By Meadow Larkin
For those who want to know what the big deal is about raw milk, in two words it’s good bacteria, killed off by pasteurization. People drink raw milk because they seek good bacteria. (Raw milk dairies are tested for diseases so this issue should not be confused with diseases.)
For those who are curious about raw milk, you might find this video delightful, and a good place to begin dispelling false assumptions. http://www.moojesus.com/
While people have been taught to believe bacteria is dangerous and so drinking milk with live bacteria in it would be risky, they are not distinguishing between good and bad bacteria and most importantly, not understanding that their own life depends on bacteria which make up 70-80% of their immune system.
Yet many continue to erroneously believe that route to safe food is through sterilizing it.
They might be surprised to realize that pasteurized milk, which lacks the essential live bacteria to produce lactic acid, doesn’t sour but putrefies. Whereas, live bacteria in raw milk lets it sour naturally. The bacterial production of lactic acid keeps raw milk healthy even as souring occurs, turning safe milk into equally safe sour milk.
But good bacteria are not just okay or nice. They are crucial. They are health itself.
What industrial agriculture is actually doing wrong, summed up most simply and scientifically, is killing good bacteria. It does so in endless ways.
First, they remove all natural circumstances that are necessary to preserve good bacteria and the protective balance it provides – such as sunlight, normal diet of grass, freedom of movement.
They substitute intolerably crowded, highly stressful, literally putrid living conditions in which bad bacteria can flourish.
To that they add such things as hormones (for more production); GMOs (for control through patents and their accompanying sale of pesticides); herbicides and pesticides, etc. – all of which either undermine or kill off good bacteria, and even create disease.
To cope with the infections and contamination which abound, they apply antibiotics, irradiation, pasteurization, chemical sprays, etc. in order to mask or kill the abnormal pathogens they themselves created conditions for.
In the process, they destroy all bacteria, leaving the field open for the emergence of dangerous and even mutant new ones.
When people die (from dangerous bacterial contamination caused by eliminating essential conditions for normal bacteria), they say the food is unsafe and they must have more power.
To deal with what they approach as a mysterious turn of events, they have media put out story after story to scare the public into pushing for “food safety” through bills that would set up centralized, massive policing power over all food and everything related to food.
The bills do not undo a single one of the causative conditions, products or processes that have produced “contaminated and virtually dead food.”
The bills, instead, would:
1. Mandate farm- and business-destroying paperwork unrelated to providing the basic things necessary for food safety – the right natural conditions to maintain good bacteria,
2. Mandate standards that do not fit any safe, naturally bacteria-preserving system and cannot be complied with financially by those already providing food from such that safe system,
3. Mandate GMOs, pesticides, hormones, antibiotics, etc. – their own the bacteria-destroying and profit-making industrial products and processes that underly unsafe food and cause dealy bacterial contamination.
Thus, those who created the filthy conditions and products that lead inexorably to dangerous pathogens, have in the name of “hygiene” and “science-based food safety” come up with bills (C-6 in Canada and S 510 in the US) which are set to regulate those who have been providing safe food all along by quietly doing the right things (all very simple, natural, common sense, and even humane things) out of existence.
So, finally, to unsafe, they add insane.
People are urged to push for more bacteria-killing industrial processes to make food safe, though food is unsafe from what industry does to bacteria with its current industrial processes. They can only get away with this because people are encouraged to believe that sterility is the same as safety. Yet, sterility turns out to be dangerous.
Good bacteria is the immune system of the world. It cleans the soil, it protects the animals, it defines fresh food, and it keeps people well.
As the articles below show, the simplistic hygiene theory is collapsing. Applying it in a way that wipes out good bacteria has boomeranged and created auto-immune diseases and new pathogens, and gone on to destroy biodiversity in plants and animals and whole ecosystems from runoff of bacteria-killing products into soil and water.
Good, living bacteria are the true dividing line between safe processes that protect soil, animals, food and people, and dangerous conditions, products and processes that create dead soil, sick animals, worthless food, and diseased people.
By simply focusing on whether good bacteria would have been preserved, anyone can easily judge whether a system, product, process, or condition is safe or is dangerous.
This will help people see federal or state requirements to milk by expensive machinery rather than by hand, or in expensive building with cement floors rather than buildings with soil and hay (which are easier on cows), or to have separate expensive equipment and buildings for bottling the milk, as irrelevant to and unnecessary for food safety.
Instead, people will realize that the safety of their food depends on the conditions the cows live in, whether they are forced into unnatural crowding, living in buildings, whether they are filled with hormones, antibiotics and GMO feed that includes pesticide residue and animal parts and blood, whether they are ill from all that, whether they are suffering. The machinery, the paperwork, the pasteurization, the seal of approval by the FDA, doesn’t make milk from those cows safe.
Cows owned by farmers who know and care about them, who give them pasture and freedom and sunlight, and who milk them by hand or by machinery, in cement floored barns or in barns with hay-covered dirt floors, produce good milk. The issue isn’t machinery or buildings.
The same is true with vegetables. The immense “self-inspecting” HACCP paperwork and rules allow for nono-cropped vegetables from fields where the soil is dead from pesticides and has been “fertilized” with contaminated sewage sludge coming from excrement of thousands of heavily drugged animals feeding on GMO/slaughter-house-waste feed raised with pesticides and crowded in pain into CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations). Washed with bleach or irradiated to kill the contamination, but that doesn’t make those vegetables safe,
Vegetables from a normal farm where there are animals in the fields – mice, deer, dogs, rabbits, birds, squirrels, – and the soil is full of billions of diverse microbes and worms and the fertilizer comes from manure from healthy and unstressed animals fed normal grass diets, are safe food.
Industrial rules require poisons and shooting to ensure no animals “contaminate” fields, earthworms are listed as an “invasive species,” and the FDA lists manure as a source of seed contamination.
“In order for the wheel to turn, for life to be lived, impurities are needed, and the impurities of impurities in the soil, too, as is known, if it is to be fertile. Dissension, diversity, the grain of salt and mustard are needed: Fascism does not want them, forbids them….” – Primo Levi
The dividing line between safe and unsafe food is not sterility.
Realize that and anyone will be able to judge whether a “food safety” bill provides food safety. They will be able to tell whether in the name of “food safety,” the bill demands bacteria-destroying industrial rules and products, requires nonsensical but costly paperwork, and imposes irrelevant but beyond-reach industrial equipment standards, which never address a single source of unsafe food, but amply provides many different means to eliminate those people who are very simply and naturally providing not only safe, but actually healthy, food.
The tiny, squiggling dividing line between safe and unsafe food is good bacteria.
In Poland, ‘green’ fields besieged http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/world/europe/03iht-poland.4.11654721.html
Battle FOR Bacteria
https://foodfreedom.wordpress.com/2009/07/24/the-battle-over-bacteria/
Pastuerization: Pulling the Plug on Scientific Fallacies Undergirding Our Industrial Food and Drug Culture
https://foodfreedom.wordpress.com/2009/11/24/pasteurization-pulling-the-plug-on-scientific-fallacies-undergirding-our-industrial-food-and-drug-culture/
Good bacteria Part I
http://www.NaturalNews.com/027763_friendly_bacteria_probiotics.html
Good bacteria Part II
http://www.naturalnews.com/027845_probiotics_health.html
Value of germs
http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2009/12/germs.html
Friendly bacteria and type 1 diabetes
http://opa.yale.edu/news/article.aspx?id=6043
Solution to superbugs
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/8878763