Springfield, Missouri
By: Kathy Vimont
My family produces raw milk in southwest Missouri. I am responding to Douglas Bryan’s letter of Dec. 9 regarding the safety of raw milk.
Dr. Bryan quoted an explanation from Cornell about why pasteurization has been made mandatory for retail sales, but he doesn’t know the rest of the story. About 100 years ago, large amounts of milk were needed to feed people in the large cities. They also needed an answer about what to do with the distillery grain left over from making alcohol there. Answer: feed it to cows and use the resulting milk to feed the people. They should not have been drinking that milk.
It was produced in filthy conditions by very unhealthy animals and caused many deaths. Their only answer was to pasteurize the milk, and that’s how pasteurization on a large scale became entrenched. But, here’s the really interesting part: at that same time, Dr. J.R. Crewe of the Mayo Clinic was bringing in clean raw milk from the countryside and curing patients of cancer and other dread diseases with a strict raw milk diet. For more on this story and a critical analysis of milk safety studies, I refer you to “The Untold Story of Milk” by Dr. Ron Schmid. Go to: http://www.realmilk.com/documents/ResponsetoMarlerListofStudies.pdf
for a balancing article on the safety of raw milk.
Considering modern advancements, the belief that we must pasteurize or die is outdated. Besides, we’re not talking about producing raw milk for the entire population; we’re talking about small family farms thriving and supporting our local economies. Buying milk from neighbors is a long-standing tradition in Missouri, one with which the legislature refused to interfere. READ MORE
Two years ago, Californians stood up and fought back against government collusion with coporate interests and fought back against a bill meant to end fresh/raw milk sales. 
The PPJ Gazette 