The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011 (7 page)

Inside his bright country kitchen, Garth carefully poured us each a glass of unpasteurized goat milk, as if proffering a magic elixir. The milk was pure white and as thick as cream. It had a long, flowery bloom and a faint tanginess. Raw milk doesn't spoil like pasteurized milk. Its native bacteria, left to multiply at room temperature, sour it into something like yogurt or buttermilk, only much richer in cultures. It was the mainstay of Garth's diet, along with raw butter, cream, and daily portions of raw liver, fish, chicken, or beef. He was still anything but robust, but he had enough energy to work long hours in the garden for the first time in years. "It enabled me to function," he said.

Raw milk brings the bacterial debate down to brass tacks. Drinking it could be good for you. Then again it could kill you. Just where the line between risk and benefit lies is a matter of fierce dispute—not to mention arrests, lawsuits, property seizures, and protest marches. In May, for instance, raw-milk activists, hoping to draw attention to a recent crackdown by Massachusetts agricultural authorities, milked a Jersey cow on Boston Common and staged a drink-in.

Retail sales of raw milk are illegal in most states, including North Carolina, but people drink it anyway. Some dairy owners label the milk for pet consumption only (though at two to five times the cost of pasteurized, it's too rich for most cats). Others sell it at farm stands or through herd-share programs. In my neighborhood in Brooklyn, the raw-milk cooperative meets every month in the aisles of a gourmet deli. The milk is trucked in from Pennsylvania—a violation of federal law, which prohibits the interstate transport of raw milk—but no one seems to mind. Garth buys milk from a local farmer and sells it out of his house. "It's illegal," he told me. "But it gets to the point where living is illegal."

The nutritional evidence both for and against raw milk is somewhat sketchy; much of it dates from before World War II, when raw milk was still legal. The Food and Drug Administration, in a fact sheet titled "The Dangers of Raw Milk," insists that pasteurization "DOES NOT reduce milk's nutritional value." The temperature of the process, well below the boiling point, is meant to kill pathogens and leave nutrients intact. Yet raw-milk advocacy groups, such as the Weston A. Price Foundation, in Washington, DC, point to a number of studies that suggest the opposite. An array of vitamins, enzymes, and other nutrients are destroyed, diminished, or denatured by heat, they say. Lactase, for instance, is an enzyme that breaks down lactose into simpler sugars that the body can better digest. Raw milk often contains
lactobacilli
and
bifidobacteria
that produce lactase, but neither the bacteria nor the enzyme can survive pasteurization. In one survey of raw-milk drinkers in Michigan and Illinois, 82 percent of those who had been diagnosed as lactose intolerant could drink raw milk without digestive problems. (A more extreme view, held by yet another dietary faction, is that people shouldn't be drinking milk at all—that it's a food specifically designed for newborns of other species, and as such is inimical to humans.)

To the FDA, the real problem with milk isn't indigestion but contamination. Poor hygiene and industrial production are a toxic combination. One sick cow, one slovenly worker, can contaminate the milk of a dozen dairies. In 1938 a quarter of all disease outbreaks from contaminated food came from milk, which had been known to carry typhoid, tuberculosis, diphtheria, and a host of other diseases. More recently, between 1998 and 2008, raw milk was responsible for eighty-five disease outbreaks in more than twenty states, including more than sixteen hundred illnesses, nearly two hundred hospitalizations, and two deaths. "Raw milk is inherently dangerous," the FDA concludes. "It should not be consumed by anyone at any time for any purpose."

Thanks in large part to pasteurization, dairy products now account for less than 5 percent of the food-borne disease outbreaks in America every year. Smoked seafood is six times more likely than pasteurized milk to contain listeria; hot dogs are sixty-five times more likely, and deli meats seventy-seven times more likely. "Every now and then, I meet people in the raw-milk movement who say, 'We have to end pasteurization now!'" Katz told me. "We can't end pasteurization. It would be the biggest disaster in the world. There would be a lot of dead children around."

Still, he says, eating food will always entail a modicum of risk. In an average year, there are 76 million cases of food poisoning in America, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Raw milk may be more susceptible to contamination than most foods (though it's still ten times less likely to contain listeria than deli meat is). But just because it can't be produced industrially doesn't mean it can't be produced safely, in smaller quantities. Wisconsin has some 13,000 dairies, about half of which, local experts estimate, are owned by farmers who drink their own raw milk. Yet relatively few people have been known to get sick from it. "If this were such a terrible cause and effect, we would be in the newspaper constantly," Scott Rankin, the chairman of the food-science department at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and a member of the state's raw-milk working group, told me. "Clearly there is an argument to be made in the realm of, yeah, this is a tiny risk."

The country's largest raw-milk dairy is Organic Pastures, in Fresno, California. Its products are sold in 375 stores and serve 50,000 people a week. "Nobody's dying," the founder and CEO, Mark McAfee, told me. In ten years, only two of McAfee's customers have reported serious food poisoning, he says, and none of the bacteria in those cases could be traced to his dairy. Raw milk is rigorously tested in California and has to meet strict limits for bacterial count. The state's standards hark back to the early days of pasteurization, when many doctors considered raw milk far more nutritious than pasteurized, and separate regulations insured its cleanliness. Dealing with live cultures, Katz and McAfee argue, forces dairies to do what all of agriculture should be doing anyway: downsize, localize, clean up production. "We need to go back a hundred and fifty years," McAfee told me. "Going back is what's going to help us go forward."

 

A century and a half is an eternity in public-health terms, but to followers of the so-called primal diet it's not nearly long enough. Humans have grown suicidally dainty, many of them say, and even a diet enriched by fermented foods and raw milk is too cultivated by half. Our ancestors were rough beasts: hunters, gatherers, scavengers, and carrion eaters, built to digest any rude meal they could find. Fruits and vegetables were a rarity, grains nonexistent. The human gut was a wild kingdom in those days, continually colonized and purged by parasites, viruses, and other microorganisms picked up from raw meat and from foraging. What didn't kill us, as they say, made us stronger.

A few miles north of downtown Asheville, in a small white farmhouse surrounded by trees, two of Katz's acquaintances were doing their best to emulate early man. Steve Torma ate mostly raw meat and raw dairy. His partner, Alan Muskat, liked to supplement his diet with whatever he could find in the woods: acorns, puffballs, cicadas and carpenter ants, sumac leaves, and gypsy-moth caterpillars. Muskat was an experienced mushroom hunter who had provisioned a number of restaurants in Asheville, and much of what he served us was surprisingly good. The ants, collected from his woodpile in the winter when they were too sluggish to get away, had a snappy texture and bright, tart flavor—like organic Pop Rocks. (They were full of formic acid, which gets its name from the Latin word for ant.) He brought us a little dish of toasted acorns, cups of honey-sweetened sumac tea, and goblets of a musky black broth made from decomposed inky-cap mushrooms. I felt, for a moment, as if I'd stumbled upon a child's tea party in the woods.

The primal diet has found a sizable following in recent years, particularly in southern California and, for some reason, Chicago. Its founder, Aajonus Vonderplanitz, a sixty-three-year-old former soap-opera actor and self-styled nutritionist, claims that it cured him of autism, angina, dyslexia, juvenile diabetes, multiple myeloma, and stomach cancer, as well as psoriasis, bursitis, osteoporosis, tooth decay, and "mania created by excessive fruit." Vonderplanitz recommends eating roughly 85 percent animal products by volume, supplemented by no more than one fruit a day and a pint or so of "green drink"—a purée of fruits and vegetable juices. (Whole-vegetable fibers, he believes, are largely indigestible.) The diet's most potent component, though, is an occasional serving of what Vonderplanitz calls "high meat."

Torma ducked into the back of the house and returned with a swing-top jar in his hands. Inside lay a piece of organic beef, badly spoiled. It was afloat in an ocher-colored puddle of its own decay, the muscle and slime indistinguishable, like a slug. High meat is the flesh of any animal that has been allowed to decompose. Torma keeps his portions sealed for up to several weeks before ingesting them, airing them out every few days. (Like the bacteria in sauerkraut, those that cause botulism are anaerobic; fermentation destroys them, but they sometimes survive in sealed meats—
botulus,
in Latin, means sausage.) Vonderplanitz says that he got high meat and its name from the Eskimos, who savor rotten caribou and seal. A regular serving of decayed heart or liver can have a "tremendous Viagra effect" on the elderly, Vonderplanitz told me recently. The first few bites, though, can be rough going. "I still have some resistance to it," Torma admitted. "But the health benefits! I'm fifty-two now. I started this when I was forty-two, and I feel like I'm in my twenties."

Primal eating has its detractors: the
Times
of London recently dubbed it "the silliest diet ever." Most of us find whole vegetables perfectly digestible. The notion that parasites and viruses are good for us would be news to most doctors. And even Vonderplanitz and his followers admit that high meat sometimes leaves them ill and explosively incontinent. They call it detoxification.

Still, radical measures like these have had some surprising successes. In a case published last year in the
Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology,
a sixty-one-year-old woman was given an entirely new set of intestinal bacteria. The patient was suffering from severe diarrhea, Janet Jansson, a microbial ecologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, told me. "She lost twenty-seven kilograms and was confined to a diaper and a wheelchair." To repopulate her colon with healthy microbes, Jansson and her collaborators arranged for a fecal transplant from the patient's husband. "They just put it in a Waring blender and turned it into a suppository," Jansson says. "It sounds disgusting, but it cured her. When we got another sample from her, two days later, she had adopted his microbial community." By then her diarrhea had disappeared.

Other experiments have been even more dramatic. At Washington University in St. Louis, the biologist Jeff Gordon has found that bacteria can help determine body weight. In a study published in
Nature
in 2006, Gordon and his lab mates, led by Peter Turnbaugh, took a group of germ-free mice, raised in perfect sterility, and divided it in two. One group was inoculated with bacteria from normal mice; the other with bacteria from mice that had been bred to be obese. Both groups gained weight after the inoculation, but those with bacteria from obese mice had nearly twice the percentage of body fat by the end of the experiment. Later the same lab took normal mice, fed them until they were fat, and transplanted their bacteria into other normal mice. Those mice grew fat, too, and the same pattern held true when the mice were given bacteria from obese people. "It's a positive-feedback loop," Ruth Ley, a biologist from Gordon's lab who now teaches at Cornell, told me. "Whether you're genetically obese or obese from a high-fat diet, you end up with a microbial community that is particularly good at extracting calories. It could mean that an obese person can extract an extra five or ten calories out of a bowl of Cheerios."

Biologists no longer doubt the depth of our dependence on bacteria. Jansson avoids antibiotics unless they're the only option and eats probiotic foods like yogurt and prebiotic foods like yacón, a South American root that nourishes bacteria in the gut. Until we understand more about this symbiosis, she and others say, it's best to ingest the cultures we know and trust. "What's beautiful about fermenting vegetables is that they're naturally populated by lactic-acid bacteria," Katz said. "Raw flesh is sterile. You're just culturing whatever was on the knife."

When Torma unclamped his jar, a sickly sweet miasma filled the air—an odor as natural as it was repellent. Decaying meat produces its own peculiar scent molecules, I later learned, with names like putrescine and cadaverine. I could still smell them on my clothes hours later. Torma stuck two fingers down the jar and fished out a long, wet sliver. "Want a taste?" he said.

It was the end of a long day. I'd spent most of it consuming everything set before me: ants, acorns, raw milk, dumpster stew, and seven kinds of mead, among other delicacies. But even Katz took a pass on high meat. While Torma threw back his head and dropped in his portion, like a seal swallowing a mackerel, we quietly took our leave. "You have to trust your senses," Katz said, as we were driving away. "To me, that smelled like death."

 

Katz has lived with HIV for almost two decades. For many years he medicated himself with his own ferments and local herbs—chickweed, yellow dock, violet leaf, burdock root. But periodic tests at the AIDS clinic in Nashville showed that his T-cell count was still low. Then, in the late nineties, he began to lose weight. He often felt listless and mildly nauseated. At first, he assumed that he was just depressed, but the symptoms got worse. "I started feeling lightheaded a lot and I had a couple of fainting episodes," he told me. "It dawned on me very slowly that I was suffering from classic AIDS wasting syndrome."

By then an effective cocktail of AIDS drugs had been available for almost three years. Katz had seen it save the life of one of his neighbors in Tennessee. "It was a really dramatic turnaround," he told me. "But I didn't want my life to be medically managed. I had a real reluctance to get on that treadmill." In the summer of 1999, he took a road trip to Maine to visit friends, hoping to snap out of his funk. By the time he got there, he was so exhausted that he couldn't get up for days. "I remember what really freaked me out was trying to balance my checkbook," he says. "I couldn't even do simple subtraction. It was like my brain wasn't functioning anymore." He had reached the end of his alternatives.