Sheep may safely graze
Farm and Dairy is such a popular little paper that even the sheep have taken to reading it:
Food safety not about choice 02/01/2007 - Editor:As a 50-year, nonfarm resident of Ohio, I place all my confidence in the Ohio Department of Agriculture to regulate the quality of milk I drink; milk not only that I buy, but milk that I may be served free by others.
The Schmitmeyer case is a blatant attempt to skirt the intent of the law. This action places me … "at risk."
I expect your department to pursue this case with an appeal of the ruling or further investigation to gather sufficient information to stop this practice and protect the integrity of your department that nonfarm residents such as myself have grown to expect from Ohio Department of Agriculture.
Contrary to Schmitmeyer's contention, the issue is not about "choice."
Food safety — as in health care — is NOT an area where "choice" is important.
The American public in general — save for those directly employed and knowledgeable in the health care field — is not qualified to make health care decisions; we are simply too ignorant of the facts and too lazy to seek them out for ourselves.
As a consequence, we defer to selected experts qualified to make those decisions for us; experts in whom "trust" is paramount.
I trust Ohio Department of Agriculture to act accordingly.
John Gregory
Westfield Center, Ohio
I've chosen to print this in full because, well, it's a masterpiece of its kind. F&D has had a long-running back-and-forth on the raw milk thing. Like any issue, there are legitimate pros and cons on either side. But this is...clinical...
Let's start with that first paragraph. In a masterstroke, Gregory instantly demolishes the "If you don't want it, don't buy it" argument by raising the spectre that somebody might feed him raw milk. Let's admit that there is a greater-than-zero chance of that happening, law or no law. There is also a greater-than-zero chance that somebody might slip LSD into his coffee. There's a word for people who obsess about others poisoning them: paranoids. It's likely that the chances of being slipped hallucinogens is greater than that of being slipped raw milk, because in the state of Ohio, illicit drugs (not necessarily LSD, but in general) are easier to get than raw milk, in spite of being even more illegal (there's no personal use exemption, for example). And the probability of tripping on a dose of LSD is 100%, while the possibility of catching listeria etc. from raw milk is probably single-digits, if that. Now, the likelihood of either happening can be vastly reduced by hanging with the right people. If you don't hang with hippies, you won't get LSD in your coffee; if you don't hang with Weston A. Pricers and the like, you won't get served raw milk. And WAPs are polite people, and would in any case be so proud of actually having scored some raw milk that they would tell you what you were getting. If you're an orthodox Jew, you don't demand that pork be banned on the off chance that somebody might put sausage in your meatloaf; you ask, or you eat in kosher restaurants, or you don't eat mystery meat.
Then we have the assertion that "the Schmitmeyer case is a blatant attempt to skirt the intent of the law." That's debateable. If the intent of Ohio's pasteuriztion laws was to prevent anyone from drinking raw milk, it would not have grandfathered in existing raw milk dairies, and it would have criminalized the act of drinking such milk, just as the drug laws criminalize drug-taking. We'd have SWAT teams coming to dinner all over Holmes County, lifting Amish girls' skirts to see if they're hiding their milk glasses, knocking over the kerosene lamps so the house burns down. He further claims that this attempt puts him at risk...which we've disposed of in the previous paragraph.
Then we have the jaw-dropping statement that in food safety and in health care, choice is not important, because in such cases decisions need to be left in expert hands. So many places to go with that, so little bandwidth...
How do we know who the experts are, when experts disagree? Don't we have to play expert ourselves to decide? Oh, we can leave it to the legislature. Well, they aren't experts either; if they were successful doctors or farmers, they'd probably be doing that. But they call in expert testimony? Well, isn't that what you or I do, except in our own cases it informs our own actions instead of being binding on everyone. Might not some experts (like dairies) have their own axes to grind? Might they present incomplete health evidence to support a commercial advantage: that pasteurized milk has a longer shelf-life?
The free market provides all kinds of expertise, in great and small doses. If you don't want to decide which kind of milk to drink, you could let the big dairies decide. Can't be trusted? But you trust them NOW...how do you know somebody at Reiter's didn't turn the heat off too soon? You don't know, really, do you? And note that Schmitmeyer is not a dairy, it's a herd share. You can't buy their milk in a store. You have to be firmly obstinately expert to get it. So why not let experts be experts. And if doctors are public health experts, why aren't THEY allowed to buy raw milk?
If experts have the answers, and you don't, why should they allow you to drink milk (or any other specific item of diet) at all? John Gregory, are you the only American who eats a balanced diet, day-in, day-out? Shouldn't experts formulate something like Purina Primate Chow, so that you can eat a perfectly balanced diet at every meal? Sure, some experts talk about "Biochemical individuality" but most approved-by-experts experts disagree, so they don't count. Of course, in your perfect world, only MDs will be allowed to practice medicine. they'll force you to come to the doctor for checkups when you're healthy (all paid for by taxes, because only experts know what medical care really costs). Doctors will only do medical procedures approved by other expert doctors, whether they work or not. Experts can even decide when you will die; legally, you can't decide when to do that now, so having somebody else decide when is not a big stretch.
There's a name for experts who decide what others need to eat and when,and where they should live, who take care of all their medical and personal needs, and who decide when their useful life is over. They're called farmers. And you, John, are asking to be treated like livestock. Now, I could without a hint of irony state that it's a free country and you have the right to be treated like livestock if you so choose. Unfortunately, the 13th Amendment prevents farmers from treating you like livestock. And I wish that you, or better still, the Supreme Court, would realize that the rest of us don't want to be treated like livestock either.
The problem here, John, is that you are sick. You have no self-esteem, and little esteem for others. The outcome of your recommendation to "trust the experts", if implemented, is the collapse of society, because it is the refusal to think. None of us is so expert that we have nobody more expert than we are, in our area of expertise. If we leave all thinking to one man, who will that man be? Kim Jong-il?
I'm not even sure you exist. It's hard to believe an American would think that way. Maybe you're just some troll that F&D invented to get some interesting letters, one reason I'm blogging instead of writing to them. But then, I got a comment just this morning that made an argument similar to yours. And I had a girlfriend once (note the past tense, a past tense that began as soon as she clearly articulated the position) who claimed similar ignorance to your own and said that it was the State's job to childproof the room, and that if that inconvenienced adults like me, tough. I'd mention her name, but she's married now, and no more dangerous than anyone else carrying a concealed vote.
Your position is fundamentally inconsistent. I'm more than willing for you not to think, to let experts tell you what to do. It's your life, to waste in whatever way you see fit. But then, you choose to be expert enough to tell me which experts I must listen to. Make up your mind. If you want to be a sheep, quit trying to play shepherd.
Comments