Wealth, Power and Raw Milk
Raw milk sales had been outlawed or severely restricted
in virtually every state, and the total number
of farms has shrunk to less than 2 million; less
than 100,000 have milk cows. Most of those cows
spend most of their time in confinement facilities.
According to the textbook Dairy
Cattle Science, “Nearly 40 percent
of all dairy cows have some form of mastitis.”
(Mastitis is inflammation of the mammary glands;
these are not healthy cows.)
The story of what’s happened to quality
milk is same as the story of what’s happened
to America’s farmers. Both have been mostly
eliminated, marginalized by a culture that has
allowed corporations to promote the big lie that
the processing of natural foods has nothing to
do with the epidemic of disease that cripples
our society. Corporate spokespersons for the food,
drug and medical industries have used billions
of dollars – a drop in the bucket compared
to their profits – to convince most of us
that this rape has been carried out for our own
good. “Food safety,” cry the corporations
and their media and government lackeys. Farmers
who would sell fresh raw milk and meat raised
and slaughtered on the farm would endanger the
public. Meanwhile, as Eric Schlosser has so elegantly
written of the nation’s commercial food
supply in Fast
Food Nation, “There’s shit
in the meat.” The Center for Disease control
estimates that over a quarter of all Americans
come down with food poisoning each year.
Meanwhile all foods rich in cholesterol are maligned
as dangerous. Cholesterol is a red herring. The
best foods in the world come from healthy animals.
Civilization was built on meat and raw milk. The
studies that purport to show that cholesterol
in foods is dangerous have been manipulated, misinterpreted
and propagandized by the drug industry to dupe
doctors and the public into buying billions of
dollars worth of dangerous drugs. Every year,
corporations and a wealthy few grow richer, while
many Americans struggle and many more just get
by. Thirty-five million people now live below
the government’s admittedly low poverty
line. We can only guess how many millions would
love to have a small family farm if it could support
even a modest lifestyle.
It’s never been easy for farmers,
and the rich getting richer and the poor getting
poorer is nothing new. Class lines grew throughout
colonial times; by 1700 fifty rich families in
Virginia lived off the labor of slaves and servants,
owned the plantations, sat on the governor’s
council, and served as magistrates. In Maryland,
the English king had granted total control over
the colony to a proprietor who ruled the settlers.
In the Carolinas, a constitution was written in
the 1600s by John Locke, often considered the
philosophical father of the Founding Fathers and
the American system. Locke’s constitution
set up a feudal-type aristocracy, in which eight
barons would own 40 percent of the colony’s
land, and only a baron could be governor. In New
York, the Dutch set up a patroonship system along
the Hudson River, with enormous landed estates,
where the barons controlled completely the lives
of their tenants. By 1770, the top one percent
of property owners in the Massachusetts colony
owned 44 percent of the wealth. “The country
therefore was not ‘born free’ but
born slave and free, servant and master, tenant
and landlord, poor and rich,” as Howard
Zinn wrote in A
People’s History of the United States.
For all that has changed in the last 200-plus
years, in America today, the richest one percent
still own thirty percent of the wealth.
What has all this to do with raw
milk? Just this: the same repressive, reactionary
forces that have concentrated power and wealth
into the hands of a few have outlawed raw milk
and destroyed the ability of small farms to survive
and thrive – and ushered in the epidemic
of heart disease, cancer and other chronic problems
plaguing the modern world.
Raw milk is the key to the health
crisis, the farm crisis, the economic crisis,
the small town crisis, even the environmental
crisis, the political crisis and the educational
crisis. Farmers who could freely advertise and
sell raw milk and its products, and fresh quality
meats, free of government intervention and hassles,
could prosper, and their communities could blossom.
The restoration of our individual and national
health could become reality.
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