Your Mileage May Vary: Can You Pass the Campy Test?

"This Amish family’s system is different from an outsider coming to the farm to purchase and consume raw milk. This family lives with the animals and comes from a lineage of farmers living a natural, farm life. Their immune systems have built up immunities to pathogens."

This quote comes from an interesting and provocative stream of comments in response to recent blog post on David Gumpert's The Complete Patient. The post was about a Pennsylvania raw dairy farmer whose fluid raw milk was recently exposed as the source of an outbreak of Campylobacter that sickened something like 35 of the farm's loyal customers. The post was mostly concerned with the farmer's admission that his milk was to blame, and his honorable behavior in the aftermath, cooperating with government officials and taking full responsibility. This is uncommon behavior in the raw milk game, partly because raw milk does take an unfair amount of flack as an "unsafe" food, and government officials have been singling out and harassing small scale raw dairies that pose minimal risk while industrial foods that sicken thousands or tens of thousands of consumers are still allowed to continue their unsanitary, inhumane, environmentally destructive practices. This is the real heart of the issue for raw dairy activists and supporters. They want to support the small scale, local, environmentally friendly alternative to industrial ag, regardless of whether or not the relative risk can be defined or quantified. Or do they?

In a crusade against negative propaganda, many raw milk advocates have sought to create the image that raw milk from happy grass-fed cows on small dairy farms is fundamentally safe. The caveat that consumption of any food comes with some level of risk could be considered to be implied, but perhaps it needs to be more explicitly expressed. The reasons that people support raw milk are varied, and the population that supports it is growing. With all the mixed messages out there, it's kind of hard to believe that people are getting an accurate picture of the level of risk they are assuming. Some may even truly believe that they are not assuming any risk at all.

Erroneous an attitude as this may be in any walk of life, it is not uncommon. Raw milk advocates still need to take it upon themselves to educate people, especially those they hope to convert, on the risk involved in drinking raw milk. I am always struck by the similarity of issues regarding raw milk to those regarding illegal drugs. Here is another one. Unbiased information is extremely hard to come by. However, unlike for illegal drugs, there is no Erowid for raw milk. Maybe there should be. People could post their anecdotal experiences, positive and negative, with raw milk, and scientific research could all be pooled into one place. People need to know about the various benefits and pitfalls of drinking raw milk, and they need to know that everyone is an individual, and their mileage may vary.

Anyway, this case is so interesting because it defies all of the arguments typically made in response to allegations that raw dairy is an unsafe food. The farm in question is the type of idyllic farm that most raw dairy enthusiasts would proudly support. It is run by a Mennonite family milking an (arguably) small number of cows. It is a grass-fed operation that prides itself on having happy, naturally raised cows, and as a Grade A dairy it at least should have been following the best of modern safety and sanitation protocols to minimize risk of illness. Raw milk advocates can not cry conspiracy, as in this case, the raw milk has been nearly unquestionably proven as the culprit. The dairy is explicitly intending to produce and sell fresh raw milk, unlike other outbreaks which have come from conventional dairies that sell raw milk on the side to make a little extra cash. All of this begs the question, how could this have happened?

One answer is quite simple, that food-borne illness happens on occasion even when safety precautions are taken. At the same time, there are many factors that contribute to the ability of pathogens to become established in food products and sicken consumers. Ultimately, even the most educated cannot fully understand all these factors and explain why sometimes people get sick and sometimes they don't. Some things seem clear to those who observe the situation attentively. The risk of food-borne illness does increase as production scale increases and sanitation becomes harder to control. Technological safety precautions (such as pasteurization and systematic use of sanitizers) can help reduce this risk. While the specific circumstances that lead to specific outbreaks can be debated ad infinitum, I suggest that the root of the problem is cultural.

I believe that increased incidence of food-borne illness has to do mostly with the fact that modern consumers are disconnected from the farm environment and the microbiological world that accompanies it. For clarity, I'm not talking about chronic illnesses like tuberculosis. I'm talking about acute infections by omni-present bacteria like E. coli and Salmonella. If you live and work in the environment where milk (or any food) is produced, then any environmental contamination is going to be something that you are exposed to every day anyway. You will have developed immunity to it. Drinking raw milk may actually play a significant role in the development of that immunity as it delivers the environmental contaminants directly to the intestinal tract (where the majority of the immune activity is located) along with other immunological factors in the milk which are not currently well understood. That is, in fact, what a lot of people are looking for when they buy raw milk. They want the bacterial contamination and immunological factors that are killed or denatured during pasteurization. Even though probiotics have been shown to have some benefits to immunity, eating pasteurized yogurt just doesn't do the same thing as consuming raw milk or cultured raw milk products. It just isn't the same as wrangling your local microbiota and establishing a relationship of mutual respect.

This is what happens when you drink raw milk. You give the immune cells in your belly the chance to get to know the local microbiota and learn how to respond to them, keep the rowdy ones in check, and let the ones that have an important function to perform go ahead and do their thing. The problem comes when the uninitiated receive too high a dose of a pathogen their body is not accustomed to. Some have argued that any time one begins to consume raw milk from a new source, one should start with a very small quantity, and work upwards from there to let your body get used to it. This is a great idea that applies to more than just milk. Always start small. My argument is that the real problem only appears when milk becomes a commodity to be sold, and there should just be more family/community cows. This closes the disconnect between the consumer and the food since everyone who drinks the milk is in close proximity to the environment and the animal. It also, in my humble opinion, is a much fairer way to distribute the work of dairying, a craft fewer and fewer people are willing to perform as it becomes simultaneously more difficult and less profitable.

At any rate, be careful if you are new to raw milk or if you switch sources. Also, go outside and work/play once in a while. Eat some dirt. It's good for you. Pay attention to everything you do, always. If it makes you feel ill, stop. If it doesn't, bottoms up! Your mileage may vary.

DIRT IS A BEATING HEART.

Dirt has a bad reputation. It is associated with filth, poor hygiene, and illness. For these reasons, some people opt to use words like soil under circumstances where the word dirt might be used. Making this distinction helps prevent ruining the reputation of soil, which, despite its amazing ecological services, is too often neglected. Perhaps this is a smart strategy.


But let's face it, soil is pretty dirty, and even the filthy part of dirt has its redeeming qualities. Plus, I have always liked the word, it's short, monosyllabic, and the entity it represents is both omnipresent and of vast ecological importance. So I prefer a more direct approach. I like to use the word dirt in cases where soil would be used, and beyond. I like to put it in unconventional contexts within a framework that is (hopefully) both viscerally and aesthetically stimulating. In this way I hope to expand on its meaning or even redefine it entirely. Tonight I present to you a recent work featuring dirt that I am excited about. It's a pastel piece inspired by me being given a box of pastels, and it's called "DIRT IS A BEATING HEART."

If you have any thoughts or feelings about dirt, or this particular piece, feel free to make it heard!

Unholy Cow! Chinese Scientists Frivolously Play God with Divine Genetics

The era of genetics has brought with it genetic modification of foods, a highly controversial and complex issue. To my knowledge, this issue has largely revolved around the genetic modification of plant foods (such as Monsanto's "Round-Up Ready" seeds where an herbicide resistance gene has been spliced into the wild-type Monsanto soy seed). More recently, genetic engineers have branched out into the world of mammals, and this scientific venture has recently hit the news. Several media outlets have reported on a study published recently by Chinese scientists in the free online journal PLoS ONE. The researchers successfully raised lactating transgenic cattle capable of producing some proteins found in human breast milk (Yang et al., 2011). A short piece from boingboing.net sums up the researcher's supposed motives pretty well, stating, "the researchers claim that this milk would be a suitable substitute for human breast milk, but do not cite any studies or data to directly support this claim" (Doctorow, 2011).

The boingboing article also exposes public misperception of the scientists achievement, as many media outlets have claimed that these cows produce 'human breast milk'. For example, I heard about this story originally from news comedian Stephen Colbert, who stated that the researchers had inserted the gene for human breast milk into a cow. To anyone with a respectable understanding of the complexity of either genetics or milk, this statement is an abomination. There is no single gene for milk production. Even an individual's eye color is determined by multiple genes. Milk is a highly complex substance which, when freshly excreted from the udder, contains many distinct and highly organized parts. These parts include, but are not limited to, a variety of proteins (the structure of each is determined by at least one gene), fat globules (which are assembled inside of udder cells and then pushed out into the milk, a process which must require a multitude of genes), and even living immune cells (each of which contains the entire genetic code of the cow itself).

According to the article on boingboing, "the researchers claim the milk contains lysozyme (an antimicrobial protein), lactoferrin (a protein involved with the immune system) and alpha-lactalbumin" which is a protein found in whey (the liquid portion of milk). The article itself is only concerned with lysozyme, so far as I can tell, so I will focus more on that in a bit. But first, I'd like to point out that all 3 of these proteins are found in both bovine and human milk. These are common milk components, the exact structure of which will likely vary even within species, and certainly varies between species. They have the same name, however, because they are structurally similar and seem to perform the same basic functions.

Alpha-lactalbumin is an interesting case, since it is found in proportionally much higher quantities in human milk than in cow's milk, which is cited by some as being a potential issue in feeding cow's milk to infants (www.alphalactalbumin.com, 2010). Again, the Yang et al. (2011) article itself makes no mention of alpha-lactalbumin contributing to the suitability of their transgenic milk as a substitute for breast milk. They do however state in their discussion section that "the gross composition of milk showed no significant difference between transgenic and non-transgenic cattle" and that "the pattern of the protein distribution in milk from transgenic and non-transgenic cattle was similar". This suggests that the overall ratio of proteins in the milk was not significantly altered, and that this milk is not a suitable substitute for human breast milk.

The researchers' main argument for the superiority of their transgenic milk is the fact that it contains human lysozyme. This argument rests on the assumption that human lysozyme is somehow better than bovine lysozyme. The authors argue this case by exhibiting the results of an experiment comparing the anti-microbial activity of their 'recombinant' human lysozyme to that of commercially available human lysozyme, as well as lysozyme from hen egg whites (that's right, it's in eggs too, as well as your tears and saliva). They found that the human lysozyme had greater antimicrobial activity than hen egg lysozyme. Why they didn't include bovine lysozyme in this experiment could be a mystery, but maybe it has something to do with the fact that some tests have shown bovine lysozyme to have significantly greater antimicrobial activity than human lysozyme (Vakil et al., 1969).

At this point, their argument for the superiority of their milk appears more like a thinly veiled attempt to justify using their time and resources developing the technology to exploit the cow's udder as a "bioreactor for the expression of recombinant proteins" (Yang et al., 2011), or in other words, a machine to manufacture whatever proteins might be commercially profitable. This concept has been in motion for years, as genetically modified bacteria have long been used to produce recombinant proteins (including 'vegetable rennet' used to make cheese). They have simply extended this same concept to the cow's udder. Never mind the fact that the cow is a living, breathing being with a beating heart. Never mind the fact that "incomplete reprogramming of transgenic animals can result in errors in gene expression" (Yang et al., 2011). Never mind the fact that of the 37 transgenic cattle born, "seven calves died within a few hours after birth, and six calves died within 6 months after birth" (Yang et al., 2011), an astonishing 35% death rate within 6 months, whereas a typical dairy herd loses as few as 7.8% within the first full year (Gulliksen et al., 2009). Never mind the fact that of the 24 calves that survived weaning and were deemed healthy by unspecified standards, only 17 expressed human lysozyme and only 4 of those "were lactating normally in the research time" (Yang et al., 2011). Never mind the fact that there is no clearly discernible reason that anyone would want to drink milk with human lysozyme in it. Concerns regarding the well-being of living things can be swept under the rug with a single feeble and poorly translated sentence:

"Of cause[course], the health and welfare of the transgenic animals should be considered" (Yang et al., 2011).

So someday you might start seeing infant formula on the shelf at your grocery store that says "Now with Human Lysozyme!" All I can say is: it's food for thought, not for babies.

Sources Cited

Doctorow, C. (2011). GM Chinese cows express milk with some proteins found in human milk, UK press reports "OMG! Cows give breast milk!". Accessed on 7/8/11 at http://boingboing.net/2011/06/10/gm-chinese-cows-expr.html.

Gulliksen, S.M., Lie, K., Loeken, T., and Osteraas, O. (2009). Calf mortality in Norwegian dairy herds [abstract only]. Journal of Dairy Science 92(6): 2782-2795. Accessed on 7/8/11 at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19448012.

Vakil, J.R., Chandan, R.C., Parry, R.M., and Shahani, K.M. (1969). Susceptibility of Several Microorganisms to Milk Lysozymes. Journal of Dairy Science 52(8): 1192-1197.

(Note: Sorry, this one's not available for free online.)

www.alphalactalbumin.com. (2010). Alpha lactalbumin. Accessed on 7/8/11 at http://www.alphalactalbumin.com/alpha-lactalbumin.php.

(Note: Aside from the information on proportions of whey protein to casein proteins, some of the things I read on this website did not seem very reputable to me. More reputable sources suggest that the proportion of whey proteins to casein proteins in human milk varies throughout lactation, but it is well recognized that the proportions are significantly different than in cow's milk, where the proportion of casein proteins is much higher.)

Yang, B., Wang, J, Tang, B., Liu, Y., Guo, C., Yang, P, Yu, T., Li, R., Zhao, J., Zhang, L., Dai, Y., and Li, N. (2011). Characterization of Bioactive Recombinant Human Lysozyme Expressed in Milk of Cloned Transgenic Cattle. PLoS ONE 6(3): e17593.

Greetings Friends and On-Lookers! Welcome to...

BREATHE

HEAR

COW

...the naturalist's guide to consciousness, interdependence, and the divine bovine. I have created this blog primarily as an outlet for personal expression. I have the hope that one day it may evolve into more of a collaborative project and a forum for expression, analysis and discussion, but its birth truly arises out of my desire to produce diverse personal works and share them with friends, family, and the general public. As time goes on, I will post original music, poetry, critical writing, visual art, and more. These works will cover many topics, but will all revolve around themes central to my own personal journey of learning and growth, summarized in the sub-title by the terms 'consciousness', 'interdependence', and 'the divine bovine'. 

These terms (as well as others central to the content of this blog such as 'natural' or 'sustainable') are LOADED, which is to say they have complex, diverse, and often obscured meanings that, when examined in context, can tell us something about the way individuals and the general public relate to the terms and the concepts they represent. With that in mind, I feel obligated to explain the way I am using them in this context.  However, for the time being I must let the terms speak mostly for themselves, largely because much of my current intellectual and artistic endeavor is aimed at trying to understand for myself what I mean when I use these words. As for an introduction, I can only say that 'consciousness' has something to do with the act of being, 'interdependence' has something to do with the act of being in community with other beings, and 'the divine bovine' has to do with the most worship-able of all the domesticated animals: the cow. I would like to note (keeping interdependence in mind) that I don't believe the cow is more sacred than anything else in this world. I will not, however, hesitate to expound and proselytize their divinity, for reasons that I hope will become more clear as I reveal my personal works.

I'd like to conclude this first post by offering some background on myself. I am a recent graduate of Hampshire College in Amherst, MA, where I studied diverse subjects in nature, ecology, spirituality and sustainability. These are also LOADED words that I have only begun to define for myself, and will be recurring themes in the content of this blog. My studies eventually led me to develop a deep reverence for ruminant-managed pasture ecosystems, and I wrote my thesis on the science and politics of farmstead dairying (Microbiology and Immunology Relevant to Dairy Safety and Human Health: A Critical Analysis of the Raw Milk Debate).

That is all for my first post! I hope people find the content I post interesting and I strongly encourage folks to post their reactions, comments and criticisms in the comments section, as this project is intended to be a reflective process and would benefit greatly from outside perspectives. And remember...

BREATHE

HEAR

COW