The Raw Deal

Louis Pasteur invented his process in the 1860s, but decades later it was still not widely used for milk. Enter Nathan Straus, an owner of Macy's department store and a crusading philanthropist. Straus, perhaps more than any other person, is responsible for the near-universal pasteurization practiced today. Disturbed by the infant mortality rate and understanding that bad milk was the culprit, Straus wrote pamphlets arguing for pasteurization and, more important, set up milk stations around the country to distribute pasteurized milk. Mortality rates plummeted. Straus almost single-handedly saved thousands of lives.

Voluntary pasteurization was such a success that cities started passing mandatory pasteurization laws. Chicago was the first in 1908; New York followed six years later. It took several more decades for states to catch up, and raw milk continued to be available in many places. Michigan became the first state to outlaw raw milk in 1948. It wasn't until 1986 that a federal judge ordered the FDA to ban interstate shipment of raw milk. The ruling cited an FDA document stating that "raw milk, including certified raw milk, is a vehicle for transmission and spread of numerous diseases," and there is no "scientifically confirmed benefit for the consumption of raw milk."

The triumph of pasteurization seems like a victory for human progress. Raw milk advocates see it differently. They believe the health problem was caused by lack of regulation and refrigeration, not raw milk. On farms, people drank fresh raw milk. In cities, where the majority of deaths occurred, the dairies were filthy, and there were lax standards for transportation and storage. In addition, suppliers were often unscrupulous, as Cattle, a history of the cow by Laurie Winn Carlson, attests: "Milk was commonly mixed with additives to gain profit. Then, to make it look whole, additives were mixed in, such as carbonized carrots, grilled onions, caramel, marigold petals, chalk, plaster, white clay and starch. To replace the cream that had been removed, emulsions of almonds and animal brains were dissolved in the liquid to thicken it."

It's undeniable that some of the milk supply was dirty and deadly at the turn of the 20th century. But modern dairy equipment, routine testing of cows and refrigeration have changed all that, raw milk advocates argue. (The FDA and other health authorities contend that those advances, while important, still don't make unpasteurized milk completely safe.) Tom Cowan, a family practice doctor in San Francisco and a founding member of the Price Foundation, has been recommending raw milk to his patients for 20 years. None of them, he says, has ever gotten sick from drinking it. Organic Pastures Dairy Company, based in California, one of the handful of states where raw milk sales are legal, claims to have sold more than 40 million servings of raw milk without a single complaint. The dairy's slogan is "Join the raw revolution."

A MARRIED COUPLE IN FAIRFAX JOINED THE RAW REVOLUTION LAST YEAR. They make for unlikely revolutionaries. He works for an investment services company; she takes care of their three boys. They live in a two-story brick house with brown shingles. He is tall and bespectacled. She has curly reddish-brown hair and lots of energy. She needs that energy: They have 2-year-old twins and a 10-month-old. They go to church on Sunday. They drive an economy-size car. They are Mr. and Mrs. America.

And they drink raw milk. They didn't want their names used for this article, even though they are not breaking the law. In Virginia, it is illegal to sell raw milk, but it is not illegal to drink raw milk from a cow you own. So they bought a cow. Well, sort of.

They participate in a "cow-boarding" program that takes advantage of this legal loophole (other states, such as Maryland, don't permit such programs). They signed a contract with a Virginia dairy farm, paying $60 upfront and another $60 a month for the care and upkeep of the cow they partially own. In exchange, they get three gallons of raw milk each week. They pay an extra $40 a month to get it delivered to their door.

They discovered raw milk last fall after the wife gave birth to their third child. The baby was six weeks premature and had trouble gaining weight. The mother couldn't produce enough breast milk, and commercial infant formula didn't agree with the baby. At one point during my recent visit to their house, she pulls out the family photo album. The shots of the baby at 2 months old do seem worrisome. His cheeks look hollow, his arms thin. In medical lingo, the baby was failing to thrive. The pediatrician was concerned. The parents were frantic.

The mother stumbled on a reference to raw milk in a book called Mommy Diagnostics. Not surprisingly, she was more than suspicious at first. "It sounds ridiculous," she says. "I thought it was nuts."

But they got more books and read testimonials online. They decided to try it because nothing else was working, and they were running out of options. They didn't make the decision lightly. "It was scary," she says. "I mean, we're talking about a 2-month-old, you know? It was very scary. But my baby needed something, and the doctors weren't helping."

In a week, the baby began to put on weight. His digestive problems vanished. His cheeks filled out. His arms grew pudgy. His mother flips to the next page in the album with photos taken a month later. It's like looking at another baby. Now 10 months old, he weighs 23 pounds, is starting to crawl and can clap his hands with startling force.

The baby lives almost exclusively on raw milk formula (though he's just started to grab food off his parents' plates). When it's feeding time, I watch the parents prepare the formula. They use the recipe in Fallon's book, which calls for ingredients such as liquid whey and cod liver oil. It has to be blended and warmed on the stove. It is not a simple or speedy process.