When the 20 agents arrived bearing a search warrant at her Ventura County farmhouse door at 7 a.m. on a Wednesday a couple weeks back, Sharon Palmer didn’t know what to say. This was the third time she was being raided in 18 months, and she had thought she was on her way to resolving the problem over labeling of her goat cheese that prompted the other two raids. (In addition to producing goat’s milk, she raises cattle, pigs, and chickens, and makes the meat available via a CSA.)
But her 12-year-old daughter, Jasmine, wasn’t the least bit tongue-tied. “She started back-talking to them,” recalls Palmer. “She said, ‘If you take my computer again, I can’t do my homework.’ This would be the third computer we will have lost. I still haven’t gotten the computers back that they took in the previous two raids.”
As part of a five-hour-plus search of her barn and home, the agents — from the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office, Los Angeles County Sheriff, Ventura County Sheriff, and the California Department of Food and Agriculture — took the replacement computer, along with milk she feeds her chickens and pigs.
While no one will say officially what the purpose of this latest raid was, aside from being part of an investigation in progress, what is very clear is that government raids of producers, distributors, and even consumers of nutritionally dense foods appear to be happening ever more frequently. Sometimes they are meant to counter raw dairy production, other times to challenge private food organizations over whether they should be licensed as food retailers.
A couple of things to note, this story has cropped up word for word in a slew of odd publications. Not sure exactly what that means, but it is worth dogging. I do know there is a concerted effort to shut down raw milk producers around the country. Raw honey seems odd. What’s wrong with that? It’s called HONEY. Why steal it?
Found by Patrick Murphy.
#19 – Awake
I get honey from a few miles away. But I buy it at City Market. It is not pasteurized, only filtered, costs close to $10/lb, and is delicious.
Once upon a time, farms weren’t in the business of selling raw material like corn and wheat. They produced products right on the farm (or nearby, such as in the case of flour) and actually made a lot of money. If they made people sick, they were out of business.
Then in the 1920s a bunch of slick businessmen in Chicago got together and bought up a bunch of slaughter houses. Since they were heavily leveraged they cut corners. People got sick, books were written, and eventually, the businessmen bought themselves a few congressmen. The congressmen passed safe food laws that set reporting and testing requirements that the small farmer/producer couldn’t afford to carry out. So they just started selling raw material to the Chicago businessmen, who made sure they just met the minimum standard for safety.
Enjoy that Big Mac.
20,
you aint old enough to remember Cleaning your food when you got home??
then you NEVER had FRESH RIPE food. Im sorry.
I find it interesting that honey producers and goat farmers and raw milk producers are raided and arrested when the government is fine to overlook meat packers and producers for their shitty QA/QC. That is until someone eats an e. coli infested burrito or McD’s hamburger and dies from from the contamination. Then they’re all over the meat industry.
Don’t even get me started on tobacco… This product has been proven over and over to kill approx. 443,000 people per year and is often labeled the leading killer in the US, but THE GOVERNMENT SUPPORTS THE TOBACCO FARMER AND TOBACCO INDUSTRY. I also like the fact that government sponsored health care, be it medicare/medicaid, employee health care for US Military and other federal employees covers the cost of ailments that are tobacco caused or related. Marijuana bad…tobacco good.
That’s what happens when you have really good lobbyists and buy the presidency.
# 21 ReadyKilowatt said, on July 18th, 2010 at 9:28 pm #19 – Awake
I get honey from a few miles away. But I buy it at City Market. It is not pasteurized, only filtered, costs close to $10/lb, and is delicious./
$10 a pound? I assume you mean $10 for a bottle.
#21 ReadyKilowat,
$10 / pound is about the right price for locally produced honey. But just because it is locally produced, it doesn’t mean that it hasn’t been mass produced. It is very common for commercial beekeepers (anyone that sells honey) to have several dozen hives. Since most areas can not support that density of bees, the bees are fed a supplement. In most caes it is HFCS by the barrel. Larger beekeepers buy it by the tankerload.
I have two beehives that I keep at the back of my yard. Because of the recent heatwaves wiping out most regular flowering plants, I have to feed them sugar water, but I make sure it is pure cane sugar. They are drinking about 1 quart per day per hive. Sugar can be easily split into glucose and fructose by adding a little lemon to the mix, and is very close to real flower nectar. HFCS is just glucose.
Anyway, you can find real honey locally, but just because it is local it doesn’t mean that it is mass produced.
Some of the “honey” comes from China and it isn’t even honey at all, or it is but contains traces of pesticides / herbicides that are not considered safe for human consumption.
The U.S. has a boycott on Chinese honey, but the Chinese don’t take this sitting down. They move their “honey” to other countries (i.e. Australia, Thailand, etc.) where they get rebadged as having an origin of the intermediate country.
Ultimately, it’s making it’s way in our country.
As for raw milk, I recall one of the reasons why most of the states in the country ban it is because of the risks of consuming it with children.
In my #25 above I meant to say that HFCS is all “Fructose”, with no glucose.
Must have first coffee before typing.
#20,
This is where the free market works!
Once a companies raw milk starts killing children consumers will stop buying their milk and they will go out of business.
Mercola’s comments on Raw Milk: http://tinyurl.com/266rjjj
#20 Jim said, “I don’t want to hear one word when your infant daughter dies from raw milk.”
Most infants drink raw milk without any issues. Most breastfeeding mothers don’t pasteurize their own breast milk before feeding it to their infants.
Oh you were referring to cow’s milk. You don’t feed babies cow’s milk at all. So the theoretical problem you came up with really doesn’t exist.
#23. FYI meat packers have onsite government inspectors around the clock. One way the government has to shut down a plant is to threaten to remove the inspectors until corrective action is taken.
For all the POST processing of milk,
you might as well Eat a pill with Chalk in it.
Raw milk has LOTS of things in it.
Milk is an EXTRA NOT NEEDED PRODUCT.
They get more money from Butter, ice cream, Cottage cheese, and ALL the other products..
MILK does not BOIL. you have to add water to it, so it wont BURN.
After they have taken all the Curds and whey and other WANTED products..WHOLE milk is 1/2 water.
Then you get 2%, and you have 1/4 milk..
ALL the stores/corps WANT, is a product that can Be created and have a LIFE of 2-6 weeks.
There is VERY LITTLE that is FRESH foods.
“As for raw milk, I recall one of the reasons why most of the states in the country ban it is because of the risks of consuming it with children.” Besides, it isn’t Kosher to consume milk with children.
Seriously, though, food seems to be one of those areas where the liberals, bureaucracy and the big statists, the fascists and big food are all working together in one unholy alliance. When they all come together like that, there is no light hand.
# 31 Cap’nKangaroo said,
#23. FYI meat packers have onsite government inspectors around the clock.
Even…better, then how is contaminated getting into the market and making people (children in particular) sick with e. coli.
It’s because meat, tobacco, alcohol, etc all have spent big money, the form of lobbyist, to influence government standards.
Is industrial hemp a good thing? Then why aren’t we allowed to grow it? Because someone might sneak some smoke-able stuff in there & Jeebus wouldn’t approve of that.
That’s where our “modern” minds are at—medieval through & through.
#14 – thank you.
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#28 – “Once a companies raw milk starts killing children consumers will stop buying their milk and they will go out of business.”
Yeah! Out of business! That’ll teach the bastards not to kill people!
How many dead people would it take to convince you to try a different supplier, if you even could do so? In our industrial food system, it’s nearly impossible to pinpoint the source of contamination in almost every product.
May I suggest that you get past the headlines and read a few articles through to the end. It’s just amazing what you’ll learn about the actual world.
Oh, and try not get all your ideas from bumper stickers. Reading them while driving can cause accidents, and developing your world view from them definitely causes brain rot and is bad for our country.
btw, I like your online nickname – an obvious takeoff on the Mr. Magoo character. Excellent role model, since Mr. Magoo was nearly blind.