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Food police
From unpasteurized milk to trans fats, governments are more concerned than ever with what we put in our mouths
Chris Selley, Macleans.ca | Updated Thursday, December 14, 2006, at 14:58 EST
The revolution has failed. Ontarians will not be getting the "all-party task force to examine the issues surrounding raw milk" that Progressive Conservative MPP Bill Murdoch wanted the provincial legislature to create. Instead, they will continue to live under Dalton McGuinty's milk-stained jackboot, deprived of the unpasteurized white stuff.
The debate stems from the case of Michael Schmidt, the Owen
Sound-area dairy farmer who had been distributing raw milk to many
happy clients - "shareholders," actually - until the Ministry of
Natural Resources stormed his premises in November and demanded he
stop. Neither sophisticated urban chef Jamie Kennedy nor
salt-of-the-earth rural chef Michael Stadtlander - not to mention
Schmidt's ongoing hunger strike - could sway the authorities otherwise.
And yet, several U.S. states regulate the sale of raw milk or allow it
on a "buyer beware" basis. So why is the issue verboten in Ontario?
Provincial
politicians have many reasons - 20-year-old horror stories, for
instance. "In April 1986 a kindergarten class in Lambton county had an
outbreak of E. coli 0157:H7 after the class had been on a field trip to
a dairy farm where the children had been given samples of raw milk,"
Liberal MPP Maria Van Bommel told the Legislature last Thursday.
"Several of the children got sick. They had gastrointestinal problems;
quite frankly, they had bloody diarrhea, which, as any parent knows, is
extremely dangerous."
Later in her address, Van Bommel fell back
on her personal experiences in dairy farming. "I can remember, as a
child, my sisters and I being handed broad brushes and a pail of
whitewash and told to go and whitewash the stone walls in the interior
of our dairy barn," she said. "My mom would don a scarf over her head
and would go chasing cobwebs with a broom."
It hasn't been a
particularly coherent debate, nor is it a new one: Schmidt has been
through this entire rigmarole once before. Twelve years ago, the
Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound Health Unit raided his store, seized his milk and
cheese and charged him with various dairy-related offenses. Schmidt
protested that everyone buying his products had completed a
"lease-a-cow" agreement, which theoretically qualified them to drink
"their own cow's" raw milk. He has attempted the same arrangement with
his current "shareholders," in hope of getting around the ban.
Another
constant in the debate is Greg Sorbara, who testified on Schmidt's
behalf in 1994 at a board of health hearing. "I think he is right and I
think the government is wrong," he said at the time. "I think it is
completely counterproductive to persecute a guy like Michael Schmidt."
A dozen years later, now serving as Ontario's Finance Minister, Sorbara
readily admits to being one of Schmidt's loyal customers. "I have long
been a proponent for a safe, effective, highly regulated system of
distributing raw milk," he told the Toronto Star.
Dr. McQuigge
was involved in the last raw milk controversy too, although he avoided
comparisons to manslaughter. Then the medical officer of health for
Owen Sound, he was quoted by the Star on the potential harm raw milk
can cause - among them parasites, blood poisoning, meningitis and all
manner of pregnancy-related disasters. "In the past three years, the
Health Unit has investigated 22 cases of disease in Bruce and Grey
counties where the consumption of raw milk was suspected as the source
of infection," he claimed.
While raw milk seems to particularly
inflame passions, recent experience suggests Ontario is particularly
persnickety about food matters.
Most famously, the provincial
government absorbed much abuse over its 2004 decision that all raw fish
should be frozen before being served - not least because that time,
officials didn't even have a list of parasites and diseases to rhyme
off. "We in Ontario haven't had any reports of diseases per se,"
associate chief medical officer Karim Kurji admitted to The Globe and
Mail.
Kurji did mention anisakiasis - described by the Globe as
"an illness caused by ingesting larvae of nematodes (roundworms),
related to the consumption of raw fish" that "causes nausea and severe
stomach pains." But chief medical officer Sheela Basrur subsequently
acknowledged that only two cases had been noted in Ontario in the
previous decade, eventually admitting that the ban had been imposed
with very little evidence to support it.
"If we had the
information we needed at the start, we would have done things
differently," she said. "But better late than never." The ban on
unfrozen sushi was reversed.
At the time, the Montreal Gazette's
editorialists couldn't resist looking down their respective noses at
Torontonians. "Quebecers' traditional feelings of smug superiority
vis-a-vis the bumptious, over-paid yokels of Upper Canada has [sic]
been taking a beating in recent years," they wrote. "But every now and
then, still, Ontario does something to evoke the stern paternalistic
era of Toronto the Good, capital of Ontario the Boring."
But
it's not just Ontario delving into increasingly heavy food regulation.
And it's not just Canada, either. Trans fats have been effectively
banned in Denmark since 2003. And on Friday, the New York City
Department of Health announced a ban on artificial trans fats:
Restaurants have six months to eliminate all but 0.5 grams per serving
of trans fats from "oils, margarines and shortening used for frying and
spreading" and eighteen months to do the same for all foods.
Trans
fats do occur naturally, in dairy products and in ruminant meats like
beef. But they are most commonly associated with the fast food
industry, particularly in the use of partially hydrogenated vegetable
oil for deep frying. They have been shown to lower good cholesterol
while raising bad cholesterol, and are associated with coronary heart
disease and diabetes.
In other words, trans fats are - like so
many other things - quite bad for you. But the fast food industry
appears to be self-regulating. KFC recently announced that its chickens
would be immersed in trans fat-free canola oil by early 2007. Taco Bell
announced in November that it would offer at least 15 trans-fat free
menu items. McDonald's promises it's working feverishly to find a
stable source of trans-fat free oil.
With disclosure of trans
fat content now mandatory on the labels of pre-packaged foods,
Canadians do not seem to lack the resources to avoid it. But in June, a
federal panel recommended that Canada adopt regulations fairly similar
to those recently announced in New York - and the NDP is outraged that
the government hasn't yet done so.
"A generation of kids has
been made lethargic and sluggish by having their little arteries
clogged with this trans fat," New Democrat MP Pat Martin charged.
"We're poisoning another generation of children when we don't have to
be."
The irony is that these arguments come at a time when
public awareness of nutritional information has Canadians increasingly
well-positioned to make informed food choices. Clearly, that awareness
- and the ensuing fear of all things unhealthy - has convinced
politicians and bureaucrats that consumer protection is a winning
issue. But it opens the question of whether we really want governments
to save us from ourselves - or from the manslaughter allegedly being
perpetrated upon us.
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