"Why is it, that in America it's easier to buy drugs, guns and political favors than it is to buy a gallon of raw milk?"

I was tired and hungry after a long business trip. It was late and so, without thinking, I drank a stout glass of ultra-pasteurized milk. It was a costly mistake. By morning I lay contorted in the fetal position, alternating between cold sweats and hot shivers. A surreal soundtrack of Janis Joplin crooning "Mercedes Benz," played deliriously in my head. In my debilitated state, it was the closest thing to a prayer my fevered mind could muster. Paradoxically, I experienced the kind of clear thinking that can only be realized through intense suffering. My meditative powers, now sharpened by the parallel pain in my gut, began to rival the exploits of the Yogis. This clarity of mind, manifest as a single irrefutable realization, was interrupted by the chaos in my stomach. Diverted from their customary southbound course and rerouted north, the contents of my stomach roared up the long dark tunnel of my esophageal pathway, like an express train, where they emerged, unwelcome, into the light. The realization, long since crystallized in my mind now trembled upon my lips: "Got Milk?"

The irony of how something that is supposedly so good for you, like pasteurized milk, could turn out to be otherwise is a troubling paradox that bedevils the dairy industry and nutrition experts. Why for instance, has the industry taken the singular icon of heartland America, the dairy cow, and turned her into a mutated freak of nature, stoked on hormones and antibiotics? Why is it, that in America it's easier to buy drugs, guns and political favors than it is to buy a gallon of raw milk? In my altered state of consciousness, the answers to these questions were all too clear.

The modern dairy business is a multi billion dollar industry built upon a rather elegantly simple commodity: milk. From this humble renewable resource, a host of profitable products are derived: ice cream, sauces, butter, yogurt, cheese, buttermilk, coffee and whipping creams, flavored milks, cottage cheese, sour cream and much more. There is a lot of revenue to be made in this industry. Unfortunately the pursuit of this revenue by large commercial dairy operations has led to practices that may be good for the corporate bottom line, but bad for the cows which must produce the milk and the consumers who drink it.

The dairy industry and the local, state and federal governmental bodies they influence are officially opposed to raw milk on the grounds that it is unsafe. Unofficially, it is more likely that the costs required to bring large scale operations, across the industry, up to the level of a good organic raw milk producer is economically unacceptable to Wall Street, company CEOs and their shareholders. In addition, despite the bad rap that dietary fat has earned over the last three decades, the real value of milk to the industry is in the fat. If consumers develop a taste for full fat raw milk, there go much of the profits that would have been garnered in the sale of higher profit items like cheese and creams.

Today, the technology and business model required to maintain safe, clean dairies that deliver fresh raw milk exists, but an industry hell-bent on maximizing profit through the creation of hormone doped psuedo-cows working under inhumane conditions ensure that large commercial dairies will never change unless they are forced to change by market demand. To prevent this from happening, the industry fights to restrict the availability of raw milk as much as possible, making its consumption illegal in many states.

So how do you keep the milk drinking public from keeling over from consuming contaminated milk produced by many of today's modern large scale dairies? This is where pasteurization comes in.

Pasteurization became necessary in New York City in the mid-1800s as a result of the "swill dairies." These dairies existed in a world that presaged Upton Sinclair's, The Jungle, a riveting social essay documenting the horrors of America's turn of the century meat packing industry. The swill dairies were the inevitable result of the confluence of human ignorance, greed and incompetence. The city's liquor distilleries made a practice of feeding the grain used in the fermentation process to the 'urban' cows who were housed in the city. The conditions that these tortured animals lived under were deplorable and the milk they produced was often unfit for human consumption. Under these conditions, death and disease were inevitable. Pasteurization was the magic bullet needed to solve, what was then, a serious problem. An added 'benefit' of pasteurization today is that it extends the shelf life of the milk. This is good news for the milk producer, but the end result for the consumer is a nutritionally inferior product.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that millions of people sickened from food borne contamination never report their illness to medical authorities. The CDC also estimates that about 5000 people die yearly from illnesses associated with eating contaminated foods. Clearly the majority of these people are not dying from drinking raw milk, and yet, while the USDA and the FDA have used their powers to try to reduce the number of food related illnesses by banning imports of products from specific suppliers, no local, state government or federal agency would ever seriously consider outlawing tomatoes and onions. Why then, has the weight of regulatory law been so inequitably applied to raw milk when mishandled fresh produce, along with sea food and meats have been proven to be a much greater threat?

Uncomfortable is getting stuck in the middle seat between two overweight life insurance salesmen on a five hour coast to coast flight. In my case, after drinking a glass of ultra-pasteurized milk, I wound up retching uncontrollably on the floor and experienced excruciating stomach cramps that lasted for hours. Although the severity of the symptoms subsided after the better part of a day, I didn't feel normal again until several days later. This, for me, goes way beyond 'uncomfortable.'

Given my recent experience with milk, it would seem unlikely that I would ever go near the white stuff again. And yet, there I stood, two weeks later with a glass of milk poised before my lips, a modern day Dr. Jekyll. The difference was that this time, it was raw milk. I had read that people who cannot drink pasteurized milk can often tolerate raw milk. This is because unlike pasteurized milk which has been stripped of all of its nutritive value, raw milk has all of the good stuff left in, including lactase, the enzyme that aids in the digestion of lactose. With my wife looking on skeptically, I downed the glass in one defiant gulp like Gary Cooper knocking back a whiskey in High Noon.

If I was to turn into Mr. Hyde, I knew from experience that I would begin to feel the first wave of trouble in my gut within fifteen to thirty minutes. Time passed and nothing happened, so a few hours later, I drank a second glass. I had two points of consolation which I hoped would make this experiment worthwhile if things went badly for me. The first was the small rationalization that I was making a great sacrifice in the service of science. The other and more appealing consolation was that this creamy full fat unadulterated milk was simply delicious. By morning I awoke feeling like a billion dollars. I donned a thirty-two pound weight vest, slapped twenty pounds of padded weights to my ankles and went for an eight mile walk. At least in my case, lactose intolerance was a completely bogus diagnosis. What my body was intolerant of was denatured pasteurized milk.

The diet priesthood, those health and nutrition experts who have been advising us for the last few decades, would argue that lactose intolerance is real, that raw milk should be avoided and that there is no nutritive difference between pasteurized milk and raw milk. Sure - and I've got some magic beans that I'll trade you for that cow. I know different and now, so do you.