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Resistance See other Resistance Articles Title: Canadian bureaucrats score one against raw milk marketer Before Michael Schmidt and his raw milk crusade, there was Adelaide Hunter Hoodless. She isn’t mentioned in this week’s court ruling that convicted Schmidt of violating Ontario public health laws by selling unpasteurized milk. And her name leaves some of Schmidt’s followers looking perplexed. But more than a century ago, after her youngest son, John, died from drinking contaminated milk as an infant, Hoodless embarked on a campaign to have all milk heat-treated — pasteurized — to kill potentially harmful bacteria, making her one of Canada’s earliest food safety proponents. “She was way ahead of her time,” said Sylvain Charlebois, a professor of food safety and distribution at the University of Guelph and a member of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency’s expert advisory panel. Hoodless grew up on a farm in St. George, near Brantford, and is sometimes described as one of the country’s most effective but least-known social reformers. After her son’s death in 1889, she devoted herself to educating women in the “domestic sciences” and giving them the institutional backing they needed to protect their families. Her work led to the formation of Women’s Institutes, home economics programs in schools and the creation of the Macdonald Institute at the University of Guelph. And while Schmidt has waged a high-profile battle against public health authorities and milk marketing boards in his quest to get raw milk into customers’ hands, his most formidable adversary might be Hoodless and her legacy. Oddly, each of their campaigns has been described as attempts to empower people and encourage them to take more responsibility for the food they produce and consume. But while Hoodless saw government regulation as part of the solution, Schmidt’s ethos is decidedly libertarian: keep government out and let consumers decide what to eat. Those competing philosophies are also at the heart of a growing international discussion about the role the state should play in monitoring and managing risks to food supplies. “I really think we need to have a debate in this country about how we commercially market milk, what does food safety mean and how do we regulate food safety,” Charlebois said. There’s definitely an appetite, he said, for more government food regulation, particularly since 1996, when Britain announced Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a human variant of Mad Cow disease, had found its way into the country’s beef. But at the same time, said Charlebois, consumers are more sophisticated, health conscious and, particularly if they live in cities, want to reconnect with the land and know more about where their food comes from. And this, he believes, is where Schmidt fits in. The 57-year-old Grey County dairy farmer has been waging his straight-from-the-cow crusade for nearly two decades and while his primary motivation was not the death of a child, it involved another form of deeply personal loss. At the end of WWII, his parents’ farm in Thuringia, near the East German border, was seized by the Soviet Union. After they escaped to the West, Schmidt said, they peered through barbed wire at their former home. Schmidt grew up highly sensitized to the potential for having one’s freedom taken away by government. That’s what he believes is happening with legislation that prevents him from selling his milk. He plans to appeal his 15 convictions. “We have a dictatorial food system,” Schmidt said this week on the porch of his farmhouse, outside Durham. “We need to establish the basic rights of people to choose which foods they want to eat,” he said. “It’s not up to the government.” But the government has a long history in milk regulation. Toronto passed a bylaw in 1915 requiring all milk sold to be pasteurized and that became mandatory across Ontario in 1938. The Star was a prominent advocate for pasteurization. From a public safety standpoint, there’s been enough evidence over the years that pasteurization is a sound measure that reduces the risk of picking up disease-causing pathogens, such as listeriosis, e. coli and tuberculosis bacteria, from drinking milk, Charlebois said. At the same time, as someone raised on a dairy farm in Farnham, Que., Charlebois said he can’t help but “embrace what Schmidt is trying to accomplish” — serving a niche market hungry for farm-fresh milk. Did Charlebois drink unpasteurized milk when he was growing up? “What do you think? If you hear one farmer say they haven’t, they’d be lying,” he said. “You didn’t really ask yourself these questions (about safety). You were served milk on the table. And it came from Melanie or Lily — they all had names.” Schmidt’s herd of horned Canadienne cows include Berbel (little Barbara) and Lola. Like Hoodless, Schmidt is a widely influential character, a leader. A pianist and conductor, he’s artistic director of Symphony in the Barn, a summer music program that brings orchestras into what is otherwise his hay house. He also founded and conducts the Saugeen Chamber Choir, now rehearsing Handel’s Messiah. Schmidt was happy he had choir practice last Wednesday, after the ruling came out, because it got his mind off his legal troubles. It remains to be seen, though, whether some day there will be a bronze plaque outside Schmidt’s farmhouse, as there is in front of the Hoodless homestead, a national historic site. Right now, there’s just a sign nailed to a tree. “This Land is Our Land,” it says. “Back Off Government.” Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
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