Photo by Stijn te Strake on Unsplash
**Previously recorded by Phyllis Schlafly // April 2012 **
You would think that the government has enough to do trying to stop the spread and sale of illegal drugs and overage drinking of alcohol. But no, the Food and Drug Administration must have time on its hands because it waged an aggressive battle against milk and has just won a fight against the creamy white stuff that most of us think is pretty healthy. The FDA won a two-year battle to shut down an Amish farmer named Daniel Allgyer who was selling fresh raw unpasteurized milk to eager customers in Washington, D.C.
The FDA claims that unpasteurized milk is unsafe and it was exercising its authority to stop sales of Allgyer’s milk across state lines. The milk battle came to a climax after a full investigation complete with a 5 a.m. surprise inspection and a straw-purchase sting operation against Mr. Allgyer’s Rainbow Acres Farm. Some of Allgyer’s customers have been buying his fresh milk for six years and they accuse the government of interfering with their parental rights to feed their children.
I’m particularly interested in this case because I brought up all my six children drinking raw fresh milk. Every Saturday, I would drive to a farm about an hour away from my home in Alton, Illinois, and buy 12 gallons of raw milk and 12 dozen fertile eggs. That lasted our family for a week, until the following Saturday. Nobody ever got sick. People asked me why I preferred raw milk, and my answer was, it is delicious. The taste difference between raw milk and pasteurized milk is just about as great as the difference between fresh fruit and canned fruit. I hope the government busybodies apologize to Mr. Allgyer and return to the important and necessary tasks that the government should be doing.
