If You Want More Local Food, Stop Criminalizing Family Farmers

[JDPriestly]

9. Must be nice!

I live in Los Angeles -- about 5 miles from City Hall. I and many, many of my neighbors grow a few of our own vegetables. I grow a lot in pots, but a lot of people grow tomatoes and squash in their front yards. (Next year if I can talk my husband into it, and besides pepper plants are pretty.)

Why do we go to the trouble when we live on small, city lots? Because the food that we can buy in the supermarkets was picked green, ripened on the shelf and doesn't taste like the tiny bit of food we can grow ourselves.

As for unpasteurized milk, it can be very dangerous, but it also can be very healthy. The problem is that you just about have to drink it while it is warm. I lived across the street from a dairy farmer at one point in my life. I rushed over every day right around milking time to pick up my fresh, unpasteurized milk. I would let some of it sour on my kitchen counter and drink the rest.

Perhaps unpasteurized milk should not be permitted to be transported off the farm, but I would bet that lots of very healthy people who are now farmers themselves grew up on the stuff especially in its soured form.

I'm not advocating for the sale or use of unpasteurized milk. To the contrary. But have there actually been any incidents of disease from unpasteurized milk in recent years? I've heard of problems with contaminated meat, fruits and vegetables. But milk?

I'm wondering whether this is just government bureaucracy picking on a couple of little guys instead of attacking the important problems like depletion of our soil and therefore of nutritional value in our food due to the over-industrialization of a lot of our farming or lack of sanitary conditions on corporate farms that can result in contamination of food.