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The Ruination of Milk article by Jennifer Lake Today there is a (real!) grassroots movement to restore the wholesomeness of natural animal food products like dairy and return as many as possible commercial producers back to the "best practices" that ensure good health for animals and humans. Controversy over the pasteurization of milk, originally adopted as voluntary, started from the very beginning of the practice in the 1880s and has never ceased. For good reason. The unsung story of pasteurized milk is having a new day in the grasp of enthusiastic raw milk drinkers who've discovered a healing food. (1). Long a "trade" secret to pioneer bodybuilders of the early 20th century, raw milk was called "the perfect food". But the benefits of fresh raw milk are no secret! Ancient societies have passed on the knowledge of milk as a medicine for the weak and the elderly and bodybuilders clearly understood it was a tonic for the strong and the beautiful! (2). The real coup, and great tragedy of the situation with milk has been the act of convincing mothers not to breastfeed their babies. By the 1950s nearly half of all U.S. infants were exclusively bottle-fed on nonhuman foodstuff and by 1971 breastfeeding in the U.S. was at an all-time low. (3). Colostrum studies printed before 1900 in the (Rockefeller Institute) Journal of Experimental Medicine note that "...good human milk is the ideal food for infants...all substitute foods must approach this ideal...the only foundation upon which we can build our substitute food is a knowledge of what good human milk is." Published conclusions of colostrum investigations records that "if we compare (human milk) and note the diversity in the results obtained, we shall conclude that each infant must be a law unto himself and that his best friend is his own mother." (4). The incentive to pasteurize appears in history as a multiplicity of self-interested motives masquerading as high-minded altruism, coordinated and timed to fool the public and health professionals who were distressed and beleaguered by the realities of urbanization and illness. The infamous force-feeding of "distillery swill" to "city milk trade" dairy cows, known widely since the 1840s, made a nifty clarion call for Nathan Straus of New York's Macy's department store. Straus and his wife Lina launched a worldwide campaign for compulsory pasteurization, along with the help of U.S. Hygienic Laboratory (NIH) chief Milton J. Rosenau and many others who profited handsomely from the effort. Virtual tomes on the subject of adulterated milk and "inconclusive" pasteurization science litter the reference material. But the story of cleaning up the milk supply, more pointedly than most, is an object lesson in Zionist power building by a Protocols family on a par with the Flexners and Rockefellers. The Bavarian-born Straus brothers (Isidor, Nathan, and Oscar), wives, and children catapulted to the ranks of elite business, politics, public health, banking, education, and law within one generation. Like many seeds taking root in the ill winds that blew across the Atlantic with the "48ers" (1848, Communist Manifesto inspired revolutions), the extended family Straus landed in the prepared and fertile soil of an America about to go boom. Eldest brother Isidor Straus made his own fortune as a young man from Talbotten, Georgia running Union blockades on breakout runs overseas. Selling Confederate bonds and brokering shipbuilding deals for Lloyd Bowers in Britain, Isidor took his payment in gold and turned his profits back into the family business. Partnering with the younger Nathan, the Strauses moved to New York City and joined the dry goods business of R.H. Macy as concessionaires in 1888. Youngest brother, Oscar, had already received a government appointment as U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire-- a job he later returned to after serving Teddy Roosevelt as Sec. of Commerce and Labor (1906-09). Nathan Straus secured a position in 1889 as NYC Parks Commissioner, a four-year stint that ended as he and Isidor launched the first of 2 department store buy-outs that made them rich. In 1894, he declined an offer to run for the City's office of mayor. In 1895, Isidor, too, gained a political post in the New York State Legislature. In the years before the Strauses bought out R.H. Macy in 1896, Nathan took the lead as the family philanthropist, offering shelter, coal, and milk distribution to poverty-stricken Jewish immigrants hit hard by cholera and flu epidemics in 1892. Opening the first of sixteen more-to-come "milk depots" in the City, it became his worldwide cause-celebre and organizing principle for the rest of his life. Helped by his wife Lina, who penned the 1913 book "Disease In Milk: The Remedy Pasteurization", Nathan funded the building of laboratories, training of doctors and nurses, and blizzards of letters to officials all over the nation. (5). In 1897 he was appointed NYC president of the Board of Health just prior to the Consolidation of 1898, which added 3 boroughs to Manhattan and the Bronx, expanding Nathan's jurisdiction to "Brewer's Row" in Brooklyn, a major source of dairy "swill". In time, the Straus clan would intermarry with the families of Jewish brewers left standing after Prohibition. The Straus propaganda, however, instead focused on the diseases of tuberculosis and typhoid as the hidden killers in milk, impervious to the care of conscientious handling. Nathan and Lina made it known to the public that they too had lost a child because of contaminated milk. Although the available stories fail to mention the official cause of death in the Straus case, it was also made public knowledge in the newspapers that one of their own milk cows had died of tuberculosis. Lina Straus gave milk-purchasing accounts of the "blue-tint" product she bought in Central Park --did she feed it to her child as preferred over the chancy source at home? While this question goes unanswered, Mrs. Straus was extravagant in her disparaging descriptions of inferior dairies. With tens of thousands of dairies supplying the city, sanitary enforcements were cast as an impossible task. A dairy industry profile at www.answers.com/topic/dairy-industry.htm is one of many websites to address the situation as "Most big city milk supplies were watered, adulterated, expensive, and more lethal than city water", contending here that the milk contained contaminated city water! New Yorkers of the 1800s were dependent on the aging Croton reservoir system that served the daily water needs of the region and did not get a modern update to it's infrastructure until 1893-- the year that Straus' first depots opened for business!-- with the completed expansion called the New Croton Aqueduct. In 1906, the completed New Croton Reservoir was fed into the system and then in 1915, a brand new Catskill watershed system was added in installments through 1927. An official website on NY water quality states "As it grew from the Old to the New Croton system through the construction of more storage reservoirs, the 'daisy-chain' structure of the Croton system helped mediate water quality at the terminal reservoir -- New Croton. In other words, by changing the system from a straight river run to a series of lakes feeding one another, the retention time of the water was increased, allowing more time for particles to settle out of the water column and pathogens to die-off. This resulted in reduced bacteria and turbidity levels. Additionally, the greater reliance on modern wastewater treatment reduced the direct loadings of contaminants to the water..." and "Not only did each new system increase the City's water supply capacity, they also allowed for shutdowns of the Croton system during late summer, when water quality deteriorates". (6). The improvement in water quality running parallel to the pasteurization campaign could have been sufficient in itself to account for a significant mortality drop. Low-key statements to this effect are acknowledged in the sources. Each marker year for water improvement in the City was met with a round of pasteurization "successes" from the Straus camp. The mortality numbers spinning out of New York that appeared to favor the beneficial sterilization of milk and that were so heavily emphasized, are hopelessly clouded in a stream of disinfected water but could hardly be more perfectly timed in the agenda to favor pasteurization. Better water quality and management in England brought a dramatic and persistent end to the troubling outbreaks of typhoid there, with no changes to the dairy practices, a decade ahead of New York. (7). Most fundamental to the historical review of pasteurization is the science. We take it for granted that scientists decided the matter long ago, but looking under that rock is eye-opening. Florence Rena Sabin, the first woman on the Rockefeller Institute staff, was a recognized tuberculosis expert who went on to serve in the public health service in Colorado. In 1932, confirming earlier work from the 1890s, she writes of "killed" tuberculosis bacilli as "features of the disease...can be produced by the dead bacilli. In 1890, Mafucci studied the effect of subcutaneous injections of dead organisms; he recorded the formation of abscesses and the subsequent death of the animals from marasmus...The fact that dead bacilli will produce the lesions of tuberculosis is of great significance...tissue response to chemical fractions [of bacilli] isolated from the organism...all play a part...but the lipoids alone produce tubercules...[experiments] repeated, extended, repeated and confirmed by Koch, Prudden, and Hodenpyl, 1891...Koch (1897) had already called attention to the danger of grinding tubercule bacilli in open mortars." (8). The Committee on Disinfectants, sponsoring the research of Sternberg and Smith, 1887 and onward, got such widely varying results from pasteurization experiments that they concluded "the data cannot be utilized". Observations on the experiments of Theobald Smith indicate that regardless of the heat/time exposure, lipids in milk shielded the TB bacilli by forming hardened "pellicles", suggesting that a false sense of security was given by pasteurization and was no protection. (9). The scientists named here were the leading experts of their day and found disagreement among themselves and the tentative results of their own data about pasteurization. This matter was determined in the end by voting within meetings of scientific societies. Contemporary investigators, nutritionists, and science-based organizations like www.westonaprice.org offer a range of information into human nutrition and health, as well as the current legal standing of food quality issues. Milk regulations in the momentum of Gilded Age "Progressive" reform became classic and precedent setting examples of judicial enforcement upon industry. An introduction to the legal groundwork attributable to "milk laws" describes the response from the dairymen in the early days; "In the case of milk, larger producers resisted the new regulations at first, but then cooperated with regulators after recognizing that obeying the health regulations would present larger problems for their smaller competitors." (10). This sort of passive-aggressive approach to squashing the little guys still seems to be the favored tactic, that is when fraud out-of-hand isn't working. A sorry case of fraud-out-of-hand that did appear to work recently in Pennsylvania is the official injunction against Stump Acres dairy that forbade the selling or giving of raw milk. The battle was a pure newspaper media show that threw the statistical weight of all the CDC raw-contaminated-milk incidents in the whole country at the door of the humble Stump family. The effort to follow the full story online led to news archives that had been wiped of content. Only the un-obliterated fist of officialdom had anything intact left to read. A slow review of the propaganda revealed that a Health Dept warning on the Stump dairy mentions 9 cases of "possible illness that MAY have occurred." (11). Nathan Straus is said to have given 2/3 of his fortune to Zionist causes. His early detractors said he was "loathed" and a popular survey of NYC residents at the time voted him "most useful". His name and dubious business history dot the legal casebooks. His real legacy may have been to help undermine the health of at least 3 generations of Americans, as we now know the negative longterm consequences of bottle-feeding milk substitutes and denatured dairymilk. The most common ailment is intestinal disease that can persist for life. The human intestines are a reservoir for at least 60 different endemic viruses like poliovirus, coexisting peacefully in a healthy gut where their numbers are held in check by out-competing native bacteria, a precious gift of mother's milk. The loss of milk goodness --the living bacterias, lactobacillium, and the vital fats and nutrients-- are not yet measured because they are not yet weighed. It is simply not in the purview of agribusinessmen to reorient for the handling of "fragile" milk or support the data discounting their continuing practices of animal management. But, the authoritarian agencies that mandate health-policy compliance in this world have determined that you are not entitled to make your own risk assessment. In most western nations now and nearly all U.S. states, it is unlawful to buy fresh milk from a farm for your own use. Did you think that would ever happen? Footnotes and references: (1) healing food, article "Drink It Raw" by Suzanne Nelson, www.indyweek.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A155882 (2) bodybuilders, article "Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed", biohazard forums (3) U.S. infants bottle-fed, complexity of the child mortality scope, http://mitpress.mit.edu/journals/pdf/jinh_34_3_315_0.pdf (4) Colostrum studies, www.jem.org/cgi/reprint/2/2/217 (5) Lina Straus, "Disease In Milk: The Remedy Pasteurization", 1913, online Cornell archives at http://chla.library.cornell.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=chla;idno=2737159 and the personal histories and stories of the Straus family and descendents is the subject matter of www.straushistoricalsociety.org (6) NYC water quality, Croton system, www.nyc.gov/html/dep/pdf/croton/whitepaper.pdf (7) water disinfection timeline, Matt Curtis and Erik Johnston at http://members.fortunecity.es/framirezq/WT-Chlorine.htm or www.waterandhealth.org/drinkingwater/wp.html (8) Florence Sabin, 1932 on TB, http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/RR/B/B/G/B/_/rrbbgb.ocr (9) pasteurization, tuberculosis, www.jem.org/cgi/reprint/4/2/217 (10) legal cases about milk, www.allbusiness.com/legal/3586268-1.html (11) positive article on Stump dairy before the "incident" is here, http://enzymeuniversity.com/artman/publish/article_127.shtml series regarding the raw milk contamination; http://agmap.psu.edu/Search/index.cfm?q=Stump+Acres&catalog=nws&mode=adv&spatial=county, and lastly a "Medical News Today" article from June 21,2008 identifies the Stump Acres 3rd incident as a Listeria agent saying "may contain Listeria" but concludes the article with "no illnesses have been reported" |