The Amish have been producing raw milk, on the same family farms, from the same breeds of cow, for approximately three hundred years.
No artificial insemination. No hormones. No industrial feed. No antibiotic prophylaxis. The cows eat grass in summer and hay in winter. The milk is in your hand within hours of leaving the cow.
Amish children, by the epidemiological research of the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins, have substantially lower rates of asthma, eczema, food allergies, and autoimmune disease than the broader American population.
Raw milk is illegal to sell across state lines. It is illegal to sell retail in most states. The FDA has raided Amish dairies in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, armed, seized the milk, destroyed equipment, and prosecuted the farmers.
The enforcement is presented as consumer protection.
The raw milk the FDA is protecting Americans from has a lower documented illness rate than the spinach aisle at any given American supermarket, which has produced multiple national E. coli outbreaks in the last twenty years with no armed federal raids on spinach farms.
A community of religious traditionalists, farming by hand, producing food the way Americans produced food for three hundred years, is being criminalised for continuing to do so.
The consumer is being protected from the option of buying food her great-grandmother considered normal.
