Some Thoughts Around the Court Hearing July 31, 2008

I believe Bills C-51 and C-52 are more of a hazard to the health of Canadians than Michael Schmidt's raw milk. And I'm not the only one who thinks like that. Michael Schmidt is showing us that there is another direction we can take, both for our personal health and for our national food security.

The value of this court case is that it once again brings attention to questions of raw milk and the importance of having a choice about what we eat. It's time for people to wake up and see which side their bread is buttered on. Do people want to drink milk from cows that have a healthy work-life balance, cows that are not driven to produce maximum yield? Do they want to drink milk that hasn't been put through an industrial process of pasteurization and homogenization? Would they like to have a personal relationship with their farmer? Do they want their milk grown nearby and not dependent on oil-intensive shipping? Increasingly, I believe, the answer to all these questions will be YES.

With the recent scares around Bills C-51 and C-52, which would reclassify supplements as drugs, to be sold only through pharmaceutically-controlled channels, people have started waking up to the tendency of government, when left to its own devices, to be co-opted by industry and global-trade-organization agendas, rather than serving the public interest.

For more than 12 years, Michael Schmidt has been trying to start a dialog with government around developing a model for the safe supply of raw milk. Last January, raw milk advocates personally delivered proposals to the offices of Ontario MPPs, suggesting that Ontario adopt the British model for regulating raw milk. Not much interest was shown, although apparently the Queen of England (and of course Canada) is known to drink raw milk from her own herd. And I've also heard that, until last year, this raw milk was sold to the public.

Raw milk is legal in Britain and in much of Europe, where it is often supplied through on-farm automatic dispensing machines. This spring, Michael Schmidt was a keynote speaker at a slow food film festival in Bologna, Italy, where the new documentary, “Michael Schmidt, Organic Hero or Bioterrorist” premiered. Look for it at this fall's Toronto International Film Festival. Of course raw milk is also legal in several states in the US, notably California, although there have been efforts made through government channels to raise standards there to unrealistic levels and thereby regulate it out of existence. Also this past spring, Harper's Magazine published an extensive article on what it called “the raw milk underground”, focusing chiefly on Michael Schmidt and on Mark Macafee of Organic Pastures in California.

I doubt there's anyone who doesn't know someone who has stopped eating dairy on the advice of their doctor because they're supposedly “lactose intolerant”. So why are there now so many more “lactose intolerant” people than there were a generation or two ago? What if the problem isn't milk itself, but the whole technology of how it's grown and processed? It doesn't take a lot of market research to begin to see that there could be a huge latent demand for organic raw milk. People want it. Many recent immigrants have grown up drinking raw milk in their home countries. Ontario farmers are legally allowed to drink their own raw milk and have done so for decades.

Among Michael Schmidt's customers are many people who couldn't drink regular industrially-produced milk, but who do well on organic raw milk. We're lucky that Michael Schmidt has done such groundbreaking work here in Ontario, developing and testing a model for the safe production and distribution of raw milk, a model that could be copied and replicated in other communities across the province. What a wonderful thing that could be for the health of Canadians; what a saving for the health-care system; what an opportunity for the future of dairy farming in Ontario. But is it safe? All choices have some risk associated with them. More and more people agree that we need to be free to make our own informed choices about food and not be forced to depend on experts or authorities to tell us what to eat and drink.

-- R. Chomko