Rawesome Foods Raid: Safety or Tyranny?

On August 3rd, 2011, Rawesome Foods in Venice, California, an organic health food store, was raided by the FDA and federal agents for conspiracy to sell raw milk and raw milk sales. Although the raw milk program was a private club, legal in California, the federal agents stated that their reasoning was because of suspicion around malicious raw milk sales.

That day and to this day, there have been protests and online lashback for what seems to be a misguided raid at an honest business attempting to make money in the current economy. The FDA and other organizations who authorized and organized this raid have spent citizen tax dollars to raid a legal business establishment and arrest citizens for legal acts. In my own opinion, the public outcry for a solution to this unconstitutional and unlawful raid is completely justified. To add to the economic turmoil that exists in every business, legal raw milk vendors are also to worry about unjustified random raids by Federal agents? The economy is already strained enough to be dealing with these kinds of regulations that seem to be without any actual benefit to the public or the public businesses.

And to add to the growing stack of malicious acts completed in this incidence, thousands of dollars of vendor items were either poured out or seized as evidence. Foods that had nothing to do with raw milk shouldn’t be taken because of the raw milk law, although that is exactly what happened.

The Rawesome foods raid is of common occurrence to the raw milk industry, with Rawesome Foods having been raided for the second time on August third. The outrage exists for many reasons, including the lack of evidence against Raw milks safety, the lack of courtesy of Federal agents in this situation, the absence of legality around this raid, the thousands of dollars of product seized and/or poured out by Federal agents, and the overall complete disregard for public opinion in this situation.

In a sense, the public right to freedom of speech is being violated by the Federal agents by ignoring any outcry by the public. The Government was created to protect the people, not conduct raids funded by the people on honest, hard-working citizens.

Now, the Federal Government is most likely operating within the law by their own definition, seeing as raw milk is a controversial issue that has resulted in only 15 states allowing somewhat-limited sales of raw milk. But, just because it is within their power to do something like this, it does not prove that what was done was right in any way.

Although raw milk has controversy around it, health and fitness enthusiasts often argue that the raw milk safety issue is completely without justification because of the lack of a anti raw milk argument. The safety statistics tell us that only 1007 illnesses and 2 deaths have occured from raw milk between 1998 and 2005, while pasteurized dairy has resulted in 200,000 cases of illnesses and 600 deaths between 1998 and 2005.

This isn’t me saying that raw milk is 100 percent safer or even better, but just by statistics, pasteurized dairy should be the illegal one and raw milk should be legal. You can let your mind wander on the many plausible answers as to why this is, although in my opinion, it is completely rooted back to money and the need for some corporations who claim to praise capitalistic ideals, but in-fact act more like fascist ones.

My reasoning behind writing this post is not to necessarily start a political or economical argument, but instead to ask you to look into the raw milk issue and voice your opinion when appropriate. Situations like this only occur because we allow them to. I’m not saying people should violate the law and drink law milk regardless of what the Government says, but what I am saying is that it is important to make use of the tools we have in protesting this. Freedom of speech, our votes, and how we spend our money are all forms of protest that are not only legal, but encouraged.

Ahmed Serag

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