Raw food raids are on the rise

There’s an interesting post on BoingBoing about government raids on farms that are selling wares at raw food markets. It’s simultaneously ridiculous and also awesome.

“If you take my computer again, I can’t do my homework.”—Words spoken to agents raiding a small California dairy farm by the owner’s 12-year-old daughter. The farm is known for producing raw goats’ milk cheese that is sold by members-only raw food markets. Grist reports that local, state, and federal raids on alternative “raw foodie” membership marketplaces are on the rise.

Raw food raids are on the rise

Ok, so the ridiculous part of this is the computer confiscation. People need computers and Internet access. With news, banking, and even government all being online, someone without a computer and Internet is effectively cut off. Really, we need to follow the lead of Finland and make Internet access a right that can not be revoked unless someone is convicted of a crime of appropriate severity.

As for the issue of the food, hells yes. If you read the posts on BoingBoing, they’re typical crazy hippies who think that anything which happens to benefit a bigger company to the detriment of a smaller one is an evil corporate conspiracy. Those same people will cry huge foul when they find a big company doing something like selling toys with lead paint. They’re just hypocrites who pick sides based on which party they empathize with more, rather than based on the facts of the issue itself.

The facts are that raw milk, raw cheese, and other such foods are fucking poison. You know humanity is only where it is today because we invented alcoholic beverages. Why is that? It’s because alcoholic beverages didn’t turn to poison and kill us all. The alcohol in the beverage killed off the nasty bacterias.

If you drink some raw milk or some bathtub cheese from one of these hippy farms, your odds of getting sick are quite high indeed. You might say that it’s never happened to you, and that’s quite possible. But it’s a huge risk. You want to get listeria, seriously?

You know how come we drink milk today? Pasteurization. Yeah, you know, the process that pretty much saved all of our collective asses. Without pasteurization, we wouldn’t be able to eat half the shit we eat today without getting sick all over the place. I’m not just talking about the common case with lots of diarrhea and vomiting, death is a significant possibility here.

You might like the taste of raw milk, but I’ve heard that anti-freeze tastes really good. I guess anti-freeze is more dangerous than raw milk, as it almost guarantees death, but the milk isn’t far behind. Actually, I’d say that lead paint is probably less dangerous than the milk. I mean, you aren’t supposed to eat the paint, and it can’t really hurt you if you leave it on the wall where it belongs. You’re going to drink the milk, and if it’s unpasteurized, you know what’s living in there?

Remember, milk comes from a farm. Farms are dirty places. They are really dirty. Even a clean farm is dirty. There’s animal poop and dirt and other nasty stuff all over. There’s also all kinds of bacteria that would love to fuck you up. The evil commercial farms are actually heavily regulated. They go to great lengths to make sure the food is clean. Ultra pasteurization, irradiation, and all kinds of other technology that make food safe to eat, and help fight hunger. Science scares hippies, so they don’t like this sort of thing, even though it saves lives. The hippy farms, they hardly do anything. Remember, unpasteurized milk is milk with cow poop in it. The bacteria in that cow poop can kill you.

The reason we have these laws for consumer protection is because clearly consumer education doesn’t work. There’s no way we can teach everyone the dangers of raw food. And even if we do, people like these hippies on BoingBoing still won’t believe it. Idealistically I am anti-nanny state. Pragmatically, let’s save some people’s lives. Even if they’re stupid enough to drink raw milk, they don’t deserve to die or have their insides come out both ends for that stupidity. Saving them from themselves is a good move. Government, please crack down more on unclean farms.

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