Raw Milk Debate a Taste of What's to Come
By Mike Nichols, Pioneer Press

My plan today was to write about Wisconsin's vaunted heritage as the dairy paradise, maybe tell the tale of a guy near La Farge whom I interviewed recently whose mom actually used to take milk baths. And expound on the inherent Wisconsin right to guzzle raw milk until it comes out your nose, if that is the sort of discomfort you desire.

But first, I had to ask the question that everybody is asking of late for a slightly different reason. I asked it of Kathy Kramer, a nutritionist and office manager at the Weston A. Price Foundation in Washington, D.C., a place that vociferously supports drinking raw milk.

What if you get sick?

"That is rare," she told me, adding that people have been drinking raw milk in some states for a long time.

But what if you do?

"We just don't see that as an issue," she said.

Lots of people on both sides of the aisle in Madison don't either — yet. A broad array of Democrats and Republicans are poised to pass legislation letting us drink raw milk, just like our ancestors did.

Our ancestors, it is true, were a little goofy and also smeared goose grease and skunk oil all over themselves when they got sick. But hey, everyone should have a right to smell however — or drink whatever — they desire, so long as they do it willingly and aren't hurting anyone else, right?

This seems like a no-brainer. Or did. Until, for some reason, I had to ask what everyone in the nation's capital had been asking as they debated health care. What if somebody gets sick?

Unpasteurized milk has been linked to things like salmonella and E. coli infections, after all. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have found that illnesses linked to raw milk are 2.85 times greater in states that allow it than in places that don't, according to Steve Ingham, director of food safety in Wisconsin's Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection.

And while it's easy to argue that people ought to have a right to harm themselves, there is another argument as well.

"There is still a social cost or a health care system cost if something goes wrong," he said.

That is true. In fact, that is now truer than ever. In a system that requires everyone to be insured and requires many people to now pay a lot more for many other people to be insured, we are bound together in ways we previously were not. Our ancestors never paid for each other's skunk oil.

People want to feel big-hearted and generous. But people are practical, too, especially when it comes to their wallets. So you can see where we are headed now. Once the medical bills start coming and people realize how truly expensive it is going to be, there's going to be a lot less tolerance of anything that doesn't conform to mainstream views of what's healthy, or normal, or not-too-risky. Wisconsin might allow raw milk, but only until there's a big outbreak.

There have been lots of stories about the exorbitant costs of our new health care system, but there is one thing it likely will cost us that has not been discussed much: the ability to take a chance or a risk, of betting you know more than the experts, of maybe just enjoying something a little dangerous with lots of nicotine or trans fats in it.

Enjoy those while you can.

Many people are going to gain insurance in this country. But you have to strongly suspect we also are going to lose something we maybe didn't think of — something way beyond just dollars: the ability to taste something a little different.