July 2008 Archive for On the Udder Hand

My last blog posting a few months ago on the topic of raw milk referenced a pro-raw milk blogger who said on the Daily Kos with an extraordinarily straight face that raw milk “is full of probiotics increasingly missing in our pasteurized, sterilized, degraded, overprocessed diets. Raw Milk is considered not only safe but especially wholesome, not only wholesome but UNIQUELY rich in pro-biotics that help keep people healthy.”

I asked the rhetorical question in my posting “is the fervor for raw milk a situation where the facts matter at all?”  For its feverish proponents, the obvious answer remains no.

In my surfing of the blogosphere, however, what’s interesting to note is that there is another class of folks who are paying keen attention to the raw milk market…and they represent the beginning of the end of the movement.  I’m referring to members of the legal profession, aka the plaintiff’s bar, aka trial lawyers looking to sue producers and processors of raw milk on behalf of people allegedly sickened by consumption of unpasteurized milk.

As I reported in that April blog posting, hundreds of people have been infected by bacteria sometimes present in raw milk – a fact that raw milk aficionados seem to blithely ignore.  But lawyers are paid not to ignore the facts in these matters.   And they see money in those same headlines.

Here are a couple of recent examples of law firms – with their own blogs, no less – who are out soliciting business from people who may have gotten the bad end of a bacterium in a glass of milk: 

Food Poisoning Law Blog

Marler Blog

The latter blog, in particular, references some of the same cases that my blog posting had mentioned – the suit against Organic Pastures in California, for example – as well as more recent cases in Connecticut and Missouri where raw milk has been linked to some bad illnesses in people.

I’ve never been comfortable with the degree to which the legal community can pursue tort litigation against product or service providers, so let me be clear about that fact.  At the same time, however, this isn’t a situation like, say, the silicone breast implant controversy in the 1990s, where the evidence was clear (and has gotten still clearer) that those implants don’t cause systemic illnesses in their hosts….yet there was lots of money made by pursuing lawsuits against the implant makers in spite of data indicating there wasn’t really a problem.

This situation, however, is the inverse:  the data do provide a link between consumption of raw milk, and the ingestion of pathogenic bacteria.  Fans of raw milk, at least some of them, claim either that raw milk’s palliative properties negate pathogens, and/or that they can, by patronizing the raw milk from a local dairy farm, be assured that the product is impeccably pure and without germs.  Yet the body count of people infected grows, in spite of these allegations.  The facts speak otherwise.

The facts don’t always matter the most in court, of course.  But as more of these medical cases become legal ones, I’m certain we will see the debate over raw milk be dominated by lawyers, not farmers.   

If you’ve seen one of the big movies of the summer, Wall-E (and I give it a thumbs up, even if you don’t have little kids), you’ll recall that a key premise of the film is that human life in the 28^th century is defined by its mindless consumer consumption, and all that consumption occurs at one retailer:  Buy n’ Large.  BnL represents the logical evolution of 21^st century superstores and hypermarkets, which have led to monopolistic control of consumer marketing in 2700 AD.

If you look at recent data on what’s happening in the food business today, however, you’ll deduce that we won’t have to wait 700 years for the future of retailing to arrive…it’s already on our doorstep.

In the July 7^th issue of Feedstuffs magazine, there’s an article accounting for the sales and market shares of the nation’s largest supermarkets.  The figures are intimidating to compute, even for Wall-E.  The top five retailers – Wal-Mart, Kroger, Safeway, Costco and SuperValu, have a 54% collective market share (this was in 2007).  Just the first two alone have fully one-third of all supermarket sales in the U.S.

When you add in the next five, including Sam’s Club (which wasn’t even counted in the initial Wal-Mart tally), Publix Super Markets, Ahold USA, Delhaize America, and HEB, the consolidation trend continues.  These second five sell 19% of the groceries, giving the top 10 outlets 73% of all sales. 

The funny thing in agriculture and, really, the entire consumer food chain is that consumers profess to be very concerned about the apparent demise of small, “family” farms, which are viewed as inherently superior to corporate, “factory” farms (as if there are only these two business models possible in farming, and they are distinctly black and white). 

But at the same time, food processing, and especially food retailing, has become enormously concentrated and big – much more so than down on the farm.  Yet, apart from occasional outbreaks of Wal-Mart bashing, generally spearheaded by labor unions, this clear and unmistakable trend is hardly notorious at all.  This, despite the fact that the consumer’s main conduit to food is through the stores that s/he patronizes.

It’s sometimes thought that the changing structure of farming is due to pressures that exist strictly, or primarily, at the farm level (the argument about whether farming is really changing dramatically today, other than through the century-old trend of fewer but larger farms, is a topic for another day).  But you rarely hear the argument made that many of today’s economic pressures on production agriculture are a reflection of the restructuring of the food distribution chain.  When the fate of your business depends on the merchandising decisions of just a handful of buyers at these large food corporations, it first concentrates the mind…and the rest of the infrastructure often follows.

In fact, I think a small portion of consumers are concerned about this trend, and they’re the ones pushing to support farmers markets and other manifestations of the buy-local trend.  But a lot of the major retailers already buy locally anyway – at least to a degree. Seeing as how most families don’t have time to drive miles every weekend to a farmers market (as opposed to patronizing one of the big 10 on the list above), it’s hard to envision the “locavore” movement as a viable alternative model that will achieve any type of critical mass in comparison to the $390 billion in grocery sales enjoyed by those top 10 marketers.

Will Wall-E’s world of tomorrow come to pass?  In a certain respect, we won’t have to wait long to see.

Sitting at the breakfast table Monday with the Washington Post, I read with great interest this article about how the bottled water business is trying to gin up more sales by finding new qualities to ascribe to its products – particularly in comparison to tap water, which is free, and in some cases, also the source of the water that ends up in popular bottled water brands.  This quote in particular caught my eye:

But empirical tests have repeatedly shown that they are generally the same. In blind taste tests, many people who swear they can differentiate between bottled-water brands and tap water fail to spot the differences, and studies have shown that both are fine to drink, and both occasionally can have quality problems.

Experts who study bottled water as a cultural phenomenon say differences between the two are largely marketing inventions.

As I poured some milk over my cereal, I though the exact same description could be made in comparing the marketing of organic milk vs. conventional milk – the latter of which, while not free and coming out of our kitchen tap, fetches about half the premium price of certified organic milk.

The reason this story resonated with me is because we’ve seen a great deal of marketing claims about organic dairy products that, in essence, use absence claims that assert the products’ desirabilties based on what they do not have.  The Unholy Trinity, as I call them, are hormones, pesticides and antibiotics. 

While it’s true that the national organic program doesn’t allow dairy farmers to use such products in the production of their milk, at the end of the day, there are no substantial compositional differences in organic vs. conventional milk.  Hormones?  All milk has trace amounts.  Pesticides?  Same there.  If you look hard enough, you’ll find evidence of decades-old use of DDT in most animal foods.  Antibiotics?  Every tanker of milk, organic and regular, is tested for antibiotics, and no milk can be sold if it tests positive.

So what’s interesting in the story about the bottled water biz is that some environmental groups are pressuring local mayors to dissuade people from patronizing bottled water at the expense of water coming from municipal taps.  Water is water, and while the plastic-packaged kind may be more convenient, it comes at a cost.

That’s basically what the overall dairy industry has been saying, with much less impact, in the past decade.  For people who don’t want milk produced using modern technologies that improve on-farm efficiencies, organic products are an alternative.  But the resulting product is nutritionally and compositionally no different, and certainly not safer,compared  to its conventional brethren.

Here’s another excerpt from the Post story toward that end:

The supply of clean drinking water across America and in many other countries is an underappreciated scientific and technological achievement that in many ways rivals putting a man on the moon. Trillions of dollars have been spent to get clean drinking water to people at virtually no cost.

You know, that’s also an accurate description of our system of modern milk production, where rigorous hygiene and sanitation requirements have made it a reliably safe, very nutritious, and relatively inexpensive product (usually cheaper, gallon for gallon, than bottled water itself, which has no nutrition at all!).

Alas, despite no evidence to the contrary, some people just don’t buy the facts.  Witness what a newsletter editor named Lisa Freeman reported on CNN last month: 

“Shoppers should splurge instead on USDA-certified organic meat, poultry and dairy products - free of antibiotics and toxins found in the conventional variety.”

I have no idea where she got the notion that there are toxins, or antibiotics, in the dairy supply, but this is an urban legend (or is it rural, if we’re talking  about farming?) that seems to perpetuate itself with no scientific proof at all.  Sounds a lot like the raw milk movement, come to think of it.

But perhaps this sober scrutiny of the rhetoric and reality of bottled water will eventually spill into the milk business as well.  I’ll drink to that.