So this morning while we were drinking our coffee (one of the few mornings on which I attempted to make myself try to like coffee…it wasn’t successful..), Ryan put on Farmageddon.

I was curious to see the movie after all of the seizures of raw milk going on and the fact that California is one of the few states to still sell it in a few markets.

Raw milk cream…even better!

Honestly, what I saw in the movie was slightly depressing. SMALL farms were being raided and their raw milk products seized and destroyed.

The government was coming in and taking away the livelihoods of small, local farmers.

They claimed that these raw milk products were dangerous and contained bacteria that could make people ill. They claimed they were doing it for the good of people.

But why were they really doing it? Where these raw products really bad?

Why the government did it, I can only guess at. Was it to protect big business? Was it to keep people in line?

Who knows, but I can say it wasn’t because the products were actually dangerous.

Observational evidence suggests that raw milk may improve lactose tolerance, prevent the
development of asthma and allergies, and may be more digestible than pasteurized milk for
people who have difficulty digesting fat. Pasteurization decreases the content of iron, copper,
manganese, and iodine in milk, and may diminish the bioavailability of calcium and phosphorus.
It causes major losses of biological activity for vitamin C and folate, substantial losses for
vitamin B6, and may have similar effects for other vitamins. The available data for the
prevalence of foodborne illnesses associated with specific foods are extremely poor in quality
and rich in bias. Even taking these data at face value, however, raw milk may have the potential
to protect millions of people from asthma and prevent hundreds of asthma-related deaths without
causing major increases in the total burden of foodborne illness. (Realmilk.com)

Honestly we didn’t even start pasteurizing milk because it was dangerous in and of itself. We started pasteurizing it when we started keeping cows in crowded DIRTY pens and we started feeding them waste. Then their milk was blue and we added chalk to make it look new.

No wonder people started getting sick and we figured we should start pasteurizing it!

So it wasn’t the raw milk but all of the awful practices we had that made the milk dangerous….I guess I would understand why we wouldn’t allow raw milk from the cows on some of our big conventional farms since those cows are kept in disgusting conditions and fed crap, BUT I don’t understand how we can’t allow raw milk from naturally raised, grass-fed cows when it has benefits such as more vitamins and improved fat digestion.

Why? Why don’t we want to explore the healthiness of raw milk? Why do we just ban it WITHOUT doing any true studies?

Hmmm…maybe because we don’t want to actually change the problem, we just want to do a superficial fix. It is easier to just pasteurize milk than it is to make all of our farming practices better so that we don’t have to….