Health benefits come up against bacterial risks
By CHRISTINA YOON Special to the Daily Press
ARIZONA AVE Despite recent bacteria scares in foods like spinach, tomatoes and jalapeño peppers, Mark McAfee’s raw milk business is thriving. His farm, Organic Pastures, has increased profits at an average of $1 million a year for the past several years.
Fans of his raw milk, butter and cheese have said that his products have helped clear up health problems including poor vision, allergies and even old injured muscles.
“People tell me stories of how their asthma will come back and how their eczema flares up (without raw milk),” said McAfee, whose milk can be found at the Downtown Farmers’ Market, Whole Foods and Co- Opportunity. “It’s a pretty powerful food.”
Although McAfee has no problems finding customers for his raw milk, he and Claravele Farm, the other raw milk dairy in California, are in danger of shutting down if a newly proposed bill, SB 201, does not pass on the state Assembly floor in August.
SB 201, or the Fresh Milk Act of 2008, was drafted by Senators Dean Florez (D-Shafter) and Don Perata (D-East Bay) as an alternative to the current milk safety law, AB 1735, which raw milk farmers claim was created by opponents to set the dairies up for failure by setting overly restrictive limits on the amount of bacteria in dairy products.
“AB 1735 was basically a snow job, a sneak attack on raw milk in California,” McAfee said.
The current law requires that dairy products hold less than 10 coliforms per milliliter before they can be sold. Coliforms are bacteria commonly used to measure food safety levels, including both the harmful and benign forms of the E. coli bacteria.
Jay Van Rein at the California Department of Food and Agriculture said that once a dairy product fails three out of five of these coliform tests, the product is pulled from the shelves and cannot be sold until it passes the tests again. According to the department’s records, Organic Pastures raw milk products have failed the test 19 times this year, with products being restricted from sale four times before being reinstated. Claravale has failed the test nine times but has not had a product pulled off of the shelves yet.
“It’s literally impossible” to pass the tests, said Maurice Kaehler, who has worked for Organic Pastures for almost four years and often manages the farm’s stand at Santa Monica farmers’ markets to educate new customers about the benefits of raw milk.
Organic Pastures has been able to stay in business this year largely due to a temporary restraining order that was placed upon AB 1735 in March. In May, a state judge refused to turn the order into a preliminary injunction, placing raw milk dairies in danger of shutting down permanently unless the newly proposed bill passes in August.
Supporters of the new bill say that the current system depends too much on an arbitrary and unreliable system to determine the safety of raw milk. McAfee claimed that in one instance, a single sample of milk returned two test results saying there were zero coliforms and one saying that there were 15.
“Even the lab can’t figure out how many coliforms are in a milliliter of milk,” he said. “There are around 30 to 50 coliforms on one clean thumbprint. They’re looking for the wrong thing.”
The proposed bill would not replace the law currently in place. Instead, it would be set up as a parallel standard that farmers could choose to use instead of AB 1735. A member of Florez’s staff said that under the bill, farmers would develop an individual Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HCCP) plan which would need to be approved by Department of Food and Agriculture as a unique method of measuring each dairy’s food safety.
In addition, dairy products would be subjected to required pathogen tests instead of the current coliform test. Pathogens are agents, bacterial or fungal, that cause harm to humans, as opposed to coliforms, which are not always harmful to the human body.
“To put it straight, SB 201 is a food safety bill, 1735 is not,” McAfee said.
Bill Marler, a Seattle-based food poisoning attorney who has worked on several cases against raw milk sellers, is not only opposed to SB 201, but believes that raw milk should be made illegal altogether. He runs a food poisoning litigation blog, www.marlerblog.com, on which he lists lawsuits filed nationwide against raw milk distributors.
Although he supported Florez’s past efforts in increasing the safety of spinach after recent E. coli outbreaks and said that he respects the senator’s work in food safety, he plainly disagrees with his support of raw milk.
“My perspective on the consumption of raw milk is colored by the reality of what I see, which is a lot of sick kids that didn’t have to be that way if they were drinking pasteurized milk,” he said.“It’s my personal opinion that raw milk should not be available under any circumstances. What Sen. Florez is trying to do is make raw milk safer, but it’s never going to make it safe.”
McAfee said that while it is very possible to get sick from unclean dairy products, Marler fails to make some important distinctions about the kinds of milk that lead to illnesses.
“Bill is absolutely right,” said McAfee. “There are people who are getting sick. But why? One, their immune systems are shot. And two, what raw milk are they drinking? They’re drinking raw milk from God knows where, because raw milk is being forced into the black market. You do get sick when you have a mix between a pathogen-ridden product and a stripped immune system.”
Organic Pastures encourages first-time raw milk users to start slowly with a quarter of a cup a day for about four days, building up the body’s immunity to unfamiliar bacteria until it passes a threshold and can handle it without side effects such as stomach aches and diarrhea.
As for Marler’s examples of illnesses due to contact with E. coli, Listeria or Campylobacter bacteria linked to raw milk, McAfee said the statistics are skewed because the Center for Disease Control groups cases of pasteurization failure, raw milk cheeses, uncertified raw milk and legal raw dairy like his in the same category.
“They’ve got Listeria all over pasteurizers,” he said. “We’ve never had Listeria, and we’ve yet to find a pathogen ever in our milk.”
Santa Monica resident Susan Emmer stopped by the Organic Pastures stand at Saturday’s Farmers’ Market on Arizona Avenue to sample the farm’s milk. Emmer suffers from dairy allergies and relied on soy, almond and rice milk products until friends suggested that she try raw milk.
“I know a lot of people now that are drinking it,” she said. “I feel really lucky that I have this in Santa Monica.”
Kaehler explained to Emmer that those who are allergic to dairy or lactose intolerant can usually drink raw milk with no problems because a digestive enzyme is present in dairy and taken away in the pasteurization process.
Emmer liked the fact that the farm is USDA certified organic and the milk is sus-tainably produced. After speaking with Kaehler and sampling varieties of milk, she bought a bottle of the raw skim milk to try at home.
McAfee sees it as part of his mission to educate people like Emmer about the importance of integrating natural, beneficial bacteria into their systems by using natural products like raw milk.
“This is a very passionate fight for me,”he said. “The loss would be greater than our business. I’m so militant about the people’s right to choose because of people’s stories.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on July 30, 2008. Read the original PDF.