Comedian Stephen Colbert poked fun Wednesday at both the “nanny state” protesters and traditional-foods enthusiasts, reporting on the June 3 armed government raid of Rawesome Foods in Venice, Calif. (David Gumpert has covered these crackdowns in detail for Grist, here and here, including collecting tips on how to survive one.)
Rawesome distributes unpasteurized, or “raw,” cow, goat, sheep, and even camel milk to its private-club members — “straight from the udder, just the way our founding fathers and their camels intended,” intones Colbert. Just like the Tea Partiers, the raw-fooders want government to get out of the way of their freedom and stop playing the “bloody diarrhea” card of food safety. They’re comfortable trading the risks of unpasteurized milk for the more complete nutritional benefits they believe it offers.
“People do have a right in a free society to do stupid things,” libertarian politician Ron Paul (R.-Texas) tells Colbert.
Call me stupid, but I’d rather drink raw milk from a known source than eat a medium-rare hamburger in just about any restaurant in America.
