Books: The Untold Story of Milk

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Green Pastures, Contented Cows and Raw Dairy Foods

Facts

Author: Ron Schmid, ND
ISBN: 0-9670897-4-3
Paperback: 455 pages
Publisher: New Trends Publishing

Back Cover

“This fascinating and compelling book will change the way you think about milk. Dr. Schmid chronicles the role of milk in the rise of civilization and in early America, the distillery dairies, compulsory pasteurization, the politics of milk, traditional dairying cultures and the modern dairy industry. He details the betrayal of public trust by government health officials and dissects the modern myths concerning cholesterol, animal fats and heart disease. And in the final chapters, he describes how scores of eminent scientists have documented the superiority of raw milk and its myriad health benefits.

Raw milk is a movement whose time has come. This book will serve as a catalyst for that movement, providing consumers with the facts and inspiration they need to embrace Nature’s perfect food.”

~ Sally Fallon, author of Nourishing Traditions and President of the Weston A. Price Foundation.

Excerpt from the Foreword

Twenty years ago organic agriculture was a fringe movement, barely on the mainstream radar scope, a subject that commentators treated with derision and politicians with scorn. Today organics is the fastest growing sector of the agricultural economy, a movement that garnishes tremendous public support and one that has proven a boon to many farmers.

Raw milk today is a fringe movement, a crusade of underdogs, a pesky mouse against the entrenched lions of medicine and industry. Who would be foolish enough to propose that raw milk should be reinstated as the centerpiece of the American diet? Or suggest that he agricultural model of the future will be the small farm with the dairy cow at its center?

In relating the untold story of milk, Ron Schmid takes us on a fascinating journey, one that starts with the beginning of recorded history and follows the cow as the economic unit upon which the wealth of nations was built, from Sumaria to the United States. While civilizations engaged in large scale cultivation of grains became highly centralized, with great disparity between the ruling classes and the laborer, cultures that kept herds and drew sustenance from dairy animals fostered democratic ideals and a more equitable distribution of wealth. Dairy animals provided abundance and independence to Abraham and his descendants and the dairy cow allowed the colonists of the new land to survive and prosper as independent yeoman farmers, freethinking agriculturists whom Thomas Jefferson recognized as the backbone of his newly emerging nation.

But milk is bad for us, say modern dietary gurus. It causes allergies and asthma, heart disease and cancer. No animal except humans drinks milk after infancy. Besides, we don’t need it – many societies other than our own do without milk and are healthier than we are. Thus has the status of milk declined from Nature’s perfect food to dietary anathema.

In the pages to come, Dr. Schmid describes the causes of milk’s decline from wholesome to noxious food; confinement dairies, inappropriate feed, horrendous processing, removal of the fat and addition of problematic compounds – all have taken their toll on milk’s delicate nutritional balance. And these changes have occurred with the sanction of our highest governing agencies and the blessings of the medical establishment.

No one can read this book without realizing that the arguments against milk are specious; that raw milk and raw milk products have provided splendid nourishment for diverse people all over the globe; and that this once-vital food has been tarnished with the black brush of modern processing.

Yes, many cultures have prospered without milk. But these cultures obtain the nutrients concentrated in milk from edibles that rarely appeal to western palates, such as organ meats, blubber, raw sea food and insects; or that are time-consuming to prepare, such as bone broths. Non-milk-drinking peoples put a high value on guts and grease; foods that modern children often refuse to eat. But few need coaxing to drink delicious whole raw milk – which is rich in the very same critical nutrients that traditional peoples found in animal organs, animal fats, and bones. Raw milk provides the welcome answer to modern parents, desperate to get quality nutrients into the finicky young eaters and mindful that children need extra protection against the junk food to which they are repeatedly exposed.

~ Sally Fallon, President (The Weston A. Price Foundation, July 2003, Washington D.C.)

Excerpt from the Introduction

Over thirty years ago, I moved to Martha’s Vineyard, ill but with a stubborn belief that I could find my own solution to my severe intestinal problems. I started buying raw milk at Fred Fisher’s dairy farm in West Tisbury, drinking some fresh and using the rest to make yogurt or “clabbered milk.” My intestinal problems mysteriously cleared up. Several years later I went on to medical school and became a naturopathic physician.

Over 95 percent of America’s dairy farmers drink their milk raw. I’ve asked a number of them why, and the answers range from, “Tastes better” to “Makes me feel good” to “Don’t like store-bought food.” Maybe they’re on to something.

Many people want an alternative to modern commercial milk, and hundreds of thousands of Americans – perhaps millions – are drinking organic milk today. A growing number are going to great lengths to obtain raw milk from healthy cows, and many more have grown curious about raw milk and want more information. Accurate information about raw milk can be hard to come by; advocates and detractors often appear at loggerheads and both sides are prone to erroneous and unsubstantiated claims.

The very best milk comes from healthy animals that spend most of their time outdoors on fresh pasture eating lots of grass, supplemented seasonally by high quality hay, green chop, root vegetables and perhaps a little grain.

Fermented milk products, fresh cheese and butter were at the center of the traditional American diet as well. Fermented buttermilk (equivalent to clabbered milk with or without the milk fat) was drunk, used in cooking or fed to hogs.

Forgotten is “the milk cure” a highly successful method for treating chronic disease detailed in a 1929 article by one of the founders of the Mayo Clinic, John E. Crewe, M.D. The article, entitled “Raw Milk Cures Many Diseases,” is a fascinating account of how many physicians used natural foods, including raw milk, to tackle the problems of chronic illness in the years before the pharmaceutical industry persuaded doctors to use drug therapy instead.

Fresh and unprocessed is important because uncooked food contains enzymes. Enzymes are defined in medical textbooks as being essential life; they are vital, and are destroyed by heat. While no one would argue those points, food scientists and medical people generally dismiss the importance of food enzymes. They’re said to be unimportant because the body contains enzymes to digest food even if the food is cooked and the food enzymes are destroyed. In this book, we’ll look at why food enzymes are crucial to good health.

Understanding what happened to milk, and how to know and find good milk today resonated with a surprising number of people. Perhaps as you pursue these pages, you’ll find that you are one of them.