Piero Sardo has written an excellent post about the high cost of the efforts of the experts to ensure the safety of our food by sterilization, i.e., pasteurizing milk, irradiating meat, etc..  Sardo is the president of the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity.  His article, Sacrificing for Safety,  on the Slow Food website, compares the efforts to prevent using raw milk for cheese making to a someone who wants to build a house in the middle of a forest.  The forest is “large, thriving, pristine” but the person is afraid of possible harm from the wild animals–like wolves, bears and foxes–that live there, even though attacks from such animals are very rare. 

As a potential solution to the potential dangers, Sardo supposes that the new forest dweller has a “gas that exterminates every living creature” and uses it.  The dangers, i.e., wild animals, have been eliminated, but the forest is now “dead, silent and boring.  In the long term it couldn’t even survive.”  What was “a living, natural system, able to self-regulate and survive most calamities and environmental disasters” is now “an unnatural monster, created only to entertain you and to guarantee your peace of mind.” Sardo goes on to compare the dangers in the forest to the dangers of raw milk.  “The vegetation represents the fats, caseins, minerals and so on, while the forest fauna represents the microflora present in the milk and the surrounding environment.”  When you pasteurize milk, you kill everything and turn “something living and vital” into an “inert, dead substance.”

The expert will assure you that the killing is progress and that progress comes with “certain losses (of taste, naturalness, variety),” but the losses ensure a very high “level of food safety.”  Sardo, in his forest metaphor, compares the killing/pasteurization to removing the wolves and bears from the forest, which eventually destroys the forests so that they “disappear, the wolves die out, the bears and boars are forced to scavenge garbage to find food.” He concludes his post by referring to the Roman historian Tacitus “they have created a desert and called it food safety.”

Although Piero Sardo and the Slow Food network  are primarily concerned with raw milk cheeses, the metaphor applies very well to all forms of raw milk,  which are rendered inert, dead, and unnatural by pasteurization.