Raw Milk, reprise

Food, next to air and water, is our most important connection to "mother nature", that is, the natural environment. Over the last 50 years, however, it has been compromised by industrialization.

A specialized perception of the world and phenomena is a concomitant factor with industrialism. Though we try, we cannot separate an investigation of the health of a human being from the health of the environment in which it lives without deluding and desensitizing ourselves.

Inherent in large-scale industrial food production is the carelessness with which food material is handled and with which consumer trust is manipulated. Even so, tremendous monetary wealth has been generated - and continues to be generated - in this politically powerful industry.

A 1936 document of a report to the 74th U.S. Congress says

...foods... being raised on millions of acres of land that no longer contain enough of certain minerals are starving us - no matter how much of them we eat.

A 2004 study published in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition, comparing nutrient levels in garden crops between 1950 and 1999, found significant decline in some nutrients in that time period, 14 years after the 1936 report to congress. Authors of the study hypothesized that the overall decline in nutrients in many of the 43 foods they studied was the result of decades of selecting food crops for high yield. (They noted also that a diet of processed foods was more cautionary than the decline in mineral concentration in food crops.)

According to a recent Food&WaterWatch report the American Farm Bureau Federation, which calls itself "The Voice of Agriculture", is one of the most powerful interest groups in the United States. The report says that its image of being pro-farmer is betrayed by its investments of tens of millions of dollars in Cargill, ConAgra, Dow, Dupont, Tyson, Archer Daniel Midlands, and so on. For the last 5 years Farm Bureau and Monsanto have been the highest spending lobbyists in agribusiness.

This report says that

Bob Stallman, the president of the Farm Bureau, ...has invoked post-slavery reparations in a seemingly mixed metaphor he used to condemn consumers and farmers who oppose the industrial model of agriculture, referring to them as “extremists who want to drag agriculture back to the day of 40 acres and a mule.”

The Farm Bureau is the voice of corporate agribusiness, not agriculture.

Food recalls by government agencies for contamination by E. coli or Salmonella, for example, and the reports that detail the agency's "investigation" of the contamination, seem to indicate that the agency is doing its job, and that once the weak link in the food chain is discovered new regulations will "come down" and food safety will be assured again. The government agency, however, is blind to the fact that it is the industrialization of food production that is the problem - blind because they are staffed with people from industry.

It's not only contamination with harmful micro-organisms that continues to be problematic in food industry. At the grocery store we find adulteration, contamination with chemical toxins, over-refinement of raw materials, and genetic modification of "food" that we don't think twice about consuming even though obesity, cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, allergies, asthma, ADHD, early puberty in girls, and other signs of imbalance are high and rising.

The farmer grows the raw materials that eventually become the food we eat, but where does the farmer get the seeds he plants? Most likely Monsanto, Dupont, or Syngenta - the three biggest multinational chemical/biotech/pharmaceutical conglomerates in the world.

In his article "Visualizing Consolidation in the Global Seed Industry: 1996 - 2008", Philip H. Howard says that trends in the commercial seed industry have effects that limit renewable agriculture, reduce seed lines, and cause a decline in seed saving. Since the mid 90's when transgenic crops were commercialized, he says, "the sale of seeds has been dominated by Monsanto, Dupont, and Syngenta." Howard says that control of the seed industry is "increasingly bound to agricultural practices that promote unsustainable topsoil depletion, monocultures, contamination of ecosystems, and high fossil fuel and water consumption."

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has identified dozens of Superfund sites for which Dupont is at least partly responsible. For example, during the period 1981 - 1984 a Dupont factory contaminated tap water with a Teflon-related chemical near Parkersburg, West Virginia, and knew about it for years but never told the community or the local water utility. The community eventually sued Dupont in 2001.

It may never be known how much Monsanto has contaminated the environment and compromised human and animal life as a result of their various creations in the pursuit of "better living through chemistry". One example came to light in Alabama in 2002. A February 2002 article in the Washington Post reported that

An Alabama jury yesterday found that Monsanto Co. engaged in "outrageous" behavior by releasing tons of PCBs into the city of Anniston and covering up its actions for decades, handing 3,500 local residents a huge victory in a landmark environmental lawsuit.

The jury in Gadsden, Ala., a town 20 miles from Anniston, held Monsanto and its corporate successors liable on all six counts it considered: negligence, wantonness, suppression of the truth, nuisance, trespass and outrage. Under Alabama law, the rare claim of outrage typically requires conduct "so outrageous in character and extreme in degree as to go beyond all possible bounds of decency so as to be regarded as atrocious and utterly intolerable in civilized society."

And,

Anniston residents did not learn about the pollution until 1996, even though documents show that Monsanto knew about it for decades. In 1966, for example, Monsanto managers discovered that fish dunked in a local creek turned belly-up within 10 seconds, spurting blood and shedding skin as if dropped into boiling water. In 1969, they found a fish in another creek with 7,500 times the legal PCB level. But they never told their neighbors, and concluded that "there is little object in going to expensive extremes in limiting discharges."

A court document in the Anniston case reported that Monsanto dumped 5,576,000 pounds of PCB's into the Anniston landfill from 1971 to 1975, years after realizing the impact on human physiology and the environment, without trying to control the contamination.

Before the PCB's hit the fan in Alabama, Monsanto spun-off a company named Solutia to take the heat over its "outrageous" contamination of Anniston, and other sites in Illinois, West Virginia, and Wales (a city there is "among the most contaminated places in Britain.")  Yet just 5 years after the verdict in Alabama, Monsanto's stock increased in value by 700% - according to the Dow Jones Industrials. "...birds of a feather..."

Monsanto, makers of DDT (banned in 1972), agent orange, dioxin, the herbicide Roundup, aspartame, Posilac (recombinant bovine growth hormone), PCB's (banned in 1979)..., has been called a retirement home for Clinton administration officials, but it makes financial contributions equally and abundantly to both political parties. Bob Shapiro, a former CEO of Monsanto, was one of the biggest contributors to Bill Clinton's re-election campaign in 1996. Subsequently, he was appointed "special trade advisor to the President." Monsanto lawyer and lobbyist Michael Taylor has been in and out of the FDA and Department of Agriculture several times over the last 25 years. He was responsible, by some accounts, for getting FDA approval for Monsanto's rBGH against the objections and warnings of FDA staff scientists. Taylor is back in the FDA today, an Obama administration appointee, as a "food safety expert".

At least partly, Monsanto's success can be attributed to its ability to infiltrate and influence the federal government and its agencies. The FDA has been called Monsanto's Washington office. At the level of influence where multinational corporations form alliances and monopolize the food supply, government, the two-party system, Democrat-or-Republican, and so on, are irrelevant and obsolete - except as a vehicle, a stepping-stone for the likes of Monsanto. This extreme of industrialism is more dangerous to the people than military squabbles between countries.

Former President Eisenhower was known to have warned against the "military-industrial complex"; Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein", written in 1816 before human sensibilities adapted to "the industrial revolution", is interpreted as a metaphor for the monstrous effects of industrialism; the legend of Ned Ludd and the Luddites, possibly the original Monkeywrench Gang, represents the actual "revolution" against the collusion between industrial wealth and the military it supplies. But industry has absorbed and transcended the military: Its model is imperialism in the global food supply economy.

Government agencies designed to look-out for the best interests of the people who elect government officials who design government agencies and appoint agency officials... have been taken over by industry operatives who introduce and enforce regulations designed to promote industry and protect it from extremists such as agrarian farmers and people who want raw milk?.... If this sounds like a circular argument or positive feedback loop that makes you crazy when you try to understand it, that's because it is - crazy.

Monsanto's behavior in general is "so outrageous in character and extreme in degree as to go beyond all bounds of decency so as to be regarded as atrocious and utterly intolerable in civilized society" yet it abides and prospers. And our elected officials are trusting it, and others like it, in the production of our food.

In his article "The Agrarian Standard" published in Orion magazine in 2002, Wendell Berry says that, as an agrarian writer, he has

never doubted for a minute the importance of the hope I have tried to serve: the hope that we might become a healthy people in a healthy land.


We agrarians are involved in a hard, long, momentous contest, in which we are so far, and by a considerable margin, the losers. What we have undertaken to defend is the complex accomplishment of knowledge, cultural memory, skill, self-mastery, good sense, and fundamental decency—the high and indispensable art—for which we probably can find no better name than “good farming.” I mean farming as defined by agrarianism as opposed to farming as defined by industrialism: farming as the proper use and care of an immeasurable gift.

Raw Milk is a battle-cry for... raw milk, unadulterated food, restoring our critical relationship to "mother nature", freedom to buy food directly from our farmer, and for health. Raw Milk is a shout against the reckless and greedy food industry, the abuse of our beasts of burden and our significant soil, the government take-over by industry confidence men, the manipulation of science for monetary gain, the control of the truth by the middleman...

Raw Milk is a wake-up call. We must wake-up to our self-responsibilities and confront those who take advantage of us for profit.