When we look back some years from now on the sordid events of our government’s campaign against food rights, right up there at the top of the list will almost certainly be the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s shameful vendetta against the Estrella Family Creamery.

New England town meetings typically include dozens and dozens of proposals for citizens to vote up or down, on quickly forgotten matters like new stop lights and bridge repairs.

But this year, things have been different. The residents in eight small Maine towns have all voted to declare “food sovereignty” — and they won’t be forgetting the issue any time soon. In other words, they’ve passed ordinances that explicitly allow local farmers and ranchers to sell their food — meat, eggs, unpasteurized milk, honey, veggies — directly to consumers within town borders, without state or federal licenses, permits, or regulations.

Towns in Massachusetts, Vermont, and California have all replicated these experiments, which in Vermont have all been based on a single template [PDF]. And while the mainstream media is referring to the ordinances as “symbolic,” it is yet to be seen how the courts will rule.

These votes are the result of work by activists in the food sovereignty moment, who see the ordinances as a response to an ever more intensely regulated food system. On the federal level, the recent Food Safety Modernization Act could require small food producers to complete a sophisticated hazard analysis critical control point (HACCP) plan, which would be both costly and tedious. Meanwhile there has also been an increase in local health department enforcement around the country, in places like school bake sales and kids’ lemonade stands.

Activists see food sovereignty ordinances as a compromise of sorts over the thorny issue of private food distribution. And although many food safety measures and regulations were developed alongside industrial food production — and have a place in protecting consumers — many activists now believe they’ve been used to target small businesses. Food sovereignty activists feel that people have a right to acquire food — such as raw dairy products — privately through membership-based food clubs, outside the parameters of long-standing regulations that require retail, dairy, and other permits.

In a recent AP article, Maine’s state agriculture officials said the ordinances “don’t hold legal muster.” But the state’s so-called “local rule” laws could contradict this view. Via its constitution and legislation, Maine confers significant power on municipalities to enact ordinances that are local in nature, and aren’t denied by state law, like controlling town growth or banning herbicide spraying. “Maine has long been considered a strong ‘home rule’ state,” says the Maine Municipal Association. (Here’s a list of these hyper-local laws.)

While everyone who voted to pass Maine’s food sovereignty ordinances knew they were risking conflict with state and federal authorities, they hadn’t imagined the objections would be as swift, or intense, as they have turned out to be.

“Farmers know whether the milk is bad”

Just months after the first six towns passed the ordinances, the state filed a lawsuit [PDF] against a farmer named Dan Brown of Blue Hill, Maine, for selling unpasteurized milk without a state permit. Brown says losing the suit could put him out of business, since complying with state permit requirements would be so costly as to not justify operating his two-cow dairy. He owns the cows primarily so that he can provide milk for his family, and he sells what’s left. (Activists set up a Facebook page in support of Brown called We Are All Farmer Brown.)

“I have never had any questions from customers saying there was any problem with my milk,” Brown told the Bangor Daily News. “This has been done this way for hundreds of years. Farmers, when they milk a cow, know whether the milk is bad or not.”

Brown says the state has devoted significant investigative resources to making the case against him, and he has led several demonstrations, including one at the capital in Augusta, demanding that the state drop the suit.

While there’s no mention of the food sovereignty ordinances in the suit, and state officials have denied a connection, Brown’s defense lawyers obtained email correspondence that suggest otherwise. For instance, a Maine Dept. of Agriculture program manager sent an email in June 2011 — two months after Blue Hill’s food sovereignty ordinance was enacted — about Brown allegedly selling food at a local farmer’s market without a license. “Sounds like we have our first test case,” he wrote.

The email was one of nearly 700 pages of emails, memos, and other documents obtained by the lawyers under Maine’s Freedom of Access Act, and they provide a window into the intensity of the food sovereignty battle. Activists also found written warnings to a second farmer, Heather Retberg of Quill’s End Farm, who has been active in organizing the residents of several towns in favor of the food sovereignty ordinances. One warning reads: “If you refuse to bring your business into compliance and continue to operate in violation of the laws of the State of Maine we will refer this matter to the Attorney General for enforcement action.”

Regulation or retaliation?

The controversy has extended to the top levels of Maine’s government, including Republican Gov. Paul LePage. Last September, after hearing feedback from constituents in support of the food sovereignty ordinances, LePage wrote a memo [PDF] to the head of the Maine Dept. of Agriculture, Walt Whitcomb, that read:

I am particularly concerned about over-regulating the small farms with large capital investments and costly licensing. In recent weeks I have received letters, emails and constituent visits concerning regulations involving intrastate commerce.

Attached to LePage’s memo was a proposed bill in the Maine legislature that would have allowed the sale of raw milk without a state permit. On the proposed legislation was a note that appears to be from the governor or an aide: “This statute sounds reasonable. Please advise the problem you see with it?”

Also attached was a letter from a Maine farmer, John O’Donnell, who wanted to let the governor know what was behind the food sovereignty movement. In the letter, O’Donnell wrote:

As you may know, several Maine towns passed food sovereignty resolutions last year. This was mainly driven by small farmers experiencing unfair regulations that are barriers to entry, and restraint of trade. Many of these farmers fought for the same Maine bills I did, and saw how the Subcommittee on Agriculture was mainly under the control of the large farm and dairy interests and would never let small farm bills out of committee favorably. We also saw how the Department of Agriculture testified in these hearings that there would be repercussions from the USDA or FDA if we relaxed the standards for selling poultry, milk, and other products in our local communities and state.

Under this paragraph was a hand-written note, presumably also from the governor or an aide. It read: “Why would this concern us, if the products are sold intrastate.”

There is no direct response from the Maine Dept. of Agriculture in all the documents. But the department made its opinions known this February in a form letter from Agriculture Commissioner Whitcomb. The letter was addressed to everyone who “shared … thoughts with the administration regarding local food sovereignty ordinances.” Here’s an excerpt:

Local food sovereignty ordinances leave the false impression that residence in certain towns exempt individuals from food licensure and inspection requirements. … Persons who fail to comply (with state laws) will be subject to the Department’s statutory responsibility to enforce state law, including the removal from sale of products from unlicensed sources and/or the imposition of fines.

The cache of emails show the Dept. of Agriculture having reversed a long-standing agency policy of ignoring unlicensed sellers of raw milk who don’t advertise. It also shows the department deciding to intensively investigate any illnesses reported from people who consumed raw milk, even if the illness were known to be highly unlikely to have originated from raw milk consumption.

As early as the summer of 2010 — just when food sovereignty organizers like Retberg were beginning to discuss their plans to push for local ordinances — agriculture investigators began visiting any farm that sold milk to people who contracted a nasty parasite known as cryptosporidium, or “crypto.” According the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, crypto spreads most often from “drinking water and recreational water” and “is one of the most frequent causes of water-borne disease among humans in the United States.”

Depositions are now being taken and arguments made in the state’s case against Brown and the trial could begin next fall. The state of Maine is hoping to end quickly and absolutely any notions people might have that they can distribute food privately, outside regulatory constraints.

While food sovereignty may stem from local efforts, however, it has arisen in response to a much larger problem — one that’s far from localized.

As Bob St. Peter, farmer and food sovereignty, organizer said to WABI, a local Maine TV news channel, recently, “Seventy-six million people a year get sick from foodborne illness. These are systemic problems … When people come to my farm or they come to Dan Brown’s farm they’re looking for a way out. They’re looking for an alternative to that system.”

Schmidt in January 2010, after winning his court case.

Now, he says, he wants a personal meeting with Ontario’s premier, Dalton McGuinty. If he doesn’t get the meeting? “I am prepared to go all the way,” he says.

As of the start of this week, the hunger strike has mushroomed into a major drama in both Canada and the U.S. Many in the raw-dairy-centered “food rights” movement see Schmidt as their spiritual leader after he spent the last two years defending himself in Ontario courts, as well as traversing the U.S. and Canada speaking about what he sees as the stonewalling by public health authorities over raw milk availability and safety. Some supporters have tried hard to dissuade him from the hunger strike, worried that his sense of commitment could lead to his death, but he has steadfastly held to his tactic.

The office of premier McGuinty says the matter of a meeting with Schmidt is “under review,” according to a press spokesperson. When might the review be complete? “I wouldn’t want to speculate on that,” he says.

Schmidt’s reputation received a major boost in early 2010, when he won a case brought by Ontario public health officials and the Ministry of Natural Resources, under the direction of the Ontario Attorney General. He served as his own lawyer, and a judge ruled that because Schmidt’s herdshare members were privately organized, they fell outside the Ontario prohibitions on raw milk. The Ontario authorities appealed, though, and an appeals court reversed the decision earlier this month. Schmidt appealed further, and launched the hunger strike.

In just the last few days, a Facebook page called Support Michael Schmidt has blossomed from a few hundred to nearly 4,000 members, and the office of Premier McGuinty has been inundated with calls and emails. McGuinty’s staff has taken to removing messages of support for Schmidt on the premier’s own Facebook page.

The drama being played out in Canada is occurring against the backdrop of a number of recent incidents involving proponents of raw dairy, primarily in the U.S.

For example, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has declared, in response to a federal suit by the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, that we “have no absolute right … to any particular food.” The strong message is that the government is the final arbiter of which foods are safe and unsafe.

The FDA stated in the same legal brief that it enacted a prohibition on interstate sale of raw milk in 1987 “after spending 13 years collecting and evaluating scientific information regarding the health risks of unpasteurized milk, holding a public hearing that resulted in over 300 comments, and ultimately concluding that consumption of these products was linked to the outbreak of serious disease.”

As if to echo the FDA’s argument, a Wisconsin judge several weeks ago issued a ruling against two raw milk dairies in the state, not only declaring their operations illegal, but concluding, in part, that the plaintiffs “do not have a fundamental right to own and use a dairy cow or … a fundamental right to consume the milk from their own cow.” 

San Diego County’s Department of Environmental Health has lobbied against a city proposal to allow residents to keep miniature goats, arguing that milk from the goats present a potential health risk. In a letter to the San Diego City Council, the county department noted that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control has issued an advisory “that specifically states, ‘To protect the health of the public, state regulators should continue to support pasteurization and consider further restricting or prohibiting the sale and distribution of raw milk and other unpasteurized dairy products in their states.’”

As if to underscore these restrictive interpretations of food rights, government agencies have targeted other food clubs and farms that privately supply consumers with nutrient-dense foods. Earlier this year, for example, the FDA assigned agents to carry out an undercover sting operation involving a Maryland food club of 2,000 people. It resulted in a federal suit against an Amish farmer in Pennsylvania who had been supplying the club with raw milk. In bringing felony criminal charges against three associates of Rawesome Food Club in Venice, Calif., last August, the Los Angeles County District attorney accused the three of not only selling raw milk illegally, but of mislabeling eggs and meat products, as well.

The outrage among the Maryland food club members led them to team with other activists to form a new food rights organization of their own called the Farm Food Freedom Coalition. The new organization is planning an intentional violation of the federal prohibition on interstate sale and distribution of raw milk via a Raw Milk Freedom Riders caravan that will travel from Pennsylvania to Maryland next Tuesday. The scheduled guest of honor at a rally to follow in front of the FDA’s headquarters will be Michael Schmidt. That is, if he’s still able to make the trip by then.

Regardless, Schmidt is raising the profile of the movement, and posing a major question in the process: Are food rights worthy of giving your life for? 

President Obama has been talking up rural job creation even as his regulators discourage it.Photo: Will Merydith

It was refreshing because it was a stark contrast to covering the crackdown around the country by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and other agencies on producers and distributors of nutrient-dense foods — in California against Rawesome Food Club and the operators of small raw dairy herdshares, and in Pennsylvania against Amish farmer Daniel Allgyer and the Maryland food club he serves. These actions, taken without the impetus of illnesses, or even food contamination, have come at huge costs in scarce budget dollars to finance intensive undercover investigations. Perhaps more significant, the enforcement actions dampen competition, and obliterate jobs.

At Rawesome alone, more than a dozen farmers and food producers have lost a key outlet for their production while the food club is shut down. When food producer revenues disappear, so do jobs.

One of the many ironies in the recent food-crackdown events is that on Tuesday, President Obama was talking up the importance of “rural economic development” at an Iowa conference. According to the Des Moines Register, “Obama announced a handful of initiatives Tuesday that he said would help foster rural economic growth. One would pump an additional $350 million in capital over the next five years to rural businesses, double the previous amount.”

The call for more funding of programs to add jobs in rural areas while his regulators are demolishing them in droves seems, somehow, the height of cynicism. The most significant irony may be that increasing numbers of today’s young people, discouraged by the lack of job opportunities in so many areas of the country, are attracted to the romance of farming. The New York Times‘ Mark Bittman describes this trend, inspired heavily by the success of Maine farmer Eliot Coleman and his all-season growing strategies.

But armed raids on private food clubs can only dampen this healthy trend that inevitably creates jobs. Who wants to enter an industry where regulators, on a whim, can and do cause death via a thousand cuts, and, at worst, throw food producers into jail? These actions are meant to intimidate producers, and would-be producers, at a time when our country can least afford to be trashing jobs and opportunity.

The Los Angeles County district attorney issued a criminal complaint, growing out of a year-and-a-half undercover operation, against James Stewart, the manager of Rawesome, along with Sharon Palmer, the owner of a farm that supplied Rawesome with eggs and chickens, and Victoria Bloch, an assistant to Palmer. The judge who finally released Stewart and Bloch (Stewart on $30,000 bail and Bloch on her own recognizance) clamped gag orders on the two and prohibited Stewart from being involved in raw milk sales and distribution. (Palmer was released separately, on $60,000 bail, a few days later.) The judge also indicated that Rawesome, because it had no permits (based on its contention that it is a private club), might be a legitimate target of Los Angeles officials aiming to shut it down.

Needless to say, many of the 2,000-plus members of Rawesome are extremely upset. Now, they have joined forces with members of a Maryland food club, Grassfed on the Hill, to form a new national association of food clubs, the Farm Food Freedom Coalition, intended to fight the federal and state crackdowns on private food groups and farmers. Grassfed on the Hill was hit with a 13-month undercover investigation by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration that resulted in an Amish farmer in Pennsylvania being sued in U.S. District Court, with the U.S. Justice Department seeking a permanent injunction preventing him from supplying the Maryland club.

Moreover, two of the defendants in the Rawesome case (Stewart and Bloch) are being represented by lawyers with the firm headed by Christopher Darden, who helped prosecute O.J. Simpson. Perhaps more to the point of the Rawesome case, he spent 15 years in the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office. Sharon Palmer is being represented by Ventura lawyer Matt Bromund. (Bloch is also being represented by Gary Cox, a lawyer with the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund.)

And in a related case, three shareholders in a California herdshare arrangement — similar in certain respects to the Rawesome arrangement challenged by the Los Angeles County district attorney — have launched a suit against the California Department of Food and Agriculture along with the Santa Clara County district attorney. The suit is in response to a California Department of Food and Agriculture and district attorney cease-and-desist notice sent last April to the owners of the San Jose farm, Evergreen Acres.

According to the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, which filed the case, the suit “asks for a declaration by the court that [the shareholders] have the inalienable right to purchase, own, possess, and use a goat, that they have the inalienable right to consume the raw milk produced by their goat, and a declaration that they have the inalienable right to contract with the [San Jose farm] to board, care for, and milk their goats. The suit asks for a permanent injunction against the State of California and Santa Clara County, preventing defendants from commencing or continuing any enforcement action against plaintiffs ‘or against anyone else in California who wishes to engage in the conduct engaged in by plaintiffs.’ “

The new Farm Food Freedom Coalition organized by the California and Maryland food clubs is noteworthy because it is heavily represented by mothers among its organizers. Liz Reitzig, mother of five, says that while there are a number of organizations focused on food rights, “most are geared toward farmers. We want to give consumers more of a voice.”

The fact that it’s mothers leading the charge should give the bureaucrats and lawyers at the FDA and Los Angeles County district attorney cause for concern, says Mark McAfee, owner of Organic Pastures Dairy Co., the largest raw milk producer in the country. “Moms from the east and west coast and everywhere in between are uniting,” he says. “If a coalition of moms take on the behemoth FDA over food rights … oh Jesus.”

The consumers obtained the milk via a private food club that arranged delivery of the milk from South Carolina, where raw milk can be legally sold, to North Carolina, where it can’t.

A couple things were notable about the press release. First, it was issued on a Saturday, which isn’t normally an FDA workday. That suggested it was an urgent public safety matter … except that the illnesses occurred in mid-June.

Second, it was put out on PR Newswire, the largest, and most expensive, news release distribution service. Press releases on this and other services are priced [PDF] based on length: $715 for the first 400 words, and $195 per each additional 100 words — or $2,470 to issue that release. (According to an FDA spokesperson, the FDA has a contract with PR Newswire that presumably discounts the cost some, but she says it would take a Freedom of Information Act request to possibly elicit the details of that contract.) The FDA’s press release ran 1,214 words, not because the North Carolina situation was so complicated to explain, but because the FDA chose to include lengthy statements warning about the dangers of raw milk, and seeking to answer raw milk proponents. “Proponents of drinking raw milk often claim that raw milk is more nutritious than pasteurized milk and that raw milk is inherently antimicrobial, thus making pasteurization unnecessary. There is no meaningful nutritional difference between pasteurized and raw milk, and raw milk does not contain compounds that will kill harmful bacteria.”

The fact that the release was put out on a slow news weekend during the summer, by the most prominent PR news distribution service, increased the chances it would get picked up by the mainstream media, and indeed, a number did pick up the story, beginning with local newspapers and television stations.

The obvious question that comes up is: Does the FDA give this much attention to other foodborne illnesses? There are hundreds of foodborne illness outbreaks each year, from tainted sausages at church breakfasts, to bad pastries made at popular bakeries, to contaminated melons and other produce distributed by major corporations.

The FDA says there was nothing unusual in its scheme of things for putting out the North Carolina food contamination press release the way it did. All its press releases are posted on its site and placed on PR Newswire, a spokesperson says. As for the Saturday issuance, the spokesperson insists, “When there is a public health issue, FDA puts out a press release as soon as possible, regardless of whether it’s a normal workday or a weekend.”

Moreover, the spokesperson says, the FDA has issued press releases warning of other foodborne illness cases. She points to a press release warning people not to eat a particular brand of sprouts, based on 20 illnesses in five states; one warning people not to eat oysters from an area of Florida; and another warning of hazelnuts tainted with E. coli 0157:H7 that sickened seven people from four states.

But all those cases involved public distribution, via retailers or restaurants, of products found to be currently contaminated. The milk distributed in North Carolina wasn’t distributed via public channels, but rather through a private club within the state. And the South Carolina dairy where the milk was produced hadn’t been found to be contaminated, and the instances of people who might have become ill had occurred a month earlier.

The FDA tends not to issue press releases in cases in which the threat from illnesses is thought to have passed. Many of these other cases are broadcast on the websites of product liability lawyers. As one example, the Marler-Clark law firm summarized outbreaks involving tainted bakery and cantaloupe products earlier this year –which resulted in numerous illnesses — yet neither rated an FDA press release.

Why would the FDA feel compelled to get the word out far and wide about a relatively small, locally confined outbreak of food-borne illness that for all practical purposes ended a month earlier? It turns out there are two reasons, both having to do with the political hot potato that raw milk has become.

The FDA has a case pending in federal district court, filed in April, in which it is seeking a permanent injunction against an Amish farmer for serving a private food club that brings raw milk from Pennsylvania to Maryland. That case has been very controversial, and inspired a boisterous demonstration in Washington two months ago, featuring a cow outside the Capitol.

The FDA is also the target of a lawsuit filed by the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, which challenges the legality of the FDA’s ban on interstate sales of raw milk. The FDA has been unsuccessful thus far in its efforts to have the case thrown out, and perhaps has become frustrated in the process.

What makes the FDA’s press release last weekend especially ironic is that FDA warnings about raw milk seem to spur sales; many raw milk producers I’ve spoken with say that every time the agency puts out warnings about raw milk, they see a bump in sales.

CNN is milking the raw dairy angle for all it’s worth.

The “other shoe” is for some scientist or government public health official to seek to link the European tragedy to the battle here over raw milk.

Sound crazy? I’d say. Verge on the paranoid? Definitely. After all, among all the culprits publicly linked to the tragedy — cucumbers, tomatoes, and, most recently, sprouts — dairy products of any kind have been noticeably absent.

But sure enough, it finally happened, and from CNN no less. The major media outlet published an editorial that sought to elucidate lessons from the European outbreak, and the key lesson turns out to be that the U.S. should ban raw milk (and raw juices). “Though it (the European outbreak) is not a reason to panic, this incident should force us to rethink some important food safety issues,” the editorial began. “One good place to start would be to completely ban the sale of raw milk and juice.”

If you’re going to ban any food (and I have a difficult time imagining finding justification to do that), wouldn’t you think it would be sprouts, which has been most definitively linked to more than 2,000 European illnesses, and 36 deaths? But then, logic isn’t the strong suit of those obsessed with depriving 10 million Americans of the unpasteurized dairy products they enjoy. (More than 3 percent of the population regularly consumes raw dairy, according to federal data [PDF].)

Nor is reasonable statistical analysis part of the argument. The author, Alex Berezow, who is identified as “a Ph.D. in microbiology,” puts forward a bunch of half truths to make the CNN case.

“Unpasteurized milk has a greater chance of being contaminated with disease-causing bacteria than pasteurized milk,” writes Berezow.

But the reality is that dairy overall is one of the safest product categories around, according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest, with milk and milk products accounting for fewer than 1 percent of total outbreaks [PDF]. Yes, raw dairy is riskier than pasteurized dairy for carrying pathogens (and many of us who favor the availability of raw milk readily acknowledge this), but the reality is that neither food is especially dangerous. Raw dairy causes between 50 and 150 reported illnesses each year — this out of a total of between 20,000 and 25,000 illnesses reported by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control each year (there were 21,244 reported in 2007, the last year for which data is available). (And pasteurized milk does cause illnesses as well — as recently as 2007 it killed three people in Massachusetts.)

Then the editorial states that “raw milk could cause a massive E. coli outbreak within a single state.” We have had large-scale E. coli outbreaks in this country, involving ground beef and raw spinach, for example, but never involving raw milk. I suppose anything is possible, but to propose banning a food because of some far-fetched possibility? I don’t know how to characterize the idea, except as hysterical.

The Berezow/CNN editorial then seeks to suggest that people who consume raw milk and raw juices are delusional. “Proponents of raw food believe natural products are healthier. This is a myth.” It’s not at all clear what the editorial means by “natural products,” but I take it to mean food that hasn’t been processed or treated with chemicals, and there is all kinds of evidence to support the notion that natural products are healthier, or rather, that unnatural products are unhealthy. The latest example can be seen in the recent revelations about the presence of arsenic in much of the chicken produced in the U.S., apparently coming from a Pfizer drug that has for more than 60 years been fed to chickens to reduce parasites. The FDA recently announced that Pfizer had agreed to discontinue use of the drug. Consumer Reports had found that organic chickens didn’t have the arsenic. Since arsenic is a cancer-causing agent, I’d say the absence of arsenic made the “natural product” healthier.

There is a final irony associated with this editorial. Berezow in a previous CNN editorial bemoaning that we have become a nation of “germophobes” made reference to “a recent study that showed that children who grow up on farms, and are exposed to a greater diversity of infectious agents, are less likely to develop asthma.” He didn’t specify which study he was referring to, but I wonder if it’s the PARSIFAL study [PDF] done in Europe five years ago of nearly 15,000 children, comparing those who grew up on farms drinking raw milk and those in other places who didn’t. The study’s authors concluded that “the results of the present study indicate that consumption of farm milk is associated with a lower risk of childhood asthma and rhinoconjunctivitis.”

The reality is that both raw milk and raw juice are severely restricted in many places as it is. If anything, these nutrient-dense foods should be more widely available. To suggest banning them is a radical notion. If mainstream media are going to use supposedly credible scientists to make the argument, they should at least apply more than the fuzziest of logic.

Portrait of the farmer as a young man: Eliot Coleman with children, circa early 1970s.Reprinted with permission from Melissa Coleman.

Some background: As a Wall Street Journal reporter in 1971, I wrote a front-page profile of a middle-class family living off the land in coastal Maine — the family of Eliot Coleman, including his then-2-year-old daughter Melissa. That profile, headlined, “The New Pioneers,” was one of the WSJ‘s best-read features ever to that time, so popular that front page editors encouraged me to revisit the Colemans and do another piece two years later (sorry, that one seems to be unavailable online).

It was a major event for me personally — not only experiencing the Colemans’ vegetarian and no-electricity lifestyle, but meeting and getting to know the original trailblazers in the living-off-the-land movement, Helen and Scott Nearing; the authors of the classic Living the Good Life, who lived just down the road from the Colemans.

I lost touch with the Colemans after doing those profiles, though I did read articles here and there about Eliot’s own increasingly successful writing career, as one of the world’s foremost experts on growing organic foods year-round in hostile climates like in Maine. Contained in some of the articles I read were snippets suggesting family problems … but then, I figured, who doesn’t have family issues?

I reconnected with the family when Melissa contacted me a year-and-a-half ago to tell me about her upcoming book, and to request an interview to capture what I remembered about visiting her family in 1971 and living in a tiny trailer while reporting my story. It turned out that my initial WSJ article was a watershed event for the family, leading to a huge influx of both tourist and hippie visitors to the family’s isolated outpost on Maine’s Cape Rosier, and eventually to Eliot becoming a celebrity farmer.

Needless to say, it’s kind of strange to read now in a memoir the remembrances of my initial visit and the family’s impressions of me. “He had lived only in Chicago, New York, and Boston, so our lifestyle was an especially exotic contrast to his own. Quiet and easy to talk to, the young reporter adapted without complaint to the difficulties of using the outhouse and eating our vegetarian food, though he secretly thought the goat’s milk tasted of the barnyard … ” (I suppose that was my first exposure to raw milk.)

Eliot’s then-wife, Sue, expressed feelings of foreboding about my visit, noted Melissa. In a diary, Sue stated, “I realize now that the experience with the reporter was an unfortunate one. He was like an intrusion, making me feel uneasy and paranoid the three days he was here.” Melissa reports. She adds, though: “despite Mama’s fears, it turned out to be a favorable profile.” And more significantly: “The article … was a messenger of change, as more and more people became interested in a simpler way of life — people who would seek us out in droves … “

Some of the change was positive, as volunteers showed up, ready to pitch in and reduce the huge workload on Eliot and Sue. Some was stressful, putting the couple ever more under outside scrutiny. The intrusions were especially difficult for Sue, who was by nature a very private person. The breaking point occurred with the drowning of Melissa’s younger sister, Heidi, in a pond on the farm in 1976.

Aside from the fact that the tragedy tore the family apart, it also forced Melissa, in the course of writing the book, to confront larger issues associated with the family’s unusual lifestyle. Indeed, the entire situation carries important messages for today’s emerging class of professionally trained and city-raised young and middle-aged farmers. I won’t reveal any more about the book, except to say that it is an absorbing read that intelligently arrays the romanticism of living off the land against the emotional challenges of moving off the grid.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has just filed a complaint in federal court, seeking a permanent injunction against Amish farmer Dan Allgyer in Pennsylvania. It accuses him of violating a federal prohibition on interstate sales of raw milk by shipping unpasteurized milk to a Maryland buying club’s members.

As part of its complaint, the agency says it carried out a lengthy undercover investigation to acquire raw milk, and as part of it, “FDA investigators picked up each unpasteurized milk order at various private residences in Maryland.” All of which has me wondering …

Were the agents looking over their shoulders as they wandered onto decks and into garages of the private homes as they picked up their milk? Were they whispering into cell phones to comrades waiting outside, eager to get their hands on the contraband? Did they stop to admire deck furniture, barbeque grills, and lawn tools on their way into and out of the homes? And maybe do a little dumpster diving, checking the trash for clues to the family’s prescription drugs, nutritional supplements … whether there might be some leftover weed.

Perhaps more to the point, did the imposters feel any sense of remorse or shame by virtue of entering private residences to seize food — eagerly ordered and paid for by the club members — as part of a major federal investigation?

On this last point, the answer appears to be negative. According to the complaint filed in U.S. District court a couple weeks back, the FDA undercover effort has been going on for more than a year. “In late 2009, an investigator in FDA’s Baltimore District Office used aliases to join the cooperative that Allgyer’s farm was supplying in Maryland and Washington, D.C.” The complaint noted that the group “warns group members to ‘not share information about our group and certainly not about our farmer’ with government agencies or doctors … “

Over the 15 months between December 2009 and March 2011, additional FDA investigators used the cooperative’s “online ordering website and placed orders for unpasteurized cow milk on 23 occasions … Payment for each purchase was made in the form of a money order payable to Dan Allgyer. Payment was either mailed to Allgyer” or left inside a zip closure bag that was located at the pickup site in Maryland, the private homes where FDA investigators obtained their evidence.

These surreptitious pickups weren’t the end of the investigation, though. “An FDA laboratory analyzed twelve of the twenty-three samples of milk purchased by the FDA investigators and confirmed that all twelve were unpasteurized.”

Investigators also visited Allgyer’s farm on April 20, 2010, and “observed numerous portable coolers in the Defendant’s driveway and a walk-in cooler/freezer on the property that contained products that appeared to be milk and other assorted dairy products.” The coolers were labeled with the names of various locations within Maryland, including Takoma Park, Bethesda, Bowie, and Silver Springs.

Not surprisingly, members of the buying group in Maryland are upset by the FDA’s undercover tactics. The club has hundreds of members, “including bureaucrats, lobbyists, staffers on the Hill,” says Liz Reitzig, one of the club organizers. “It feels like betrayal,” she says. “The fact that they have been in some of our homes is mean. We trusted them, and they are totally betraying us.”

Reitzig argues that the milk being delivered to members wasn’t being purchased, and thus wasn’t part of interstate commerce. It was already owned by the members as part of their club membership agreements, and was merely being delivered to them. Indeed, the fact that it could only be obtained by entering private residences is testimony to the private nature of the transactions, she says.

Who knows, maybe some FDA staffers who weren’t privy to the undercover operation had their homes visited. It’s a tough business, this official effort to deprive people of food.

Photo: Chewonki Semester School

So Retberg shifted her focus to raw dairy instead, selling directly to local neighbors. When she received a notice last year from the Maine Department of Agriculture that she needed a permit, requiring investment way above what she could ever hope to justify with her minimal sales, she’d had enough. She got together with four neighbors similarly upset with the new regulator aggressiveness and, after concluding that state legislators weren’t especially interested in tackling the problem, they decided to seek help closer to home.

They drafted proposed ordinances for four neighboring towns that would sanction direct sales of farm products between farmers and consumers, without the involvement of regulators, and even without the involvement of lawyers, if everyone agreed. This spring, they began presenting their ordinances at town meetings — that New England institution that has stood the test of time — allowing all of a town’s citizens to vote yea or nay on proposed ordinances governing town spending, along with other purely local laws.

First up on a Saturday morning town meeting in early March was Sedgwick, Maine (population approximately 900), where they’ve been holding these meetings in the town hall since 1794.

Citing America’s Declaration of Independence and the Maine Constitution, the ordinance proposed that “Sedgwick citizens possess the right to produce, process, sell, purchase, and consume local foods of their choosing.” These would include raw milk and other dairy products, and locally slaughtered meats, among other items.

It wasn’t just a declaration of preference. The proposed warrant added, “It shall be unlawful for any law or regulation adopted by the state or federal government to interfere with the rights recognized by this Ordinance.” In other words, no state licensing requirements prohibiting certain farms from selling dairy products or producing their own chickens for sale to other citizens in the town.

What about potential legal liability and state or federal inspections? It’s all up to the seller and buyer to negotiate. “Patrons purchasing food for home consumption may enter into private agreements with those producers or processors of local foods to waive any liability for the consumption of that food. Producers or processors of local foods shall be exempt from licensure and inspection requirements for that food as long as those agreements are in effect.” Imagine that — buyer and seller can agree to cut out the lawyers. That’s almost un-American, isn’t it?

The approximately 120 Sedgwick citizens in attendance discussed the proposal briefly. (You don’t have a huge amount of time when there are 78 different proposals under discussion, as there were that Saturday morning.) When the discussion was over, all 120 raised their hands in unanimous approval of the ordinance.

Local farmer Bob St.Peter said afterward that he feels the vote creates favorable conditions for beginning farmers and cottage-scale food processors to try out new products. “My family is already working on some ideas we can do from home to help pay the bills and get our farm going.”

Next up, a few days later, was Penobscot, another tiny coastal town. About 100 people in attendance there, where a similar discussion to that of Sedgwick was held, and another unanimous vote.

But on the same Wednesday evening that Penbscot was having its vote, some residents of the nearby town of Brooksville were dividing on the proposal. There, the town’s Ordinance Review Committee had, a few weeks earlier, expressed concerns about the ordinance’s enforceability, should the state challenge the lifting of regulations, and also about potential liability issues and legal costs if anyone became ill from the unregulated food.

When the vote came up at town meeting, the committee’s recommendation was included with a secret ballot the 300 or so town citizens used to vote. The food ordinance lost by nine votes, 161 to 152.

But wait. Local organic grower and author Eliot Coleman discovered a possible glitch — that the proposed ordinance was preceded with a statement expressing the ordinance committee’s opposition, a bit of inappropriate electioneering, in his view. The ordinance may well get a do-over vote, likely by the end of April. A fourth town, Blue Hill, is due to vote on the ordinance in early April.

The notion of food sovereignty that has sprouted in coastal Maine may be gaining traction. Deborah Evans, one of the organizers of the Maine effort, says that since the Sedgwick and Penobscot votes, she’s heard from farmers around the country — some as far away as Texas — interested in proposing similar ordinances in their towns.

As demand for locally produced food expands, the pressures for such ordinances can be expected to expand as well, as small farms seek to avoid stifling regulation. The true test of their workability may well come when state or federal regulators decide that some local ordinance clashes with state requirements. In that case, we may see a court test of who has precedence. Given the pressures on farmers and regulators, such a clash and court test are probably inevitable.