Apparently, wanting the government out of their food colored everything for them.

  Aside from the Freedom Riders’ farm table, the only other food booth belonged to Freeze Dry Guy, a company that sells “freeze-dried foods for uncerta
inties.” Preppers, as the community of apocalypse-ready food-hoarders is known, take food self-sufficiency to an extreme. Freeze Dry Guy’s pitch was Store What You Eat—the idea being that if you’re a big meat-eater, you’re not going to want to add adjusting to a vegan diet to your list of problems when catastrophe strikes. Germans starved after World War II, the marketing material said, because they considered corn to be pig food. “These were not stupid people. They just had strong prejudices about what they would not eat. . . . Ever had monkey’s brains, goat’s eyes or grubs? Ever try to make an 18 month old child eat Brussels sprouts? Good luck! What if that were all you had?”

  The Freedom Rider stared at a huge can of freeze-dried “Oriental-style spicy chicken”: monkey’s brains to her. Finally, a wedge issue! “Wow,” she said, as she read down the list of industrial and GMO ingredients. “Wow.”

  At lunchtime, a buffet was set up in the middle of the room, with cold cuts, pasta salad, and bags of chips. Sheriff Mack loaded up a plate. “I grew up absolutely hating milk,” he told me. “I would gag on it! Now when I drink their milk, maybe it tastes better to me because it’s freedom milk. It just has a little rebellious flavor in it. To me, it’s the new civil rights. It’s Rosa Parks.”

  Mack wandered over to the farm booth and asked one of the women there if she had eaten. “We brought our food, ’cause this is genetically modified,” she said, pointing at the bag of popcorn in his hand. Someone poured Mack a glass of milk, and he turned to face the roomful of sheriffs—old fellows, mostly, with holstered handguns at their hips. The raw-milkers cheered as Mack took a big, showy sip and called out, “Freedom milk! Freedom milk!”

  That night, Stewart’s supporters threw an “ice-cream speakeasy” for the sheriffs in one of the hotel rooms. There was uncured sausage and raw cheese made by an Amish farmer currently fighting charges in Wisconsin. The raw milk was flowing, as was the cold-pressed hibiscus juice, sweetened with raw honey.