Risks are always in play
Maureen O’Hagan’s story on raw milk was certainly interesting [“Is raw milk safe?” page one, March 21]. It did shed light on what sounds to be legitimate health risks related to the product.
But she seemed to peg raw-milk consumers as foolhardy risk-takers, playing “Russian roulette” with their health while believing in the “unscientific” claims made for the health benefits of the product.
The trouble with this is that health risks are always in play when relying on the American food-supply chain. And most often, these risks are being taken even as there is established science that categorically demonstrates the food being consumed is detrimental in all ways to your health.
Worse yet, the FDA regularly is either passive in its regulation of these products, or outright in support of them. Anyone familiar with the FDA’s sorry position on trans fats knows this, and would look to them last for a “scientific” determination of a product’s safety or efficacy.
So rather than present raw-milk drinkers as superstitious zealots prone to a belief in conspiracy theories, you could have gone another route with your story. You could have taken an opportunity to show the murky difficulty consumers face in making risk/benefit choices in the foods they eat when having to rely on the word of captured regulators.
The question for this story was why we let a few thousand people take a health risk for an unproven benefit? Maybe the better question to address is why do we regularly let millions of people make bad health choices while telling them they are making a healthy one? As they say, if you can get people to ask the wrong question, you don’t have to worry about the answer.
— Tom Cobb, Lynnwood
We lived on raw milk
I read the article on raw milk with amusement. We raised all our children on raw milk with never a bad tooth or broken bone among ’em. They lived with cows, chickens, hogs, and horses, and were, and still are, disgustingly healthy.
We are an old, fat couple with family histories fraught with health problems who have lived and eaten a great deal from our postage-stamp piece of property. We have people mad at us because we don’t have high cholesterol or diabetes.
I do not know what the answer is for you urban dwellers. Continue going to your Great Grub Temples, consuming their sanitized, sterilized, plastic-wrapped goods, I guess.
Here beyond the sidewalks we will be drinking milk straight from our cows, eating our own beef, enjoying bacon and eggs at breakfast, and I will remain the terror of the vegetable kingdom, ripping the ears off the corn, gouging the eyes out of potatoes, chopping the heads off cabbages, and ripping baby carrots from their beds and eating them alive.
— Mark Aamot, Custer
Concern for the bottom line
Jeff Brown had better hope that he was badly misquoted. Otherwise, he sounds more than a little disingenuous.
At the very least, he espouses a naive and ignorant knowledge of the concerns surrounding and the historical reasons for pasteurization. At the worst, he is a cynical smart aleck whose concern is not really the Christian line, but his bottom line, wherein he would rather sell expensive product to other foolish disciples — and their children — than demonstrate concern about the safety of his product.
“Everything God designed is good for you.” Oh please. God presumably is also responsible for cobra venom, cyanide, botulism, and the Ebola virus. Can’t recommend eating them, though. And, oh yes, He created the E. coli bacterium, too, didn’t He?
— Alan E. Marsh, Kirkland
Never again
When I was in my twenties, I came down with an infection of campylobacter two times. My doctor could not figure out how I was picking this bacteria up. Finally she looked at me and asked, “You don’t drink raw milk, do you?” I answered in the affirmative and the source was found.
I’m now in my fifties and can say that I’ve never been that sick before or since. I’m a firm believer in eating whole foods, but I will never drink raw milk again. It’s simply not worth the risk.
— Debby Erickson, Edmonds