THE buses rolling into the parking lot of Eau Claire’s Chippewa Valley Technical College came from every corner of Wisconsin, and at least from one corner of Ontario, each packed with farm families wearing paper milking caps with “Freedom” written on them and brandishing signs that said, “I ♥ Raw Milk.” March 10 was smack in the middle of calving time, but the heifers would have to wait — raw milk was that important.
The occasion was a hearing-turned-rally on a bill in the Wisconsin Legislature that would allow dairy farmers to sell milk straight from the spigot to anyone who felt it did a body good, save the very young, the very old and the very pregnant. Some 500 farmers crammed into the small college auditorium to cheer on one of the bill’s sponsors, State Representative Chris Danou, the Thoreau of raw, who declared that, should the legislative process fail, civil disobedience would surely follow.
Zealots like those at the rally extol the virtues of raw, including its unadulterated animal fat bio-activators, which may lower the risk of asthma and allergies. Standard pasteurization, they claim, kills a dubious-sounding 99.999 percent of milk’s good, bad and indifferent microorganisms, resulting in what raw milk people call “a whitish liquid.” What they fail to mention is that you can’t get $6 a gallon for pasteurized milk.
Published June 4th in The New Times. To read the rest of the story go to: www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/opinion/07feldman.html