Martin Sheen: Poisoning Your Babies with Ass Milk?
Endless Simmer usually likes to take bold political stances on the important issues facing the food world. (As you may recall, we’re staunchly pro-moose burger and anti-portion control.) But sometimes we just don’t know which side to take on the more serious issues. Case-in-point: The raw milk debate.
Raw milk is milk that has not been pasteurized, and it’s been a hot topic in the MSM, with articles that make it sound like raw milk has all the qualities we like: all-natural, tasty, and sticking-it-to-the-man rebelliousness Food bloggers like I Heart Farms have been pushing the raw milk movement, pressuring state governments to allow the sale of raw milk, claiming it has healthy benefits that cleaned-up milk can’t offer. But the FDA and other worrywarts still say you gotta go the Louis Pasteur way if you don’t wanna get sick to your stomach.
Now the raw milk side has enlisted Martin Sheen to campaign for their cause.
Of course, we usually will believe anything Marty tells us, because he’s such a good pretend president. Sheen says he’s been drinking the raw his entire life, and this is a pretty good defense, because when has he ever produced anything less than top quality?
So we gotta side with Sheen on this one, right? He wouldn’t lie to us. Or would he…
We became a little concerned when we realized Sheen is in league with Whole Paycheck, the white people-approved grocery store chain best known for crushing smaller competition, poisoning people with faux-organic products, and making us fork over half-a-month’s rent just to put together a decent cheese plate.
And - hottie food bloggers the Haphazard Gourmet Girls serve up a pretty convincing indictment of Sheen and his fellow raw milk fiends:
Raw Milkies believe it is a magical elixir for a huge variety of health problems…a belief that is completely unsubstantiated by any medical studies. We refer to raw milk as ass in a glass…due to its origination point; the location of cow udders in close proximity to cow ass has caused problems since humans started ingesting milk. Pasteurization changed this; and in so doing profoundly changed the course of human health.
The Haphzard Girls showed up to protest at Sheen’s big event and seemed to make quite a splash:
…worried Raw Milkys approached us for more information; all of them said they’d started to drink raw milk after hearing the hype, but they’d never heard a single mention of potentially deadly pathogens, and wondered both why there was no warning labels on milk bottles, and why raw milk can be sold…
Ugh! Now we don’t know who to believe. You know how much we like to be at the cutting edge of things, but not at the expense of consuming ass milk. But who’s telling the truth? If any of you readers have thoughts on this, please do weigh in. To drink or not to drink? How are we supposed to figure this one out?
Photo: Haphazard Gourmet Girls
on September 16th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
I’m pro raw milk for one reason and one reason alone: raw milk cheese.
I really don’t drink milk for any properties other than taste (go figure), so I’m probably not missing anything by drinking the pasteurized stuff.
But I’ve had raw-milk Epoisses and I can honestly say that I could taste the difference between the real deal and the stuff you can buy here.
If allowing raw milk paves the way for allowing the production and sale of raw milk cheeses, I say bring it on.
on September 16th, 2008 at 5:18 pm
Actually, the girls have it wrong: the benefits of raw milk have been illustrated in several studies and the risk of pathogens is incredibly low in raw milk from clean dairies. Pasteurization is simply an excuse to produce dirty milk.
on September 16th, 2008 at 7:19 pm
So what does raw milk have that pasteurized milk doesn’t…that I NEED to have in order to lead a healthful, fulfilled life? And can I get these properties from another source? Does it have to be dirty milk? And yes, it is dirty. Raw=dirty.
on September 16th, 2008 at 8:24 pm
I am not sure I understand what this entire drama is all about. The case in point is- should we allow people who would like to drink raw milk to have more access to it? My personal opinion is yes, we should. Will I drink it? Probably yes, but that’s a personal decision, not a policy-making argument! I disagree with the Haphazard Gourmet Girls on this one. They will not buy raw milk- but why shouldn’t I be able to?
on September 16th, 2008 at 9:57 pm
milk is bad for most women’s tummies… that’s all milk, raw or cooked
on September 16th, 2008 at 9:57 pm
I.B.S.!!!!
on September 17th, 2008 at 10:57 am
I’m pretty opposed to government interference in matters of personal choice. If someone wants to drink raw milk I have no problem with their drinking raw milk, with the caveat that they need to know what they’re getting into. And I do like raw milk cheese, proximity to cow hiney notwithstanding. I wouldn’t eat it if my immune system were compromised or if I were expecting or something like that, but since none of these are the case… As for drinking, I’ll stick to beer. Solves the problem for me!
on September 17th, 2008 at 11:35 am
It’s funny that folks think that raw milk is dirty. In this state (Washington) the levels of pathogens has to be the same as pasturized milk. So think about that… after the milk is pasturized it has the same level of pathogens as the raw milk has without being pasturized. How nasty dirty did that pasturized stuff have to be to only get as safe as any decently clean dairy can get without the pasturization? The simple fact is that it wasn’t clean, it was horribly filthy to start with.
As for what raw milk has in it that pasturized milk doesn’t… enzymes that allow you (and baby cows btw) to digest the stuff. Many people who have problems drinking milk have no issues drinking pasturized milk.
That being said I don’t usually pay for raw milk. I do just fine on the other stuff even though I know it was dirtier to start with (wouldn’t it be nice if cleanliness was required from ALL dairies?) but the idea that someone else shouldn’t be allowed to purchase raw milk is asinine. Again, in this state there are warnings on raw milk so if someone wants to buy it (and oh yes they do) then what business of mine is it to stop them? Seriously people, don’t we all have something better to do then to stop people from drinking raw milk?
on September 17th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
As a lactard, who misses cheese but who never could down a glass of the white stuff without gagging and having to hold my nose, I should probably stay out of this debate. HOWEVER, personal choice only gets one so far with incomplete information. In fact incomplete information -which is afterall what proganda and marketing in general is designed to give us - injects an element of coercive element into the “choices” we make.
Now, I’m not saying raw milk is bad, I’m just saying, if there are questions about the safety of the white gunk, it’s probably better not to be pouring it into the mouths of babes (who have incomplete information and limited choices because their ‘rents buy and provide their sustenance).
on November 1st, 2008 at 12:12 pm
The Haphazard Gourmet Girls are all for personal choice and as little government intervention as possible. But the raw milk issue in California was more about personal financial gain for the two dairies that somehow roped our Senator, Dean Florez, into backing SB 201, rather than providing The Public with a healthy source of food-based medicine (raw milk sells for $25/gallon to markets, as opposed to $4/gallon for pasteurized milk). Unfortunately, there is no hard medical evidence that raw milk provides any of the health benefits that the very emotional and very glossy pro-raw campaigns suggest (literally, not a single study done in a completely scientific way). However, there have been many, many studies done on the deadly pathogens like listeria, campylobacter and e coli that are regularly and naturally present in milk as part of cows’ daily digestive processes. Pasteurization kills these pathogens, and many others. It’s no accident that illness and mortality rates from milk have plummeted in the century since pasteurization became a standard. California’s governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, a self-proclaimed raw milk advocate due to his body-building “natural foods” past, ultimately vetoed the bill because he believed it dangerously altered state dairy standards, and because there was no real reason that raw milk should be allowed into the marketplace if it contained deadly pathogens. Can “raw milk” be bottled and sold without deadly pathogens being present? Absolutely. But it’s a labor intensive process, requiring scrupulous cleanliness in barns and fields, and constant testing for the presence of pathogens. Thus it’s extremely costly for raw milk dairyists, and vastly reduces their profit margin. SB 201 sought specifically to allow a higher level of pathogens to be present in milk being sold, thereby reducing the financial burden of testing, etc. Another complication in the mix is that cows naturally shed campylobacter in the spring and fall; it naturally exists in almost all cows’ digestive tracks, but just happens to cause renal failure, dementia, paralysis or death in humans. Raw milk dairyists who are scrupulous about cleanliness, health–and ethics–would not be selling raw milk during the natural campy shedding season. Coincidentally–or not, as it happens constantly–less than 24 hours after we showed up to protest passage of the bill at the Martin Sheen event, a whole batch of raw milk cream was quarantined and recalled for contamination. It was produced by Organic Pastures, the raw milk dairy that had sponsored the bill. Organic Pastures, as it happens, is involved in a number of ongoing law suits for poisoning its consumers. The Haphazard Girls are locavores, organic, microfarmers and activist foodies, and it pained us to be on the side of “Big Ag.” But in some cases, Big Ag has it right. There’s no good reason NOT to pasteurize, except for monetary gain.
on November 18th, 2008 at 1:06 pm
[…] drink milk from ass - ES Rank: […]