Should This Milk Be Legal?

THERE was the name of a Web site scrawled on cardboard and quickly torn to bits by an anonymous farmer in the Greenmarket at Union Square. Then came the paperwork, legal enough presumably, to protect the source of the illicit substance. Finally, Yaron Milgrom-Elcott received the monthly drop site: an address near Chelsea, open for two hours, show up or lose the white stuff.
Skip to next paragraph
Multimedia
mm.DI = true;
mm.LI = false;
mm.AH = "Nina Planck on Raw Food";
mm.AD = "70";
mm.AU = "http://graphics8.nytimes.com/audiosrc/dining/planck1.mp3";
mm.IU = "";
writePlayer();
mm.DI = true;
mm.LI = false;
mm.AH = "Nina Planck on the Nutritional Benefits of Raw Milk";
mm.AD = "22";
mm.AU = "http://graphics8.nytimes.com/audiosrc/dining/vitamins-milk.mp3";
mm.IU = "";
writePlayer();
Nina Planck on the Nutritional Benefits of Raw Milk (mp3)
var so = new SWFObject("http://www.nytimes.com/packages/flash/multimedia/swfs/multiloader.swf", "p20541", "100%", "25", "8", "#FFFFFF");
so.addVariable("mp3","http://graphics8.nytimes.com/audiosrc/dining/vitamins-milk.mp3")
so.addVariable("duration","22")
so.addVariable("contentPath","http://graphics.nytimes.com/packages/flash/multimedia/INLINE_PLAYER/NYTInline.swf")
so.addParam("allowScriptAccess", "always");
so.write("p20541");
mm.DI = true;
mm.LI = false;
mm.AH = "Nina Planck on Lactose Intolerance";
mm.AD = "31";
mm.AU = "http://graphics8.nytimes.com/audiosrc/dining/lactoseintolerance.mp3";
mm.IU = "";
writePlayer();
Nina Planck on Lactose Intolerance (mp3)
var so = new SWFObject("http://www.nytimes.com/packages/flash/multimedia/swfs/multiloader.swf", "p792551", "100%", "25", "8", "#FFFFFF");
so.addVariable("mp3","http://graphics8.nytimes.com/audiosrc/dining/lactoseintolerance.mp3")
so.addVariable("duration","31")
so.addVariable("contentPath","http://graphics.nytimes.com/packages/flash/multimedia/INLINE_PLAYER/NYTInline.swf")
so.addParam("allowScriptAccess", "always");
so.write("p792551");
mm.DI = true;
mm.LI = false;
mm.AH = "Nina Planck Compares Raw to Industrial Milk";
mm.AD = "26";
mm.AU = "http://graphics8.nytimes.com/audiosrc/dining/rawvsindustrial.mp3";
mm.IU = "";
writePlayer();
Nina Planck Compares Raw to Industrial Milk (mp3)
var so = new SWFObject("http://www.nytimes.com/packages/flash/multimedia/swfs/multiloader.swf", "p122810", "100%", "25", "8", "#FFFFFF");
so.addVariable("mp3","http://graphics8.nytimes.com/audiosrc/dining/rawvsindustrial.mp3")
so.addVariable("duration","26")
so.addVariable("contentPath","http://graphics.nytimes.com/packages/flash/multimedia/INLINE_PLAYER/NYTInline.swf")
so.addParam("allowScriptAccess", "always");
so.write("p122810");

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times
UNPASTEURIZED Yaron Milgrom-Elcott buys raw milk easily in San Francisco.
Mr. Milgrom-Elcott never missed a drop. Each month, he joined mothers with newborns and Wall Street titans in search of a box of unpasteurized, unhomogenized, raw milk. He is also part of a movement of perhaps hundreds of thousands across the country who will risk illness or even death to drink their milk the way Americans did for centuries: straight from the cow.
Twenty years ago, the Food and Drug Administration banned interstate sales of unpasteurized milk. This spring the agency warned consumers again that they were risking their health drinking raw milk.
Still, individual states determine how raw milk is bought and sold within their borders. While its sale for human consumption is illegal in 15 states, New York is one of 26 where it can be bought with restrictions. The chief one is that raw milk can only be sold on the premises of one of 19 dairy farms approved by the state. Clandestine milk clubs, like the one Mr. Milgrom-Elcott joined, are one way of circumventing the law, and there are others.
Raw milk drinkers may praise its richer flavor or claim it is more nutritious than pasteurized milk. No matter why they drink it, the demand for it is booming. In 2000, the Organic Pastures Dairy Company in the San Joaquin Valley near Fresno became California’s first raw milk dairy with certified organic pasture land. This year its co-founder, Mark McAfee, expects it to gross $6 million — up from $4.9 last year.
His raw milk is sold in 300 stores in California, where it is legal. He also has an $80,000 a month mail order business, shipping creams and cheese as well as milk to all 50 states. He believes he reaches 35,000 customers a week for his raw milk products. Because the laws allow interstate shipping of raw milk that is not meant for human consumption, Organic Pastures milk is labeled as pet food.
“I like to go into the warehouse and see the addresses — it goes all over creation,” he said. “We don’t have the same customers day in and day out. We’re the entry point. We hear back that shipping is too expensive but that they found a local provider, either a farm or on the black market. They have got to have it.”
Mr. McAfee said he knows firsthand of more than six dairies in Pennsylvania, some of them Amish, that supply the black market in New York and Boston. “They’re sending in 200 cases of milk every month,” he said.
Some drink it for the same reason raw milk cheeses are popular: the taste. “I first discovered it two summers ago in France,” said Mr. Milgrom-Elcott, who is pursuing a doctorate in medieval Jewish mysticism at New York University. “There is a richness and density unlike processed milk, plus there’s this complexity of flavor.”
Others believe that it is good for them. Pasteurization — a process of heating and quickly cooling milk to kill pathogens such as E. coli, salmonella and listeria — also destroys beneficial bacteria, proteins and enzymes, they say. Advocates attribute stronger immune and better digestive systems to raw milk. Many have incorporated it into their diet as part of a broader philosophy to treat their bodies and the planet properly.
Nina Planck, the author of “Real Food: What to Eat and Why,” defied the F.D.A.’s warning and drank raw milk while she was pregnant. She not only continues to drink it while nursing her 9-month-old son, Julian, but also allows him the occasional sip. She has an arrangement with a couple of farmers to deliver it to New York City.
“We drink raw milk because we trust the traditional food chain more than the industrial one,” said Ms. Planck, who knows a number of farmers from her days as director of the New York City Greenmarkets and through her boyfriend, Rob Kaufelt, the owner of Murray’s Cheese in Greenwich Village.
“We’re willing to spend more money the higher up the food chain we go,” she said. “We’re not alone, either. You cannot categorize the people who are drinking raw milk. They are people from the blue states and red states, farmers and yuppies and Birkenstock wearers.”
Food scientists can hardly believe that so many consumers have turned their back on one of the most successful public health endeavors of the 20th century. In 1938, for example, milk caused 25 percent of all outbreaks of food- and water-related sickness.
With the advent of universal pasteurization, that number fell to 1 percent by 1993, according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nutrition advocacy group in Washington