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‘Like Food Nazis’: Did a Calif. Health Dept. Come to Homes to ‘Confiscate’ Contaminated Raw Milk?

May. 21, 2012 4:28pm Liz Klimas

Did Health Department Officials Try to Confiscate Contaminated Raw Milk in California?

(Photo: kthread/Flickr)

Organic Pastures, a dairy farm run by the McAfee family near Fresno, is California’s first raw milk dairy farm that has certified organic land as pasture for its herd. Earlier this month, though, the farm was placed under quarantine due to reports of harmful bacteria found in samples of some dairy products and cow manure.

The California Department of Food and Agriculture cleared the farm on Friday after eight days of quarantine as now meeting all food safety and sanitation standards. What some found unusual, however, is how individual customers of the dairy products were contacted, some even saying officials tried to “confiscate” their legally-purchased milk. Although, officials have said they did not try to take milk for individuals but were simply informing all people about the recall of the contaminated milk.

(Photo: Wikimedia)

Natural News reports the founder of Organic Pastures Mark McAfee said he was told by one of his customers during the quarantine time frame that she was called repeatedly by the health department of L.A. County and told to give up her raw milk. Here’s more of McAfee‘s account of the events as told to him by one of his customers that has milk dropped off at her home from the dairy farm via UPS:

[...] they showed up at her house and demanded that she give her raw milk to them. She was getting ready to call 911 for the Sheriff’s department and have them removed from her front doorstep, and she was threatening to use her camera to take a picture of them and post it on Facebook for harassing her over her raw milk… The investigators left after she told them she was not going to give them the raw milk and to get the Hell off her property.

This is what’s going on, it’s like food Nazis, it’s incredible what these people are doing, trying to collect food from people’s houses, that have not made them ill!

McAfee stated that a secretary had mistakenly given out his customer’s contact information. Later, he said, the San Diego health department contacted him to for names and addresses, but he refused to provide them.

The Blaze contacted the California Department of Food and Agriculture, which gave the farm the green light to start distributing its products again on Friday. It said it was standard protocol for customers to be contacted during a time of contamination. A spokesperson for the CDFA wrote in an email, “Generally, during a recall, it is standard practice for health officials to use a dairy’s distribution list (usually retail outlets, but may include individuals) to verify that the producer has notified its customers in compliance with the provisions of the recall.”

The Blaze has also contacted the L.A. County Health Department for more details on their protocol in food contamination situations. Angelo Bellomo, director of environmental health for the department, emphasized that this issue was not between raw and pasteurized milk but about informing the public on a potentially contaminated product during this time period. Similar to any food recall, Bellomo said contact is made to sites that may have the product in question. Usually these are commercial entities, but in the case of Organic Pastures, eight individuals were on the list. Bellomo said phone calls were made to ensure they knew about the recall. One site visit was made, but he said no one was at home at the time and the inspector left.

Raw milk, according to the Real Milk campaign that is run by the Weston A. Price Foundation, is unpasteurized, unprocessed, straight-from-the-cow dairy. Advocates of raw milk say it tastes better and preserves more of the health benefits than the average gallon jug consumers can get from the grocery store. The group states that concerns about contamination over milk not being pasteurized — a process that heats the milk for a length of time to kill pathogens — are exaggerated.

The U.S. Center for Disease Control maintains that pasteurization is necessary to make milk safe and states that studies have shown it does not degrade the product’s nutritional value. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration also debunks what it considers “myths” about pasteurization’s effect on dairy and also believes milk products should be pasteurized.

Where and how raw milk is available for purchase in the United States varies by state. (Image: Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund)

Legality of raw milk sales in the United States varies. Most recently, raw milk dairy farmers in Minnesota — a state that allows for raw milk sales at the farm where it is produced, according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune — are in a legal battle where a 2-year-old got seriously ill from a bacterium he obtained after drinking the milk given to him from his parents. The parents are seeking damages for medical expenses associated with the incident, which happened two years ago. The Star Tribune reports a judge recently said the parents should have been aware of the risks associated with raw milk but still ruled that the farmer had been negligent. It is expected the case will be heard by a jury.

Although law varies by state, in California where raw milk sales are legal, those cartons must contain the following warning: “Warning – raw (unpasteurized) milk and raw milk dairy products may contain disease-causing micro-organisms. Persons at highest risk of disease from these organisms include newborns and infants; the elderly; pregnant women; those taking corticosteroids, antibiotics or antacids; and those having chronic illnesses or other conditions that weaken their immunity.”

Natural News considers the recent events in California as “food police” reaching “right into your refrigerator.” In a separate case, a Wisconsin judge ruled in Oct. 2011 that individual families owning their own cow are subject to the rules and regulations of the state. If the milk was not pasteurized, they couldn’t drink it:

“It’s always a surprise when a judge says you don’t have the fundamental right to consume the foods of your choice,” said [Pete] Kennedy [with the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund].

Oregon is going through its own legal issues over raw milk due to a recent E.coli outbreak that sickened 20, including four children. The Oregon Dairy Farmer’s Association is pushing for a crackdown on unpasteurized milk, according to the Oregonian. Only small farms can sell the raw milk within the state.

Watch this video profile from The Oregonian of a mother telling why she and her children are fans of raw milk:

What are your thoughts on the raw milk debate?

This story has been updated to reflect that McAfee’s customer said it was L.A. County Health Department officials who came to her house to “confiscate” the milk. The Blaze spoke with an official and updated the story accordingly to reflect the department’s protocol, which includes contacting those who may have contaminated products but did not involve confiscation of the milk.

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Comments (124)

mrdoogle
Posted on May 22, 2012 at 12:42am
Did you read the crap “one child got sick fro drinking raw milk” How many people have died from foodborn illnesses from tainted lettuce, factory farmed meat, cantalope and dozens of other sources of mass produced food in this country. The FDA plain and simple are tyrants, telling people what they can and cannot eat. My wife and I have drnk raw milk for 10 years in 2 different states and have never gotten sick, and if we ever do get sick, it’s still OUR choice….SCREW THE FDA! Wake up America! Weston a. Price Foundation

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JBee449
Posted on May 22, 2012 at 12:19am
The debate over the health benefits of raw milk are irrelevant to this discussion. The fight for food and farm freedom is the tip of the spear when it comes to fighting for liberty generally. I’m no fan of milk period, raw or otherwise, but I fully support the right that free humans have to decide for themselves what to consume. We must not let a leviathan government gone wild to continue to erode our basic freedoms. And beware, the guy who was jailed (and badly abused while in custody) from Rawesome Foods, was profiled by L.A. County as a “Sovereign” — an “anti-government extremist” is who a threat to public safety. All for promoting raw milk. The racial racketeering Southern Poverty Law Center is training LA County law enforcement on how to recognize and deal with “Sovereigns.” You can see where this leads. I know that liberals decry the slippery slope argument….but this has goto to stop. We must hold the line and defend Liberty, whether it’s guns, God or raw milk, we have to take a stand.

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Metallicat
Posted on May 21, 2012 at 11:51pm
I have a theory that women arent as bodaciously built as they used to be because now they rely on vitamin supplements for calcium and not good old milk, maybe comparing bust sizes of raw milk drinkers and non milk drinkers could verify my theory. something had to cause the modern day outbreak of itty bittys.

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team1blazer
Posted on May 21, 2012 at 11:50pm
Good luck to that left wing POS judge telling ME I can’t drink my own cow’s milk. I’d go postal on his sorry butt.

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hickville
Posted on May 21, 2012 at 11:42pm
One thing that is not pointed out that is critical is that a huge percentage of all dairy-born illness originates in cleanliness and/or the actual person doing the milking. Extreme sanitation procedures should be used to avoid any of their manure, etc getting in to the milk as well as germs we may be packing around on our hands, etc. A good dose of soap and water, one-use towels, and avoidance of cross-contamination can go a long way.
If we suspect anything has made its way in to the milk bucket, it goes to the dogs, cats, chickens, and abandoned calves:)
btw- it’s delicious!

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mtnpull
Posted on May 21, 2012 at 10:57pm
I am enjoying a glass of raw milk right now!

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Tractorboy
Posted on May 21, 2012 at 9:55pm
In the fine state of NY it is illegal to give away or sell quail eggs unless you get a permit for $50.00 . I checked the consitution couldn’t find the section where I can’t give somebody something for free! We give eggs away all the time, sometimes those little buggers get mixed in with the chichen eggs, oh well put me up to a fence post and shoot me.

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sldjulius
Posted on May 21, 2012 at 9:03pm
Raw milk is safe when you own your own cow, milk it and drink or use it right away. But when people started mass-producing food, all these laws became necessary because nature starts to take its course and it does become very dangerous without the product being heavily processed. The answer is fresh, local food, especially from your own land.

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LeadNotFollow
Posted on May 21, 2012 at 8:51pm
…
The Government needs to stay out of our lives.
Humans have been drinking raw milk from animals since the beginning of time.
What’s the Government coming after next, humans’ breast milk?

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fcbs46
Posted on May 21, 2012 at 8:45pm
I grew up on raw milk. It seems that it must contain some thing other then the things known by scientists because my daughter was giving regular milk to my grandson and she was told he was allergic to it and had rashes. She found a raw dairy (after reading some info on the net) and began to give him that and his rash cleared up and he was able to drink the milk just fine.
I think we ( the dairy industry) needs to get un-brain washed from the USDA and look at what happens to people when they drink raw milk. Yes some small dairy’s ,as in one or two cows do not treat the milk right, and that does causes problems but the blanket laws are nuts. Like most things the goverment is involved in they have not lee way or common sense they just take the easy way out by a blanket law. Lazy goverment.
I not a fan of drinking milk but if I was going to it would be raw . I grew up milking by hand the family cow and making butter as well as drinking it’s milk.

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338lapua
Posted on May 21, 2012 at 8:20pm
I have the great privilege to live in Wisconsin. Where raw milk sales are VERBOTEN! Farmers are threatened with all kinds of sanctions if they are caught selling raw milk. It is nearly impossible to make cheese with store bought milk. When I do happen upon a “gift” of raw milk, I pasteurize it myself. Usually just enough to cleanse the natural fauna of the milk and then I add my own bacterium. No responsible person is in danger here. The Govt. needs to back away before they are met with more lethal force than a phone call to the sheriff.

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Look4DBigPicture
Posted on May 21, 2012 at 7:34pm
But ..but ..but the milk police are smart people and know better than us. They’re just trying to protect us and we’re just being whiners and complainers who need to go sit in the corner and shut up.

Now can I have some more of that yummy raw milk please?

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ronin_6
Posted on May 21, 2012 at 7:23pm
What a crock. You should not drink unpasturized milk. Some nutritionist say you should not drink cows milk period or at least not after a certain age. Now folks are saying raw milk is the nutritional holy grail.
Who knows. Most Asians don’t use dairy at all and live a lot longer than those of us of European stock. All you folks saying the govt should step out and let folks do whatever it is they need to will be screaming when an ecoli out break kills 100 or so kids.
Remember the Odwalla thing a few years back? Odwalla bragged that they didn’t pasturize thier juices. Then a kid died and a whole lot of people got real sick. Some are still suffering immune disorders, blindness, etc. Go ahead feed your kids that stuff. It’ll probably be okay.

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- fcbs46
  Posted on May 21, 2012 at 8:55pm
  Well, you should check your facts the Asians are catching up to our death stats as they are eating more McD’s and junk food. It was the old days that Asians lived longer.
  
  By the way some Asians grew up on farms and they did have cows and milk. Some were buffalo but they used the milk just the same. Guess what, they are the ones living longer now.
  
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- Gladius_Doctorae
  Posted on May 21, 2012 at 10:26pm
  @retard6
  
  Eat well, stay fit, and die anyways. You worry about yourself and keep your nose out of my a$$. Funny how there were no peanut allergies or soy allergies when I was growing up but now we have to have special peanut free tables in schools. retard6, go pound sand!
  
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- anji_s
  Posted on May 22, 2012 at 2:13am
  There are traditional dairy products that originated in Asia thousands of years ago. Do your research :)
  
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Toltepeceno
Posted on May 21, 2012 at 7:09pm
I grew up in a small town where we had a milk cow and drank it daily as did others. I had to churn butter sometimes. I know of nobody that got sick. I even squirted it into my mouth strait from the tap a few times as a child (not touching blackie’s tap with my mouth of course). During the 50′s and 60′s, very different time.

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Godrulz
Posted on May 21, 2012 at 7:00pm
Is this thing on?

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jcldwl
Posted on May 21, 2012 at 6:49pm
I’m just glad to read that the woman told the health department to get off her property. That is what everyone needs to do. Get off my property and I will not comply.

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Robert in Texas
Posted on May 21, 2012 at 6:47pm
I’ve been drinking raw, local milk now for two years. Since then, my IBS (Irritable Bowl Syndrome) has all but disappeared, my seasonal allergies are non-existant, and my kids… well lets just say their cavities are gone. We had determined a long time ago that it was milk (store bought) that was causing a lot of my intestinal problems, and I had to seriously cut back on the one the food I love the most… til a friend suggested we “go raw”… I wouldn’t think about buying milk from a grocery store anymore – especially after I found out what happens to it during the pasturization process…

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Constructionist
Posted on May 21, 2012 at 6:46pm
This whole argument will soon be moot. As soon as the unions take over the dairy industry the cows will be too lazy to produce milk, claim that milking is nothing more than a form of sexual harassment, and go on strike. Soon afer, the NAACP will proclaim that soy-based supplements are a civil right.

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lingsun43
Posted on May 21, 2012 at 6:45pm
The government has the right to enforce food safety laws. You don’t have the right to buy raw milk and give it to your children. That used to be considered common sense before people abandoned it.

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- Toltepeceno
  Posted on May 21, 2012 at 7:12pm
  What planet do you live on? Just how long do you think people drank raw milk with no problems before the government decided what is best for us?
  
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- ronin_6
  Posted on May 21, 2012 at 7:33pm
  @ toltepeceno
  “Just how long do you think people drank raw milk with no problems before the government decided what is best for us?”
  
  Answer; never. Why do you think pasturization was invented? Because childhood deaths were epedemic from consuming the stuff. A childs immune system is not fully developed. Ecoli will make a healthy adult nauseas. It will kill children all the way up to their teens. When Louis Pasteur developed the method he was hailed as a genius and great humanatarian. Don’t like food saftey laws, get the repealed.
  
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- DIDMYRESEARCH
  Posted on May 21, 2012 at 7:37pm
  Pasteurization was invented because someone had the brainy idea to stick a dairy right next to a wine distillery so the cows could eat the distillery waste. The cows were kept unsanitary conditions and became unhealthy. So when people started getting sick from raw milk, they decided to pasteurize it, instead of actually solving the original problem.
  
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- Look4DBigPicture
  Posted on May 21, 2012 at 7:49pm
  Can you say refrigeration?
  
  We were a much healthier country before all the insecticides, herbicides, flourides, chemicals and hormones were incorporated into our food supply. Children who drink raw milk have fewer allergies and colds, because they’re consuming foods in the form God intended.
  
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- Tractorboy
  Posted on May 21, 2012 at 11:24pm
  @Ron 6 you and yours should back off and mind your own business, your the kind who will go and buy organic foods you like at twice the cost. Nobody is waterboarding you with the milk, thought you libs are about privacy and choice, you just can’t stand the fact that some people are doing things they enjoy and that ****** you off.
  
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- mrdoogle
  Posted on May 22, 2012 at 12:47am
  your a moron…
  
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- anji_s
  Posted on May 22, 2012 at 2:17am
  There are archeological remains dating back over 10,000 years ago that show the evidence of milking. I don’t pasteurize my breast milk before I gave it to my kids, and no one ever pasteurized cow milk either, at least not until recently.
  
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- anji_s
  Posted on May 22, 2012 at 2:24am
  pasteurization was not invented for milk, but for wine. It was later applied to milk after large dairy operations began feeding cattle distillery mash instead of grass. It made the cows so ill that they had to be hoisted up with a pulley in order to be milked. Now, if the cow is that sick, of course it would make you sick to drink it’s milk. but instead of cleaning up their act, they just cooked the milk. There now, that’s better. even the calves often die from drinking milk from their commercially raised mothers. Raw milk where cows are eating a natural diet of grasses and forage is safe. The problem is, cows are fed everything to day old baked goods to chicken manure in sawdust. How can that be safe? Cows on pasture which are not eating grain and other crap that they shouldn’t be are not going to be a breeding ground for super e-coli bugs.
  
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suz
Posted on May 21, 2012 at 6:44pm
i will not comply.

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DIDMYRESEARCH
Posted on May 21, 2012 at 6:44pm
We didn’t used to have a problem with raw milk until confinement dairies began feeding their cows distillery waste. Because the cows became unhealthy and were kept in unsanitary conditions, so did their milk and a lot of people started getting sick. It was in the early 1900s that pasteurization became popular to fix a problem created by unsanitary dairies.

The moral of the story is this: healthy cows give healthy milk. I have no problem with raw milk from healthy cows. I only wish I knew where to get it where I live.

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- mrdoogle
  Posted on May 22, 2012 at 12:51am
  Go to realmilk.com and find a farm near you. That’s what my wife and I did and found a farm close to our house. Good luck!
  
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tankyjo
Posted on May 21, 2012 at 6:37pm
Just like Rush said. When the govt can get their 40%, raw milk will be good for you.

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mixplix
Posted on May 21, 2012 at 6:31pm
Raised on a farm with two milking cows, churned our own butter and slopped the two hogs with the skim milk from the separator. Mom and Grandma liked the buttermilk but I didn’t then. Well water that would not pass as safe because it did not contain chlorine, figure that one out.

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MsPinkles
Posted on May 21, 2012 at 6:21pm
I have been raised on raw goats and cows milk my entire life, I now produce my organic raw kefir, a process of fermenting raw milk with kefir grains… The health benefits are amazing… as Glenn Beck would say, “Do your own research.” The evidence against government molested pasteurized milk is astounding. When you cook/pasteurize ANYTHING you kill it. So, the enzymes and nutrients that you are drinking the milk for are dead. No only that they homogenize it, which makes it so that the cream that is usually seperate from the skim blends evenly… Newsflash, Cream was made thick for a reason, it is digested a completely different way from the skim… when you homogenize milk, it clogs arteries… I suggest reading a book called THE MILK BOOK, by William Campbell Douglass. This ought to get you real mad at the “Food Nazis”… May even inspire you to GO RAW!!

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azitdad
Posted on May 21, 2012 at 6:14pm
I drank raw milk from birth to about age 13. I miss it. It was wonderful. Americans have been drinking raw milk up until a few decades ago. The givt wants their cut in the name of “safety” and “health”. That’s all. Raw milk is delicious and excellent for good health.

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