The udder truth

Today, raw cow's milk is legal in at least 22 states -- and is legally available through inventive arrangements in a handful of others. In Florida and Arizona, raw milk can be sold as pet food, as long as it is labeled as such. Dairy farmers in other states are getting even more resourceful in skirting the law while also meeting demand: Cow-share programs, in which consumers buy a share in a cow (usually an annual fee of $25) and then pay a "boarding fee" when they come to fetch their share of the animal's milk, are thriving in Ohio, Virginia and Michigan. "There is no law against drinking milk from your own cow," Fallon explains.

But some states -- and even the FDA -- have begun cracking down on such creative loopholes. Wisconsin banned shares a few years ago, after an outbreak of Campylobacter jejuni was traced to raw milk. In October, state troopers pulled over Michigan dairy farmer Richard Hebron as he was making a delivery and seized more than 400 gallons of his raw milk. And one month earlier, in California (where it's been legal since 1930 and is to this day sold in retail outlets), agriculture officials shut down the nation's largest raw milk dairy, Fresno-based Organic Pastures, after five children who drank the milk became infected with E. coli. (Intensive investigations since then have not turned up any E. coli at the farm, in the milk or even in the cows' manure.) Finally, last fall, an Amish dairy farmer who ran a cow-share program in northeastern Ohio was busted when an undercover state inspector came to his door, feigning interest in raw milk.

One of the most outspoken critics of unpasteurized milk is John Sheehan, director of dairy and egg safety for the FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. Drinking it, Sheehan says, "is like playing Russian roulette with your health." He's even devised an anti-raw-milk PowerPoint presentation. When I ask Sheehan if he's familiar with the theory that pasteurized milk is a nutritionally depleted beverage, his response is terse: "Such claims are wholly without scientific support." Sheehan's slide show enumerates the hazards of drinking raw milk (especially by those who are immuno-compromised) and appears to be a direct rebuttal to a similar slide show that can be found on the Weston A. Price Foundation's Campaign for Real Milk site. (One of Sheehan's slides: Myth No. 1: Raw milk kills pathogens. No it doesn't.")

Mark McAfee, the owner of Organic Pastures, says his dairy has been under intense scrutiny since September, when the E. coli outbreak prompted state investigators to shut the company down for a few weeks. Two of the five children infected with E. coli were hospitalized -- and one nearly died. Still, McAfee maintains there is no proof that the E. coli strain that infected the five children came from Organic Pastures milk. (Indeed, that strain was also separate from the E. coli O157:H7 traced to Earthbound Farm's spinach, which infected nearly 200 Americans in 26 states in September.) Even before this scare, McAfee's dairy was aggressively inspected by the California Department of Food and Agriculture, the Fresno County Health Department and even the FDA.

"I'm probed like you cannot believe," he says. "There's no notice -- they just show up in their white suits with their hairnets and booties." Though disruptive, these inspections are essential if he is to keep his Grade A status. "And they've never found a pathogen," McAfee says, with obvious pride. "Anytime, anyplace."

He isn't surprised. McAfee's Holsteins and Jerseys, all 300 of them, feed year-round on fresh, organic grass -- Sweet Clover, Bermuda and Johnson -- and are kept immaculately clean. McAfee has even invented a mobile milking barn for his cows that allows them to graze rotationally and keeps them away from crowded, manure-filled barns.

Another reason no pathogens have ever been found in his milk, McAfee believes, is that it contains a host of active antibacterial components -- not just proteins like lactoferrin, but enzymes, bacteriocins, colicins and at least 25 beneficial bacteria, including lactobacillus and bifidus, the same probiotics that are found in most yogurt. And all of those components, McAfee says, are destroyed during pasteurization. (In her book "Nourishing Traditions," WAPF founder Fallon concurs: "Pasteurization destroys these helpful organisms, leaving the finished product devoid of any protective mechanism should undesirable bacteria inadvertently contaminate the supply.") To prove his theory, a few years ago, McAfee sent his milk and colostrum to a private lab and had both injected with high levels of the three pathogens. The bacterial counts of all three bugs decreased over time. And the conclusion of the scientist at BSK Labs? "Raw colostrum and raw milk do not appear to support the growth of Salmonella, E. coli O157:H7, and Listeria monocytogenes," stated the lab report. McAfee is so proud of his below-normal bacteria counts that he posts annual averages on his Web site.

"Pasteurization is an excuse to produce dirty milk," says Los Angeles raw milk activist Rahman Dalrymple, citing the outbreaks of salmonella, listeria and Campylobacter that have all been traced to pasteurized milk. In California, accepted bacteria levels for Grade A raw milk are fewer than 15,000 colony-forming units per milliliter; accepted levels for raw milk destined for pasteurization is 50,000. (Post-pasteurization, milk in California can contain 15,000 CFUs per milliliter. States that adopt the FDA's Pasteurized Milk Ordinance allow pasteurized milk 20,000 CFUs per milliliter, one-quarter more than California's raw-milk limit.) Dalrymple, who credits raw milk with curing his asthma, emphasizes that he would never drink raw milk that's destined for pasteurization by a large industrial dairy. Not all raw milk is created equal, Dalrymple says. "Raw milk is dangerous -- if you get it from one of these industrial dairies that have fecal matter and pus and blood in their milk. I would absolutely not drink that!"

This distinction -- between raw milk that's destined for pasteurization and raw milk from a small, spotlessly clean dairy that's kept to higher standards precisely because the milk won't be pasteurized -- is a crucial one, and it's lost on public health officials like Sheehan, who seem to lump all raw milk into the same pathogen-contaminated vat. Industrial farms are dirty -- as the recent agri-exposés "Fast Food Nation" and "The Omnivore's Dilemma" have proved. When Sheehan thinks of raw milk, in other words, he's thinking of milk from cows crowded together in barns, eating a diet of corn, and standing in their own manure. All the raw milk advocates I spoke to are against drinking this type of raw milk.

Perhaps even more convincing is the argument, made by raw milk advocates, that safe raw milk must come from grass-fed cows. That distinction, too, is ignored on the FDA's Web site, in remarks that Sheehan made last May to Ohio's House Agriculture Committee, and in his anti-raw-milk PowerPoint presentation. Cows, like all other ruminants, are meant to eat grass. Yet, at the vast majority of U.S. dairies -- even organic ones -- cows subsist on corn feed. In "The Omnivore's Dilemma," Pollan explains how eating a high-starch diet acidifies a cow's rumen, making the animal sick and eventually allowing bacteria to enter its bloodstream. A cow's corn diet can also make us sick: E. coli O157:H7 has been around only since the early '80s, when it likely evolved in the acidic guts of corn-fed cattle. (E. coli O157:H7 is so lethal because human stomachs, too, are acidic. We can kill off microbes that evolve in the neutral pH of a grass-fed cow's rumen, but not the acid-resistant strains such as E. coli O157:H7.) Grass-fed cows also produce milk that is intrinsically more nutritious: Whole milk, butter and cream from grass-fed cows contain conjugated linoleic acid, an omega-6 fat that has been shown to inhibit breast, skin, stomach and colon cancers. (CLA is found in both raw and pasteurized grass-fed milk -- it does not appear to be damaged by pasteurization.)

Next page: An after-the-fact measure that does little to prevent contamination