Originally published January 21 2012
Obama says NO to WhiteHouse.gov petition to legalize raw milk at federal level
by Ethan A. Huff, staff writer
(NaturalNews) Even though the federal government does not actually have the right or authority to dictate what free individuals can and cannot eat, the Obama administration has officially rejected a WhiteHouse.gov petition signed by more than 6,000 Americans seeking freedom from federal tyranny against raw milk.
Food freedom advocates filed the petition as part of the We the People: Your Voice in Our Government program which, at the time, promised a response to any petition that gathered at least 5,000 signatures within 30 days. However, the federal government has since raised that signature threshold to 25,000 (http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/10/26/we-people-takes-next-step-responding-your-petitions).
A response letter to the petition from Doug McKalip, Senior Policy Advisor for Rural Affairs, rehashes the same tired nonsense about raw milk's supposed "health risks," and touts pasteurization as a type of Godsend for protecting the ubiquitous "milk supply" from deadly pathogens, as if all milk everywhere is exactly the same and part of a single, government-provided supply.
You can read McKalip's full response to the petition at the following link (https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions).
As you will quickly notice, McKalip's response letter is really nothing more than a propaganda-filled form letter that was likely constructed by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), both of which have long crusaded against raw milk using faulty and deceptive "science."
Interestingly enough, the letter begins with pleasant rhetoric about how the government "understand[s] the importance of letting consumers make their own food choices," but quickly proceeds to beat the dead horse of raw milk pseudoscience. In the process, McKalip reveals his and the federal government's true colors concerning freedom of food choice, which is that they could not care less about it.
It cannot be stated enough that the raw milk statistics dispensed by the FDA, the CDC, and the state and local governments that parrot them, are flawed. In the vast majority of illness outbreak cases, raw milk is almost never proven to actually have been the culprit. And as the anti-natural medicine crowd is so quick to announce every time a scientific study finds a link between nutrients and disease prevention, an "association" does not imply causation.
Also, when raw milk is found to have been the culprit, it is almost always raw milk that was "bootlegged" from an industrial farm producing dirty milk intended for pasteurization. This class of milk is regulated under the "Grade A Pasteurized Milk Ordinance," and is not produced using the same high-quality standards that are used to produce Grade A raw milk, which can be found in states where raw milk is legal.
Sources for this article include:
https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions
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