Bootleg Milk is Flooding DC
Is this a good thing?
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This is Part I of a 4-part series about some of my personal experiences over the years as a Raw Milk Mama and activist. It includes details I’ve never shared before, and experiences that are difficult to write about.
These are real and true personal experiences and will be quite difficult for some to believe. It was difficult to believe even living them.
Black market definition: The illegal business of buying or selling currency or goods banned by a government or subject to governmental control, such as price controls or rationing. (American Heritage Dictionary, online)
Is it “noncompliance” or “mafia” style control?
Political tensions are ratcheted artificially high. The world is still reeling from a deadly pandemic.
The economy is in turmoil with the conflict between the classes deepening through long-felt divisions. Corruption is rampant. How America handles news is shifting rapidly as rising technologies create unfamiliar ways to communicate and interact. Social landscapes morph as women’s political and professional roles change. Americans question the new influx of immigrants and ask, “What does it mean to be an American?”
The year was 1920.
Prohibition was the new law of the land. Americans grappled with this change and many didn’t know how to respond. The opposition to the new law was fierce, yet “the government” had laws to uphold and a reputation to protect.
The business prowess of Al Capone emerged from the toxic slurry of greed and unchecked crime. “Scarface,” the most infamous of gangsters, didn’t see “prohibition” as a ban. He saw it as a challenge – a gift from the government handed directly to him and his growing band of gangsters. For him, prohibition was a cash cow. Americans would never stop drinking and he knew he could profit greatly from it.1
As Capone himself said, “I’m just a businessman, giving the people what they want. All I do is satisfy a public demand.”2
The propaganda was strong. Newspapers portrayed Capone as either Robin Hood or Sheriff of Nottingham–different images depending on which audience they were appealing to.
The ensuing decade of crime, pursuit, and conviction was everyone’s loss.
Prohibition rarely works. It didn’t work in the 1920s when aimed at alcohol and it’s not working now, aimed at raw milk. Despite the potential best intentions of some–including many of the women of the Temperance movement, the war against alcohol only managed to fuel a violent black market.
For the past several decades, the intentions of those wishing to “save the children” from possible food borne illness by banning or making raw milk near impossible to acquire legally, has instead led to something deeply and culturally destructive.
The black market that arose during prohibition was never about American’s right to drink whisky and beer. It was about money.
And today, the raw milk black market isn’t about “food freedom” or getting to choose what you eat. It’s just as much about money as its inebriated counterpart 100 years ago.
In direct parallel, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA’s) ongoing crusade against raw milk, and the ban on interstate transportation, doesn’t keep milk off our tables. It only fuels a reckless black market.
Had it been about the right to manufacture or sell whiskey, gin and beer, Capone and his broody crew of gangsters would have used their vast influence to change the laws. But they didn’t, of course, because they needed prohibition in order for their businesses to work.
The parallels to today’s raw milk black market are vast and uncanny.
“But wait,” you say, “raw milk isn’t illegal in most places!”
The interstate transportation of raw milk is however.
States have a spattering of laws, some easier to operate under than others. States where raw milk is illegal to sell for human consumption create an open invitation for those willing to blatantly break the law.
Even in states, such as Pennsylvania, where raw milk production and sales are supported by the law and the agencies overseeing standards, a black market thrives.
Businessmen unhindered by standards that the honest, law-abiding farmers and their supporters adhere to use social force, coercion and control to dominate and intimidate others. Physical force is not unheard of.
Both alcohol and milk were blamed for damage to children.
When vast numbers of suffragettes (women seeking the right to vote) boarded the prohibition bandwagon in the early 1900s, it was, ostensibly, to reduce domestic violence from men drinking and then coming home and beating their wives and children. Thus, it was “justice” for women with their newly recognized political roles, to get behind a ban on the manufacture and sale of alcohol. The Volstead Act passed in late 1919, and a few months later, the 18th Amendment was ratified sealing the fate of small distilleries in America, and building the foundation of the black market.
In the same vein, the early 1900s campaign for pasteurization pinned the blame for infant and childhood mortality squarely on the raw milk spilling into the cities from the disgusting swill dairies. (If we can even call them “dairies.”)
Faced with constant romanticized images of wealth and glamor that only certain segments of the population enjoyed, we can only begin to imagine what the prohibition period meant to many living through it.
In the years of alcohol prohibition in America, a sinister underworld of corruption reared its ugly head and grabbed a massive foothold in the American psyche.3 As notorious gangsters became famous for their escapades, it shifted how Americans thought about crime and business. As one historian, Amy Hayes, notes, “the Roaring Twenties quickly became a decade full of organized crime that caused chaos among communities where gangsters ruled all.”4
To this day, we expect and take for granted a certain level of corruption and unethical business practices when it comes to organized crime like bootleggers, gambling, drug cartels and other illegal activities. We expect a certain amount of corruption from within the government, including regulatory agencies tasked with various enforcement efforts.
But do we expect it from food “farmers?” Or do we want to bury our heads and pretend like it’s not happening even when the facts tell a different story?
How did we get here?
I first started sourcing the best food I could for my children in the early 2000s. In the infant days of the modern “raw milk movement,” those of us looking for alternatives read books, we talked to each other and shared meals. We visited farms and learned what we could.
And a few farmers responded.
As these few farmers offered what they ethically produced, there were a few of us mamas who stepped up to help.
We fondly called ourselves “bootleggers”--those helping to get raw milk to the families who wanted and needed it. Some of the mamas nicknamed themselves the “milk mafia mamas.”
Of course we were joking, making fun of the draconian enforcement the FDA and some state agencies used in the early 2000s to enforce against the few farms even willing to offer raw dairy.
Demand grew quickly.
So more farmers came on board. At first, it was farms who really believed in what they were doing. They were clean, transparent and they obviously wanted a connection to their customers while doing meaningful work.
This was gradual awareness-building, a slow construction of what appeared to be grassroots.
But things shifted as interest grew. It was an odd shift initially. There was no catalyst like the Volstead Act and 18th amendment that catalyzed the bootleggers of the 1920s.
Yet sales for the unscrupulous farmers skyrocketed. If you were willing to make wild claims for the purposes of sensationalism, you would profit. Many of these farmers were Amish, hiding behind a culture and costume that sheltered them.
It was an image, a “brand” if you will, that gave a certain facade to the public.
I witnessed farms that were not clean, not transparent and refused to test. Many of them aggregated milk from other farms with no disclosure and no checking on animal treatment and human health standards.
I wondered, how could hard working American farmers be corrupt enough to handle food in such a careless way?
Why were some of the Amish behaving in ways contradictory to what they preached and how their public persona portrayed them?
These “farmers” were and are not working towards “food freedom” anymore than Al Capone was having a couple beers with friends.
There was obvious and increasing corruption in the worst possible ways and it was being passed off as “noncompliance” and “resisting government corruption.”
I won’t argue that government-led corruption doesn’t exist. It does and is, perhaps, one of the biggest reasons that hungry Americans are searching for answers to begin with–in many of the wrong places.
But no matter how wrong the government can be with food prohibitions, the black market is not the solution in this case and it only makes things worse.
The answers we search for are shape-shifting right under our noses and your involvement, or therefore lack of, will write the final chapter…
Coming soon… Part II: “The Black Market is a Race to the Bottom.”
I am called to share in-depth investigative articles with salacious details about my experiences in the “food freedom” movement–the good, the bad, and the ugly. If you appreciate these articles and want to see more of this work, please consider a paid subscription, or if that is out of reach, please share this Substack with others. This work helps to support my family.
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https://www.thecollector.com/organized-crime-roaring-twenties/
https://allthatsinteresting.com/mae-capone
https://www.history.com/news/prohibition-organized-crime-al-capone
https://www.thecollector.com/organized-crime-roaring-twenties/