What I thought was interesting about this one was the broken regulatory system that allowed this, and that led regulators not to penalize the unlicensed business, but to issue a cease and desist for expediency.
At licensed farms, California investigators have collected the milk themselves. And because newer batches might not have the same contaminant that sickened consumers, they have also combed the farmland for the pathogen, sampling dirt, groundwater and animal droppings.
Department officials told ProPublica that California law does not permit investigators to enter unlicensed properties, even when they receive reports of unlicensed activity.
Okay, but shouldn't this be a sort of caveat emptor situation?
Surely by now everybody knows that raw milk consumption is associated with risk of illness and injury. They buy it anyway. They give it to their children. The parents here were grossly irresponsible -- but the article frames it like they were poor ignorant saps who did nothing wrong. In my view, the parents are much more to blame than the farm is. The farm didn't seek them out, didn't force them to buy or drink anything.
The sale of raw milk for human consumption is legal in California. As a regulatory matter, it's "associated with risk of illness and injury" only in the same way as sushi. There are best practices which farms selling raw milk as food are required to follow, which the parents here reasonably believed were being followed, even though they weren't.
You and I agree that raw milk is dangerous in the "nobody should ever drink it" sense, but that view is not as widely held as you'd think.
What I thought was interesting about this one was the broken regulatory system that allowed this, and that led regulators not to penalize the unlicensed business, but to issue a cease and desist for expediency.
Okay, but shouldn't this be a sort of caveat emptor situation?
Surely by now everybody knows that raw milk consumption is associated with risk of illness and injury. They buy it anyway. They give it to their children. The parents here were grossly irresponsible -- but the article frames it like they were poor ignorant saps who did nothing wrong. In my view, the parents are much more to blame than the farm is. The farm didn't seek them out, didn't force them to buy or drink anything.
The sale of raw milk for human consumption is legal in California. As a regulatory matter, it's "associated with risk of illness and injury" only in the same way as sushi. There are best practices which farms selling raw milk as food are required to follow, which the parents here reasonably believed were being followed, even though they weren't.
You and I agree that raw milk is dangerous in the "nobody should ever drink it" sense, but that view is not as widely held as you'd think.