America devotes an inordinate amount of resources to its wars on controlled substances; namely its wars on drugs – and raw milk. Yep, you read that right. The prohibition of alcohol may have ended in the US in 1933 with the passage of the Twenty-First Amendment, but it’s still alive and kicking when it comes to unpasteurized milk.
The
retail sale of raw milk for human consumption is illegal in the vast majority of states, and though some
states do permit direct farm sales and/or herd shares, federal laws prohibit the sale and transport of raw milk across state lines. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration considers unpasteurized milk or cream –– and any uncooked products made from it, such as cheese, yogurt, and ice cream –– to be categorically unsafe. Their official line is that “raw milk can harbor dangerous microorganisms that can pose serious health risks to you and your family.”
However,
by their own figures, a mere “800 people in the United States have gotten sick from drinking raw milk or eating cheese made from raw milk since 1998.” When you compare those numbers to
the statistics on alcohol and cigarettes – which can be bought legally in all 50 states – the government’s position on the sale of raw milk appears to be inconsistent to say the very least. And the discrimination against raw dairy is even more profound when
the health benefits are taken into consideration. But while the fight to decriminalize other controlled substances grabs headlines and galvanizes support, few are even aware of the prohibition against real milk. Kristin Canty, a small farm advocate from Massachusetts, hopes to change that with her compelling new documentary, Farmageddon: The Unseen War on American Family Farms.
Canty didn’t set out to make a film, merely to heal her son, who suffered from asthma and severe allergies. When traditional medicine failed to help, she embarked on a voyage of discovery that led her to raw milk. While fighting to heal her sick child, she also had to fight the seemingly unreasonable and intransigent attitude our government has towards healthy-minded boutique farmers who produce this hard to come by commodity in the face of much adversity. Frustrated and angered by reports of raids, and shocked at the increasing ferocity of the persecution of those who were doing nothing more than producing fresh food, Canty was compelled to expose the truth. For her, it wasn’t just about the disparity in treatment between big agriculture (whose factory methods have actually been responsible for the majority of serious food scares in recent years) and the mom & pop organic and sustainable operations, but an issue of a mother’s right to choose healthy food.
Nicole Powers: Congratulations on the film. I found it absolutely riveting. It really struck home for me, because I remember when I first came to America, just walking through the grocery aisles, it was so hard to find anything that actually resembled food. It just always amazes me what Americans will put on their plate and call food.
Kristin Canty: Yeah, I agree with you.
NP: I always joke about the advertisements for cheese products where they say “made with 5% real cheese” – doesn’t that beg the question what’s in the other 95%? It amazes me that more Americans are not asking that question.
KC: It’s scary. It’s truly scary. I know, that most Americans don’t think at all, and don’t want to think, about what they put into their mouths.
NP: How did the process start for you?
KC: Actually, I used to be that person. It’s not that I didn’t think about what I put into my mouth, I just didn’t think that the government would lie to us, or allow foods that were so unhealthy to be in the supermarket. So I clipped coupons and we ate processed foods all day long, and my son Charlie got really sick. He was my third child. When he was in preschool he was completely ridden with allergies and bad asthma. He had a middle ear hearing impairment because he had so much fluid in his ears. It was pretty sad because we never knew it because he never got an ear infection, he was just moderately hearing impaired and it took us awhile to catch that. We didn’t know why his speech was delayed.
The doctors told me that he was allergic to the world, which meant grass, dust, every kind of pollen, every kind of animal. So my house, I had to rip up all my carpets and take down my curtains, and vacuum [for] dust mites, wrap his bed in plastic, and run a HEPA filter all the time. [I had to] follow him around with an asthma inhaler and an EpiPpen. It was just crazy. He was just so sickly. None of the medications were working. He was just getting sicker, sicker.
Finally, I’d started to try to heal him with food. I was walking through Whole Foods one day at my whit’s end, and someone handed me a copy of
Patient Heal Thyself by Dr. Jordan Rubin – it’s all about healing yourself with whole foods. I started cooking with his recipes and I needed more. He recommended
Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallen-Morrell. That book is very much about raw milk and traditional foods, and it had a lot of examples of people who had been healed from allergies and asthma because of raw milk.
I just figured what the heck, I’ve got to give it a try. So I went out to the farm [to get raw milk], and met the farmer, met his kids, met his customers, and made sure everybody was healthy. I drank a ton of it myself before I finally gave it to my children, and within a few months my son was completely healed of all allergies. He had none. He’s 16 now, and he doesn’t even sniffle. He doesn’t even have seasonal allergies. It was amazing.
It’s very hard in this lifestyle with the four kids and four teenagers especially. We’re all very busy, but we belong to three co-ops and we try as hard as we can to get as much of our food as possible directly from farmers that we know and trust.
NP: What’s the theory behind the idea that raw milk can alleviate allergies and asthma?
KC: The theory that I first started investigating actually was that kids who grow up on farms don’t get as many allergies and asthma. They [attribute] that to the fact that their bodies are tougher and they’re exposed to more bacteria. Probably what’s happening to most of us today is we’re not consuming as much of the positive bacteria. We’re consuming a lot of the sterile dead foods and we need the bacteria. We need the enzymes that our foods are completely devoid of right now. Basically, [my son’s] gut was probably just empty of good bacteria, and when your gut doesn’t have the bacteria, it can’t protect you against viruses and diseases and allergens.
NP: It’s this modern thing of being too clean.
KC: Exactly. Exactly.
NP: And it’s actually hard to source unpasteurized, raw dairy products. As a European, I used to love unpasteurized cheese, and I couldn’t understand why it was so hard to find it in America. I had no idea that cheese shops that were selling unpasteurized Brie under the counter were actually participating in some sort of bootleg, prohibition-era kind of activity.
KC: Right. I know, it’s so sad. And actually I read — and I forget where – that the French farmers and the French cheesemakers are having a difficult time with their government, that the government is trying to shut down their raw cheeses. That’s just a travesty. Nobody is getting sick from raw cheese in France, or anywhere else. There are two artisanal cheese makers, very large cheese makers, in America that were just recently shut down…At least we can have raw cheeses in our higher end supermarkets and cheese shops that are aged over 60 days, and now [the FDA is] trying to increase that to 90 days. Basically, I think that their goal is to eliminate raw cheese altogether. They’re just unfairly making that a scapegoat. We know where the most unsafe food is in America, and they’re just letting that go scot-free and picking on artisanal food makers.
NP: For the benefit of the people that haven’t seen the film, what is at the root of most of the food scares?
KC: Well, if the US government was serious about food safety, I think the first thing that they would want to do is build more USDA inspected slaughterhouses. Right now we don’t have enough of them. If you’re a grass fed farmer, in many states, you can’t get your meat slaughtered in a USDA slaughterhouse because there’s different rules for the grass fed then for the conventional. A lot of slaughterhouses don’t want to be bothered with those rules, and don’t have to be because they have enough business. In many cases the farmers have to haul their meat very long distances to get to these slaughterhouses. And thousands and thousands and thousands of animals are slaughtered in an hour in these huge facilities that aren’t well inspected. Half the time the farmers will tell me that they’re not even sure that what comes out is what they put in.
NP: Right, they have no way of knowing that it’s actually their meat really.
KC: Exactly…In Massachusetts we’re very lucky, we have two USDA inspected slaughterhouses. The farmers really trust the inspectors and know them well. Plus we are allowed to have these mobile slaughtering units. You can bring them onto the farm. They come with an inspector, and they’re very, very clean. In my DVD that will hopefully come out in the winter, I have a friend of mine, who’s a farmer and teaches sustainable farming at Tufts University, explain these mobile units and why they’re so sanitary as far as slaughtering is concerned – and the most humane. But in other states they don’t allow these outdoor units, they don’t allow field slaughter, and they pretend that these huge, filthy USDA slaughterhouses are the way to safety – and it’s actually the exact opposite.
NP: Right, ‘cause I understand that you’re getting cattle that have been raised on antibiotics with bacteria resistant E. coli in their gut and in their feces, and all that spills out in these slaughterhouses that don’t have the time or the inclination to be truly clean. So that just gets into the meat, and it doesn’t necessarily just get into the meat of the carcass that’s being slaughtered at the time, it gets into the meat of all the carcasses that come after that animal, which is why we’re getting all of these scares involving bacteria resistant strains of E. coli.
KC: Exactly. Then factory farming is the other very unsafe practice…Instead of keeping the cows clean, they keep the cows crowded, knee deep in manure in some cases, and feed them grain and GMO corn, which cows should not be eating. Cows should be eating grass. Instead of keeping the animals clean, they try to clean the milk. You’re still eating that; you’re not getting rid of any of that through pasteurization. Ultra-pasteurization is even worse. That just kills everything. You’re not getting anything live in that milk. It’s just dead food – completely dead food. That is only meant for a longer shelf life. There is absolutely no nutrition in ultra pasteurized milk, and that’s the milk that I’m sure 99% of Americans are drinking daily.
NP: Right, and that milk is mixed in huge vats with milk from thousands of other cows.
KC: Yes, exactly. So these are the kinds of discussions we should be having as far as food safety is concerned – not going after our artisanal food makers and shutting them down.
NP: These factory farming methods, in England they were brought in during the war, and they were only ever supposed to be a low cost, low labor, temporary measure to feed a population that was in crisis. They were never supposed to be maintained after the war. Then these big food corporations took hold and things never reverted back. What is the history of factory farming methods in America?
KC: As far as the dairy factory farm, what happened was, after prohibition, when they started making whisky here instead of importing it, these big huge distilleries in New York City found that when they fed cows spent grains, the cows would produce a lot of milk. These were the first factory farms. They moved tons of cows, tied them up – the cows never moved – and they were fed this spent grain.
NP: Which is the byproduct of whisky production.
KC: Exactly. They were called swill dairies because the cows were fed the swill.
NP: Swill dairies. Lovely. Yum.
KC: Yeah. So the milk came out blue. They were milked with dirty hands into dirty buckets. The milk came out blue, but plentiful…So they added chalk to it to make it white and fed it to the multitudes. And I think the death rate in New York City at that time was 50% in children that were drinking this milk.
NP: Wow.
KC: So they outlawed swill dairies. There was a group of doctors that were outraged about this and started this certified raw milk movement and were saying that the only dairies that you should be drinking milk from were ones that were certified clean raw dairies. But at about the same time they discovered that pasteurization could also clean the milk and get rid of unhealthy pathogens — and that was just the cheaper, easier way. They could continue this factory farming and make money. So eventually, pasteurization won out and many states passed laws making it harder to get raw milk.
NP: You said the death rate was 50%? Five, zero?
KC: 50% in children under a certain age. I think it was like in children under 6 the death rate was 50% from drinking this milk at the time.
NP: So instead of outlawing the unhygienic practices, by almost a comedy of errors they outlawed raw milk.
KC: Exactly.
NP: So moving on to what’s happening today, what’s shocking in your movie is the footage of the raids. It looks like the authorities are invading a meth labs, and yet all these farmers are doing is producing fresh milk products.
KC: Yeah. It’s really sad. That’s why I made the movie. I just wanted to expose the raids. I was really upset. It wasn’t really meant to make anybody drink raw milk. It wasn’t meant to be a diet movie, or tell you what you should be eating. I tell my story quickly, and I tell you the way that I like to eat, but I think that this is really a civil rights issue that everybody should be concerned about, whether you want to eat this way or not. I would think that if most Americans knew that the government was spending millions of dollars spying on sheep farmers and raiding Amish farmers, they would be quite disturbed, no matter how they eat.
NP: Right, you feature a family, Linda and Larry Faillace, that imported some sheep…
KC: Yeah, they were spied on by the USDA investigative forces.
The USDA has their own police force, and the USDA spent $1 million spying on this sheep farm and writing down every 15 minutes what they were doing.
NP: And what their kids were doing.
KC: And what their children were doing. All they were doing was home schooling and taking care of a flock of beautifully healthy sheep. They were saying that these sheep were at risk for mad cow disease because they’d come over from Europe.
NP: Which is a concern. Coming from Europe I can’t give blood. But I also know that there are downed cattle in American slaughterhouses that they don’t bother testing and that the USDA has actually
reduced testing for mad cow disease [and has
gone to great lengths to stop concerned farmers from conducting their own private carcass inspections. If they were really seriously concerned mad cow, they’d step that back up.
KC: Right. They would test a cow for mad cow disease, not the sheep. Sheep have never gotten mad cow disease. They get scrapie, which is related, but these sheep didn’t even have scrapie. These sheep were very healthy. They had imported them from Europe, and none of the sheep in Europe were being killed for mad cow disease, they were all healthy flocks also. They were just using it as a big scapegoat basically, pretending that they were taking care of mad cow disease in this country by keeping everything that had been imported from Europe out.
NP: Right, if they were serious about the issue, they wouldn’t be spending a million bucks on an artisan sheep farmer, they’d be spending it on upping mad cow screening in cows in America since we know that there are
downed cattle heading into slaughterhouses.
KC: Exactly. They didn’t really want to find it.
NP: There is a trade war between Europe and America and we do like to control the dairy and cotton products that come into America. But what are the other reasons why the government is picking on the small farmer in an unwarranted fashion while letting the big guy off the hook?
KC: That is the big question of the movie that I would like all Americans to think about. And to know that this is happening. As far as the sheep are concerned, I know that the USDA officials who were in charge of this project told the
Faillaces that they were under political pressure from the beef industry and the pharmaceutical industry to get rid of the sheep. So that’s one thing, there is political pressure. And I’m assuming [there’s pressure] from the big corporations, whether it be because of fears, in that case fears of mad cow disease, or fear of competition. Who knows? Then there’s also just a mindset right now that the FDA seems to have that all food needs to be made in a lab and in factories. That real food humans have eaten for millennia has all of a sudden turned into the demon. That’s just a mindset that I wish that we could have an open dialogue about.
NP: The film focuses on dairy and slaughtering practices, but farmers that are just trying to grow vegetables are having similar harassment issues aren’t they?
KC: Yeah. This is crossing all farms. I couldn’t get into everything in the movie. My original goal was to cover every single restriction of all farmers. The vegetable farmers right now, well, first of all, since the USDA deregulated all the GMO crops, especially the GMO alfalfa, if you want to be an organic farmer, everything is getting contaminated right now. It’s very, very difficult and very expensive to find organic seeds –– which is quite frightening.
NP: Ironically soy is one of the worst crops. People eat soy because they assume it’s going to be healthy but that’s one of the most GMO-ridden crops isn’t it?
KC: Yep, GMO soy and GMO corn is in all of our processed foods, one or the other, and sometimes both. Then if you’re an organic vegetable farmer, you have to fill out an incredible amount of paperwork to talk about the soil that you’re using to grow your vegetables. If you’re a chemical farmer, they leave you alone. You don’t have to write down any of the chemicals that you’re using on your [crops]. So the amount of work that the farmer has to do just to grow things the way that they’ve been doing for years and years and years is very unfair.
NP: I know in California in the Central Coast wine area, there are winemakers that basically follow organic practices but prefer to use the label “sustainable” so they don’t attract that kind of oversight. So a lot of the time with a Central Coast wine you’re consuming an organic product, but they just don’t want to call it that.
KC: Yeah, and that’s true in Europe too. A lot of the wines that are produced in Europe are actually produced with the biodynamic practices too. But it’s so expensive to get that label that they don’t do it. The best thing to do is to not worry so much about the labels, but to know your farmers.
NP: Get to know your farmer.
KC: Yeah. To know who’s producing it, to know how they’re producing it. How they’re either growing their vegetables or taking care of their dairy cows, or taking care of their animals that are meant for slaughter. It’s very difficult, but we have other tools. You can actually Google Earth the farms now if you can’t physically step on the farm. As much as possible get to know your food and get to know where your food is coming from.
NP: That’s what really surprised me. I did
a story on a Central Coast winery. I liked the wine, but until I visited the vineyard I had no idea that it was produced in such an all-but-label organic and sustainable way. And what really struck me was the love and the passion that this farmer had for the land and all of the things that lived and grew on it. I would really encourage people to get to know their farmers, but that’s not always practical if you’re living in the middle of a city like Los Angeles.
KC: Yeah, it’s not, but there’s wonderful farmers’ markets in Los Angeles. You can just go talk to the farmers at the farmers’ markets and then you can Google Earth their farms.
NP: And of course there’s
Rawesome, the Venice Beach, CA food collective that you show in the movie.
KC: Yeah, the Rawesome club is a great club. I would highly recommend joining that club. All their food is just fantastic.
NP: As a club member you can buy food that’s not available to the public. That’s why these grocery collectives are sort of so important. It seems strange having to become a member of a club to buy a pint of milk, but that’s the legal get-around for raw dairy in some states.
KC: Yeah, it’s just very sad. Like what happened to the
Ohio family [John and Jacqueline Stowers]. Their grocery stores just weren’t full of the food that they wanted to eat. Just like you said; you go to the grocery store and you can’t find anything that resembles food. [Jacqueline] found 40 Amish farmers in her area that had no way to get their products to market. She came up with this great idea to go to the farms and buy the food directly from the farmers. Since the supermarket wasn’t serving up healthy food, she got the food directly from the farmers, collected a lot of food and brought it back to her house and her neighbors would come and pick it up. Then the next week her neighbors would drive and get the food, and, you know, it was a co-op. They were cooperatively going out to get their food from the farms and taking turns. This grew bigger and bigger and bigger and finally the Ohio Department of Agriculture caught wind that they were doing it. They never prosecuted them with anything. All they had was a warrant that said that they were operating a retail establishment without a license, which is a third degree misdemeanor. For that third degree misdemeanor, they had 11 armed agents show up at their house one day and keep ten kids up in a room for six hours while they ransacked their house, took their computers, took their cell phones, took their personal food, and took their food from their co-op –– and then never ended up charging them with any crime.
NP: Which is why it is a civil rights issue, because this is about intimidation isn’t it?
KC: Exactly. Yeah. I’m hopeful that Americans would believe that our government should be spending their money on real crime…not families that are thinking very hard and working very hard to feed their families healthy food.
NP: One of the other things that I love about this film is that you’re not a filmmaker per se, this is just an issue that you were upset about and felt that more people needed to know about. You’re basically a citizen activist and the film was your tool.
KC: Right. I just got upset about the raids and I had to do something about it. I was just writing and telling people, and trying to get active politically, and it just wasn’t working for me. I had a bunch of farming organizations that were going to pay for the documentary to be made and I was trying to hook them up with a documentary maker. I couldn’t find one that wasn’t super expensive or was just too busy or was going to take so long to get the project done. Finally, one of the documentary makers that I wanted to do it called me and took me out to lunch and said, “You should just do this yourself.” So the next week I started Kristin Canty Productions and hired a small crew and made my reservations and set out across the country to film the people who had been raided.
NP: What was the budget for the movie?
KC: The budget was $75,000, but we far surpassed the budget. We’re still going with distribution. It’s a good thing I didn’t know that.
NP: Do you have other projects in the pipeline now?
KC: For film? No. I’m just going to just finish up distributing this film, and hopefully be done and put it on autopilot when I can finally release it on DVD, after I try a short theatrical run. ‘Cause when I play in the theaters it gets a little more press than if I just release it on DVD. Then I’m going to hopefully open up a ‘farm to table’ restaurant in my town, in Massachusetts.
NP: When you do release a documentary like this, you inadvertently become a nexus for information. People see the documentary and then they want to tell you about what’s happening down the road from them. Is there anything in particular that has come as a result of this documentary being out in the world?
KC: It hasn’t come as a result of it, I think it’s just been naturally happening and naturally building up…I mean, I don’t think that it’s getting worse because of my documentary, but a few months ago,
Dan Allgyer, who’s an Amish farmer in Pennsylvania, was raided by the FDA. There was a one-year sting operation on him. He has a private club also, and the members of that club brought a cow to Capital Hill and protested his raid and his shut down. They’re quite upset, but to no avail. The Department of Justice is now prosecuting him for the sale of raw milk across state lines. And
in California there’s a whole bunch of goat-share people that are being shut down. There’s a lot of people that really like raw goat milk and the CDFA has come down really hard, has shut down all your raw goat farmers right now, so that is a big problem.
NP: If I didn’t know it was true, it sounds so ridiculous it’s like the plot of a Hollywood comedy –– smuggling raw milk across state lines and
hiding goats undercover.
KC: I know, it’s absolutely ridiculous. It’s insane. Like I said before, they don’t seem to care –– I could feed my kids sugar all day. That’s what I used to do because I just hadn’t paid attention. I fed them cereal in the morning and Kraft’s macaroni & cheese at lunch, and we usually had a decent dinner. But they wouldn’t care if I fed my kids sugar and junk food all day long. We have a huge rise in obesity and diabetes in our kids, and they’re just not paying attention that. Then you have these parents and families who are trying so hard to get away from that and feed themselves and their children the way that they believe is correct, and the way that makes them feel better and feel healthier, and this is getting shut down. It’s absolutely insane.
NP: Well thank you for making the movie. It certainly covered an aspect of the issue that I had no idea about. I highly recommend people go see it.
KC: Thank you very much. Where are you from?
NP: The North of England, Sheffield.
KC: Do they have raw milk there?
NP: We used to have milkmen come around on milk carts, so you’d get milk fresh from the dairy every day. It had literally been in the cow that morning. They’d milk the cows and you’d have milkmen come round to deliver it. It would be left on your doorstep each morning.
KC: How about now?
NP: There’s no milkmen now. When I was growing up the joke was that if a child didn’t look like the father, it was the milkman’s. I used to love the whole milk with cream on top. I would rush down to be the first person to open the pint of the milk in the morning so I could pour the cream on my cereal. A pint of milk with the cream on top just doesn’t exist anymore –– I miss that so much.
KC: No it doesn’t. Well, I have it in my fridge, but, yeah. In Italy I know they have raw milk right in the vending machines on the streets.
NP: Really? Wow.
KC: Every country is different. I was curious about the UK because actually I’ve had a lot of requests for the movie there. I’m hoping to screen there. I get a lot of requests, like I’ve had a lot of requests from Australia. I’m thinking that they kind of must be having some of the same kinds of problems. I got a bunch of requests from Germany yesterday…
NP: I would imagine France too because the farmers are so proud of their cheeses.
KC: But when I first started getting them I was confused why they were interested because this is an American movie about American problems and American farmers. And they all wrote back: “the world is watching America right now and if you lose this fight we may all lose this fight.” I thought that was really sad. I don’t know if my film could make a dent in it. This is an uphill battle that really is going to take numbers and the voices of the people to make change. I know that my movie makes individual change; individuals who see it usually immediately go out to seek their local farmer and think about their food and try to get involved at some level. But to put a dent in the big picture, I think it’s going to need a lot of…
NP: I see your film as part of a greater movement. The underlying message is very similar to that of another movie I saw recently,
The Last Mountain. It is ultimately a civil rights issue. It’s also an issue of how our democracy is being taken over by big business.
Big business is subverting democracy in the same way that it’s subverting the food chain.
KC: Right, big business right now is pretty much in charge of us. I tried to get an interview with anybody from the USDA, and a guy who was an assistant to a secretary of one of the large government administrations said to me: “You know, it’s all very cute, and it’s all very nice what you’re doing, trying to protect the small farmer and trying to help the small farmer, but big ag [agriculture] runs this country and that’s just the way it is.” I just find that very, very sad. I find that an extremely sad statement.
For further information on the film and the issues raised in this interview visit FarmageddonMovie.com/. **UPDATE**
Following a multi-agency armed raid on Venice Beach, CA fresh food collective Rawesome, which resulted in 3 arrests (
see story), there will be a series of special screenings of
Farmageddon at the Electric Lodge cinema on Saturday, August 20 (
see details). Proceeds will go to the Rawesome Community Fund.
Sometimes I beat up dinosaurs... And loose.
which is not much fun and doesnt need to motivation I need.
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