Washington's War on Food is Making Us Sick! with Guest Liz Reitzig
You don't have to drink raw milk or buy your meat directly from the farmer to agree that others should have this right. After all, the right to choose what we put in our bodies is fundamental, even if the government feels it has the right to tell us what's "good" for us. On today's program we visit the front lines of the food freedom movement, with special guest, food liberty activist Liz Reitzig.
You don't have to drink raw milk or buy your meat directly from the farmer to agree that others should have this right. After all, the right to choose what we put in our bodies is fundamental, even if the government feels it has the right to tell us what's "good" for us. On today's program we visit the front lines of the food freedom movement, with special guest, food liberty activist Liz Reitzig.
Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With me today is Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
Well, we have a friend of Liberty on as a guest today, and she has been an associate with us and talked to us and even when we were in Washington.
But she's still pursuing a very important issue and that has the issue of freedom of choice in food.
And that's Liz Reitzig.
And she's very knowledgeable on that.
And I love the title of her website, nourishingliberty.com.
That is good stuff.
So we know she believes in liberty and nourishment.
And she's coming from an angle that we agree with.
And Liz, I want to welcome you to the Liberty Report today.
Hi, Dr. Paul.
Thank you so much.
Thanks for having me on.
Well, good.
I want to start off with talking a little bit about how you got involved.
How long have you been involved?
And were you interested in the principle of liberty even before you were interested in applying it to food?
Or did they come together?
Just tell us a little bit how you got involved in this issue because you've been a real activist on this and your approach of a little less government, a little more freedom, it's refreshing to know that.
Well, thanks.
And I really got my start, my conscious start that I was aware of after my first daughter was born just 15 years ago.
So it was just after she was born.
I was seeking out what can I feed my growing family that is the best thing for them.
And I came across raw milk and the importance and the benefits of raw milk and the direct farmer to consumer relationship.
And I thought, well, this makes so much sense.
And then due to government regulation, I was not able to feed my family in the way I saw fit without me becoming a criminal and without my farmers becoming criminals.
And that really launched me into the larger message of liberty and freedom and into the work I did all those years ago when we were working in Congress together and I would bring ideas to your office and events.
And you were so supportive then and as you are now of this, the crux of the issue for foods, that we need to be able to access the foods of our choice from the producers of our choice.
Right.
You know, and this freedom to choose in milk and milk pasteurization, I find fascinating because I didn't know where we stood on that in the general public.
I guess probably in 2008, 2007 when I started in this presidential race, I assumed that there's just a couple of you out there.
Nobody really cares about drinking raw milk.
So, and I remember, you know, it came out one time naturally when I was talking about personal liberty and personal choices.
And I said, yeah, don't you think you ought to have the choice on whether you can drink raw milk or not?
And the whole crowd didn't let loose, but there was a significant group of people in those audience.
So it dawned on me that this is an issue.
And I use it quite frequently.
So it works really well in the freedom of choice and responsibility.
And because of the work that you have done and others who are interested in freedom of choice and food and making our own decisions, I think that's why the number of people that care about this are growing.
And this is how you eventually change legislation.
So Daniel, do you have a question for Liz?
Growing Support for Choice00:10:40
Yeah, and I mean, it must have been a shock, you know, when I'm sure you've did the research.
My family did the research.
Our kids have only had raw milk.
You do the research, you come to a conclusion based on a real sober look at the facts, the pros and cons, and you make the decision, okay, this is what I'm going to do for my kids.
And all of a sudden, the government steps in and says, oh, no, you don't.
You've got to do it the way we say.
If you don't do it the way we say, you're going to get sick.
That must have been shocking to you when that happened.
Well, it absolutely was.
You know, to have people who didn't know my family, didn't know my children or what they needed, tell me that I can't make this decision as a parent.
I mean, it was a shock, Daniel.
And then even more shocking, of course, was the lengths they went to to shut down our farmers and raid them and put them out of business.
And it's, it's, you know, I thought, okay, well, as a mom, you know, I've gone through all these pregnancies.
I could smoke and drink all through them.
I can feed my children scoot and lollipops all day long.
That's perfectly fine.
But the way they raided the farms, the way they were so aggressive about this shutdown, there's such a mistreatment of raw milk and just the fundamental principle of me as a parent being able to choose what I can feed my children as long as it's within this scope of what they've already said.
Can you tell us about a couple of those raids?
I mean, maybe our viewers may not know about them, but maybe pick out one or two and tell us some of the details about they're absolutely horrific, aren't they?
Oh, absolutely.
There was one case in Pennsylvania against farmer Mark Nolt that went on for years and years where it was actually enforced through the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, but where they came onto this farm and they seized equipment over and over and over again.
And so that's indirectly shutting the farm down because how can a farm buy equipment over and over and over?
They can't.
They just economically crumble.
And then the most publicized and most famous case, of course, was the Rossum raid out in California.
And that was raw milk coming from Pennsylvania to people who wanted it in California.
And that's where you see the dramatic video footage of the police coming in with guns drawn and they're looking around crates of food.
And that got quite a bit of publicity and media attention.
But this is how they treated it.
And then, of course, the one that I was the closest to was when farmer Dan Algier got investigated.
And the buying club that I was running at the time, the FDA did a year and a half long undercover operation to prove that we were providing raw milk to people who wanted it, which is something that was blatant.
I mean, we weren't hiding anything.
There was no need to do an undercover investigation on this.
And then the subsequent shutdown of his farm, but how many resources they put into that is a measure of how many.
Now, there's a lot of intimidation and threats and closing people down.
Have individuals gone to prison, or is it just the vicious intimidation and threats that they use?
Well, so far, to my knowledge, nobody has gone to jail for prison over raw milk.
We had it come close.
There was a Wisconsin farmer, Vernon Hirschberger, who was charged with four criminal counts for providing raw milk to his community.
And those were, they were not federal offenses.
It was all within the state of Wisconsin.
But they actually, you know, it's great to bring that up because his acquittal, the anniversary of his acquittal, is four years ago today.
And he was acquitted on three of those charges.
One stuck, but it wasn't about the milk.
It was about moving product.
And it was a great example of a community coming together and not criminalizing the feeding of that community.
It's really great to see the outcome of that.
But the government certainly tried to put him in jail for it.
Yeah.
You know, and it's not just milk that we're talking about.
It's food.
It's meat.
It's vegetables.
It's so many things.
Some of the background material that thankfully you provided that we looked at, one of the examples is a slaughterhouse issue.
And I think this is a good news story, and I'll end it with a good news part and have Liz comment on it.
But in 1967, there were 9,600 slaughter facilities in the U.S.
They passed a bill to require USDA inspection, and by 2016, there are only 1,000 of them left.
And that means that for small producers, it's very difficult. to access these.
But the good news is, and I think it's a lot of it has to do with the efforts of Liz and people like them, there's a huge demand for farm-to-table foods where you get your farm food direct.
And these are, Dr. Paul, these are high-end restaurants where people are paying a couple hundred dollars for a meal that was on the farm.
The animals are raised humanely and killed humanely.
But Daniel, you don't care about the middleman.
You're putting people out of work.
You're making it more efficient.
But the great, you know, and sadly, I think when wealthier people are getting involved, they will raise the issue higher.
But Liz, I think this is probably good news for our movement, that people are getting irritated that they cannot access some of this higher end, some of these, you know, more specialty meats.
So do you see the pressure kind of coming from it being, I wouldn't say a fad, but people more aware of the health benefits of these foods?
Well, absolutely.
There's always awareness building and people understanding that there's so much value in it, not just in the health benefits, but in the relationship building and in the way these farmers farm that's more humane and it's more environmentally friendly.
So the benefits are so many layered and so many levels.
And of course, that awareness is great.
And what that's causing is people to step out of their comfort zone of compliance and literally engaging in ways that they wouldn't otherwise engage.
So one example of that, Daniel, is very recently another farmer I work with, he's been custom slaughtering and providing that meat to people who want it.
And the USDA did a big investigation on him and asked for so many records and just a continual amount.
And the organization, the Real Food Consumer Coalition that I helped found, we stepped in and we were able to negotiate to get him released from his contempt of court charges on that particular issue.
And there's still a long ways to go because you know how these things get drawn out and dragged out in court.
But we were very effective in that and moving it to the next level where now there's this greater awareness of what's going on and we can deal with this in the ways that keep it out of court more.
And I understand you have to face the consequences of the invasion of privacy where some of the farmers who sell raw milk or whatever, the government comes in and demands the name of every single customer.
And there's been some court cases on that.
Is that something that is rare or is that one of their routines to come and say, we want to know who dares to drink raw milk against our permission?
I think the request for information happens a lot more than the farmers actually giving the information, which is really good because every time the farmers say no, it strengthens other farmers to say that as well.
And it requires more resources and more effort on the part of the FDA or the USDA or whoever is tasked with enforcing it to then get those records.
And I see that as a really positive impact that the message of liberty has had on this movement.
Some of the problems are not, that we talked about, are philosophical.
They're not really contained only in the food issue.
But there's the idea that if there's no TSA, we'll not be safe in the airlines.
If there's no USDA, we'll all die from our food.
And we know there's no customer that wants to kill, there's no businessman who wants to kill his customers.
So this whole idea, wouldn't you say, Liz, that the USDA is vital, otherwise our farmers will kill us.
It's just absurd.
That's right.
And there's also no better regulator or inspector than the customer, than a passionate, informed customer.
And that's how we choose where we're going to get our food.
As we go, we look at the farm, we check it out.
I go take pictures for other people who might want to go there.
And I give write-ups about it.
And that's the kind of free market regulation that we do embrace in these situations.
You know, in medicine, patients pick their doctors not because the FDA or some government agency comes in and gives them a license, even though that happens and they say they screen doctors.
But really, most people get their doctor by talking to somebody who's been there and has already screened the doctor in the same way would happen with food.
I think Daniel's touched on this very important issue.
Who's responsible for safety?
And some people say, well, it's the government.
It's the government.
Of course, where is the evidence?
Where is the evidence that they have made us much safer?
You hear all of a sudden, oh, somebody got poisoned and somebody got sick or something happened and therefore we need more government.
Well, government's been already regulating.
Why don't they say the government has failed to do it?
Everybody depends on it.
In the drug industry and in medicine, if there's an FDA approval, it's a sign that you can go ahead.
And if the FDA say you can't do it, it means that whatever they wanted to do was evil.
It's the confidence that these things can be worked out in the marketplace.
It's not like we've always had the government regulating raw milk.
And that raises the question, Liz, when did they really get active on this and decide that we have to go after these bad people who would dare sell raw milk across the state line?
Is this relatively new or have they been monkey around with this for a long time?
Well, the regulation has only been since the late 1980s that bans the interstate transportation of raw milk.
But to my knowledge, it's only been in the past 12 or so years that they've been so aggressive about targeting the farmers.
That's really where the rates came in and the shutting down.
Friends of Liberty00:02:21
So the issue we touched a little bit about USDA regulation, but thankfully there still are some friends of consumers and some friends of liberty in Congress.
Could you let us know, is there some legislation that you're looking at or anticipating, especially that our viewers might look out for, that they might be able to support and encourage their members once they're introduced to support these?
Absolutely.
Yes, of course.
Congressman Thomas Massey, he's been a huge supporter, as well as Congresswoman Shelley Pengree.
And they've done a fabulous job of keeping this issue relevant in Congress through introduction of the Prime Act and the Raw Milk Freedom Bill.
And we are expecting to see both of those again, although I'm not exactly sure when at this point, but I will keep others informed about that.
And hopefully we can see a huge groundswell of support for these bills, even from those who don't necessarily care about eating these particular foods or meat slaughtered in that particular way, but understand that this is part of a much larger picture of liberty.
And Liz, we're going to have to go, but I want to thank you very much for bringing this issue to us, in particular because I love the opportunity to defend liberty in a very specific way, making it a very practical thing.
And you have this evidence that you've done a lot of good work.
So I'd like to sort of close by giving the viewers an opportunity to know where they can go to find out more about what you have been doing.
Okay, thanks.
The realfoodcc.com is the website for the organization that's taking a lot of the political action.
And then nourishingliberty.com is my personal website where I do my writing about these issues and about raising children and securing food for them.
Okay, that's very good.
And thank you once again for being with us, Liz.
Appreciate it very much.
And thanks for always being a champion of food rights.
Okay, very good.
And I want to thank our viewers for joining us today for this very important message about raw milk.
Should you drink it or shouldn't you do it?
Let a free society decide it.
And making personal choices is a lot better than letting the bureaucrats control our lives and our liberty.
So I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.