Another raw deal

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

By Ari LeVaux

August 3 was a telling day for food freedom in America, but the events were framed in terms of food safety. In Venice, Calif., the Rawesome raw food club was raided by armed federal and county agents who arrested a club volunteer and seized computers, files, cash, and $70,000 worth of perishable produce.

James Stewart, 64, was charged on 13 counts, 12 of them related to the processing and sale of unpasteurized milk. The other count involved unwashed, room-temperature eggs—a storage method Rawesome members prefer. The agents dumped gallons of raw milk and filled a large flatbed with seized food, including coconuts, watermelons, and frozen buffalo meat.

That same morning, leaders at the multinational conglomerate Cargill were calculating how best to deal with a deadly outbreak of drug-resistant salmonella that originated in a Cargill-owned turkey factory.

When word of the raw milk crackdown got out, a bevy of high-profile lawyers offered to represent the raw foodies pro bono, says Rawesome member Lela Buttery, 29. Christopher Darden, who helped prosecute O.J. Simpson, appeared at Stewart’s arraignment just in time to lower his bail from the $121,000 that prosecutor’s had recommended to $30,000, and to strike a rarely used clause that would have prevented Stewart from employing a bail bondsman.

The August 3 raid was not Rawesome’s first. A June 2010 raid resulted in seizures of cash, computers, and other equipment that has yet to be returned, Buttery says. It also resulted in Rawesome’s agreement not to distribute raw milk from Santa Paula-based Healthy Family Farms, which had been supplying it to Rawesome.
With the prohibition against selling to Rawesome, Healthy Family Farms owner Sharon Palmer, 51, disbanded her dairy herd. Palmer and her employee Victoria Bloch, 58, were also arrested August 3 on charges related to marketing chicken products, one count of which involved Rawesome’s unwashed, room temperature eggs.

Later that day as Stewart, Palmer, and Bloch languished in jail, Cargill issued a voluntary recall, four months after people began getting sick, of 36 million pounds of ground turkey traceable to an Arkansas plant. Cargill has a history of deadly outbreaks, is a major supplier to the nation’s public-school meal programs, and sells turkey under dozens of brand names, none of which include the word “Cargill.”
The labels at Rawesome don’t say much either, but records in the club’s office sourced each batch of raw milk. This information, before it was seized, was available to members. If a contamination issue were to have flared up, members contend, it could have been much more quickly traced than, say, that Cargill turkey. Buttery says that in 12 years, there hasn’t been a reported problem.
Despite a lack of victims, Rawesome stands accused. And while Cargill has no shortage of victims, nobody at the company has been charged with a crime over the turkey recall. The government has fewer options against multinational corporations than it does against neighborhood food co-ops. USDA oversees the safety of meat products, but can only encourage “voluntary recalls” of products that have been infected with antibiotic-resistant pathogens, reports Tom Philpott in Mother Jones. The final decision to recall was left to the company, which inevitably considered the bottom line as well as public safety when making its decision.
While Cargill self-polices, the Rawesome club has been under more intense scrutiny than members even realized. “Since the raid, it’s come out that we’ve been under investigation since June 30 of last year,” Buttery says. “They’ve been monitoring us from unmarked vehicles, they have agents who have become members.”

PHOTO: Raw milk is criminalized while bad turkey goes free. CHIOT’S RUN

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Another raw deal | Planet JH News Article: Restaurants And Dining

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