Anything That Moves (13 page)

“How far down the rabbit hole do you want to go?” Ajna Sharma-Wilson, the lawyer, asked me. Several months after the raid, she and Stewart and a group of his supporters converged at a hotel in Las Vegas, to attend the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association convention, an event put on by Richard Mack, a former sheriff from Arizona who successfully challenged a provision of the Brady Bill before the Supreme Court and was running for Congress as a Republican from Texas. I met them there. Mack, who told me that he'd spoken at “more Tea Party events than Sarah Palin,” had drawn a hundred sheriffs, from across the country, who feel that the federal government is infringing on individual rights. He had invited the raw-milkers, he told me, because he wanted to educate both the sheriffs and the lawbreakers. “I want them to call their sheriff,” he said. “I want their sheriff to protect them from the FDA.”

Among the booths—Gun Owners of America, the John Birch Society, anti-income-tax proponents selling a CD called
The Politics of Jesus
—was a table piled with raw cheeses and fresh produce. The vegetables had come from a sustainable Nevada farm that had recently become a food-freedom darling when a health inspector showed up at a “farm to table” dinner and made the farmer pour bleach on the vegetables, maintaining that, because she could not determine how long ago they had been cut, they were unfit even for pigs.

At the table were several Raw Milk Freedom Riders, mothers who practice civil disobedience by crossing state lines with raw milk. Their splashiest protest so far has been a raw-milk-and-cookie sit-in on the steps of the FDA, in Silver Spring, Maryland. One of them had a seven-month-old baby on her hip. Sheriff Mack, an imposing figure in cowboy boots, a turquoise shirt, and a loosened teal-colored tie, kept throwing his arm around her and joking that he was going to arrest her for feeding her baby unpasteurized breast milk.

The mother was around my age and lived outside Washington, D.C.; she had started drinking raw milk when pregnant with her second baby. (This one was her fifth.) I asked her if she wanted to walk around and check out the booths. I kept looking for signs of the culture clash between the raw-milkers and the antigovernment extremists, but I couldn't get purchase. The raw-milkers claimed to be on board with everything, from putting a stop to roadside sobriety tests to ending seat-belt laws. Apparently, wanting the government out of their food colored everything for them.

Aside from the Freedom Riders' farm table, the only other food booth belonged to Freeze Dry Guy, a company that sells “freeze-dried foods for uncertainties.” Preppers, as the community of apocalypse-ready food-hoarders is known, take food self-sufficiency to an extreme. Freeze Dry Guy's pitch was Store What You Eat—the idea being that if you're a big meat-eater, you're not going to want to add adjusting to a vegan diet to your list of problems when catastrophe strikes. Germans starved after World War II, the marketing material said, because they considered corn to be pig food. “These were not stupid people. They just had strong prejudices about what they would not eat. . . . Ever had monkey's brains, goat's eyes or grubs? Ever try to make an 18 month old child eat Brussels sprouts? Good luck! What if that were all you had?”

The Freedom Rider stared at a huge can of freeze-dried “Oriental-style spicy chicken”: monkey's brains to her. Finally, a wedge issue! “Wow,” she said, as she read down the list of industrial and GMO ingredients. “Wow.”

At lunchtime, a buffet was set up in the middle of the room, with cold cuts, pasta salad, and bags of chips. Sheriff Mack loaded up a plate. “I grew up absolutely hating milk,” he told me. “I would gag on it! Now when I drink their milk, maybe it tastes better to me because it's freedom milk. It just has a little rebellious flavor in it. To me, it's the new civil rights. It's Rosa Parks.”

Mack wandered over to the farm booth and asked one of the women there if she had eaten. “We brought our food, 'cause this is genetically modified,” she said, pointing at the bag of popcorn in his hand. Someone poured Mack a glass of milk, and he turned to face the roomful of sheriffs—old fellows, mostly, with holstered handguns at their hips. The raw-milkers cheered as Mack took a big, showy sip and called out, “Freedom milk! Freedom milk!”

That night, Stewart's supporters threw an “ice-cream speakeasy” for the sheriffs in one of the hotel rooms. There was uncured sausage and raw cheese made by an Amish farmer currently fighting charges in Wisconsin. The raw milk was flowing, as was the cold-pressed hibiscus juice, sweetened with raw honey.

“I heard you won't touch anything raw,” a goat farmer from Utah said, looking at me pityingly. In a small seating area, Stewart arranged tangerines, carob pods, and Satsuma mandarins on platters. Along one wall was a giant freezer filled with raw-milk ice cream: cherry from the Dairy Fairy, and chocolate and vanilla that Sharma-Wilson and the woman who loved dirty eggs had made in their hotel room that afternoon. “I sniffed every egg,” the woman said, meaning to reassure.

•   •   •

T
he romance of the small farmer is a powerful thing in the American food marketplace. The reality can be jarring. Sharon Palmer, who had taken up farming after a career in business, sought to connect Healthy Family Farms to this story, describing it as a “sustainable, pasture-based farm,” where all the animals—chickens, ducks, Cornish game hens, lambs, cows, milk-fed pigs—are raised from birth and harvested by hand. When she was arrested in August 2011, she again positioned herself as part of a larger narrative, telling the
Ventura County Star,
“It's not just about me. It's happening all over the country. I am very, very hopeful that this will become apparent that this is government abuse.”

But just because a farm is small does not mean that the farmer always makes good decisions about how he raises the food you eat. A community that resists labeling and inspection as government intrusion puts itself at the mercy of its suppliers. (One longtime customer complained to me of buying rancid pork from Rawesome in an undated package, but he also used the occasion to brag that his gut microflora were strong enough to handle it.) Although Rawesome is held up by those who mourn it as a paradigm of intimate, enlightened consumership, its members may have known less about the origins of their food than they thought. A few years ago, a splinter group led by Aajonus Vonderplanitz began to question the integrity of Healthy Family Farms, claiming that the chicken and the eggs were outsourced and contained high levels of mercury and sodium. (Palmer and Stewart admitted to briefly selling eggs from another farm, but dispute the lab tests.) The former USDA employee who worked at Rawesome said that she was furious to discover that the chickens she believed to be exclusively pasture-fed were in fact finished on corn. “There's no such thing as non-GMO corn feed!” she said.

From the Dairy Fairy, I bought a pound of sacred butter and some milk in a plain, lightly sweating plastic gallon jug—no date, no label. It was yellowish, with a thick mantle of cream. I was tempted, but I didn't dare. It came all the way from Pennsylvania, and, visions of Amish country notwithstanding, I had no clue what that farm looked like. I poured my husband a glass. “It coats your mouth, almost like drinking half-and-half,” he said, pronouncing it delicious. Five minutes later, he said the taste was still with him: a gamey, sweet-hay-manure flavor that intensified when he stepped outside.

The butter stayed in the fridge until I got word of a Primal Diet potluck hosted by Vonderplanitz at a condominium in Marina del Rey. Etiquette required that I bring something from Vonderplanitz's recipe book—“Nuts over Meat” (raw lamb on a pile of zucchini, covered in fresh nut butter), say, or a flask of “Power Drink” (raw liver, thyroid, testis or ovary, lung, brain, adrenal gland; raw milk; red onions). I took the butter instead, placing it on the counter in the kitchen, next to room-temperature oysters, raw chicken chunks, strips of raw red bison, cut fruit bobbing in cream, and a few open jars of raw milk. The whole room stank: warm, bilious, inescapably animal, like a nursery full of neglected babies surrounded by panting carnivores.

Vonderplanitz sat on a deep couch, among leopard-print pillows and faux-fur throws, surrounded by three young acolytes. Double-height windows looked out on the beach. He told me about his clients who thrived on raw food during their pregnancies. “It's so good for your baby,” he said, and invited me to eat. “You have to pick it up by your hand, real primitive, cannibal-like,” he said, widening his pale blue eyes and smiling to show his strong teeth. “Thank you,” I said, but didn't move from the couch. He introduced me to his friends, two heavy-browed bodybuilding brothers in their twenties and the nineteen-year-old girlfriend of one of them, who was a personal trainer. They told me that, on Vonderplanitz's recommendation, they had started eating rotting meat, though it was sometimes hard to do. “When the beef is green, you're like, ‘Uhhhhhh,'” the young woman said. “My dad was pissed, like, ‘What are you doing? You're going to be sick.'”

Vonderplanitz specifies using the highest-quality meat, and the young folk complained of the expense. The older brother said that when he couldn't afford gourmet meat, he ate spoiled meat from the regular supermarket. I let that sink in for a second: these middle-class kids were deliberately eating like the survivors of an apocalypse. It seemed to me they'd cherry-picked a losing combination, though—the modern convenience of cheap conventional beef with the caveman's limitation of eating it raw.

“What could be healthier than eating something completely unprocessed?” the older brother said.

“Like the cavemen did,” the young woman said.

“Animals don't cook their food. They can survive anything. Humans on a cooked diet are weaker.”

Vonderplanitz turned to me. He was bothered by the fact that I hadn't helped myself to the buffet. “Are you in any way connected with any government agency?” he asked. I reassured him, breathing through my mouth, that I was not, and got out of there before I embarrassed myself by throwing up all over the faux fur.

•   •   •

N
ot long after that, I had a dream the egg lady asked me how much grocery-store yogurt I was eating and I lied. I was sick of people telling me what to eat and what not to eat; I had come to my own conclusion about it and wanted to be left alone. In my irritation, I began to appreciate how maddening it must be for someone who believes that raw milk is saving her own or her child's life to be told she can't have it. Imagine if the annoying people interfering with the very private decision of what I ought to eat to stay healthy represented the federal government. No wonder the raw-milkers took refuge in the suffocating, self-enclosed world of the like-minded. It felt safe to them.

In the end, the Rawesome Three never went to trial for their alleged milk crimes. Stewart, who had spent time in jail on a related matter after failing to make bail, pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors, for processing raw goat milk at Healthy Family Farms and for operating a food facility—the Rawesome lot—without a permit; he was sentenced to 253 days in county jail, but credited for time served. In a separate case, he also pleaded guilty to two counts of felony tax evasion, and was given a suspended sentence of sixteen months in jail, and required to pay some $325,000 in restitution to the Franchise Tax Board. Palmer pleaded to a single misdemeanor, for having her dairy in an “insanitary condition” on the day of the raid. She had to pay a fine and perform forty hours of community service. Bloch, who took a misdemeanor for improperly labeling food, paid a hundred-dollar fine. All the rest of the charges were dismissed.

You can buy raw meat at the grocery store and feed it to your kids and no one can stop you. But milk has exceptional emotional power. Be it human or cow, it is the first food to which we are exposed, making it unlike other products, both for consumers, who associate it with basic nourishment, and for regulators, who see its oversight as a grave responsibility. Michele Jay-Russell, of the Western Institute for Food Safety & Security at U.C. Davis, told me, “From a public-health perspective, milk has fallen into the category of water. Providing a clean milk and water supply is fundamental to what the government sees as its job.” But she acknowledges the frustration of consumers who can't get a product that they feel they need. “The crux of the conundrum is: Why shouldn't it be their choice?”

T
he Food and Drug Administration was the great achievement of the pure-food movement, and a centerpiece of Progressive Era reform. Harvey W. Wiley, known in bureaucratic history as the Father of the FDA, started his career in Washington in 1883, as chief chemist at the Department of Agriculture, which at that time was tasked not with meat inspection but with boosting the country's agricultural output. His office was founded to verify the uniqueness of fertilizer formulas for those seeking patents. Six feet tall, and more than two hundred pounds, with, a biographer noted, “only a suggestion of a paunch to testify to his fondness for the pleasures of the table,” Wiley was an outspoken and controversial crusader for unadulterated, properly labeled food.

Unlike today, when diners seek adventure, eating in the nineteenth century, especially for the poor, was an act of inadvertent daring. Rapid urbanization had cut people off from the sources of their food; mass production was changing that food's very character. Refrigeration was limited. Chicanery and fraud were common. Unscrupulous and ignorant producers, trying to stretch shelf life or save on ingredients, put ashes in bread and formaldehyde in milk; chemical preservatives like borax, a laundry booster, were routinely added to perishable foods to mask or defer spoilage.

Born in a log cabin in Indiana to a family that grew almost all their own food and traded milk and butter for whatever they could not make themselves, Wiley lamented the industrialization of the food system. “In the good old days preceding and immediately following the War between the States, there was little need of protection of the people from impure, adulterated and misbranded foods and drugs,” he wrote in a memoir. “The great bulk of the people raised most of what they ate.” Processed foods appalled him; he advocated a “natural” diet composed mainly of whole grains, fruits, and vegetables.

In Wiley's time, the food avant-garde was made up of reformers calling on the federal government, which did not yet have a significant role in regulating the food supply, to establish a safe, standardized American diet. In 1902, at the beginning of Theodore Roosevelt's first term, Wiley asked Congress for $5,000 to conduct experiments on commonly used chemical preservatives. With the money, he built a kitchen and a dining hall in the basement of the Bureau of Chemistry, an imposing brick building on what is now Independence Avenue. Then he recruited from the Department of Agriculture a small band of men, choice specimens aged eighteen to twenty-nine, including a sprinter from Yale and former captain of a high-school cadet regiment, who were willing to test his belief that preservatives were harmful to human health.

Three times a day, Wiley's “boys” assembled to eat food prepared for them by Perry, a civil service cook previously employed by the queen of Bavaria. The menu was designed by Wiley, who, the press noted, “has some original ideas about feeding human beings.” The food was administered in precise doses, weighed out by chemists in lab coats, lending the enterprise a theatrical aura of science; in spite of occasional pleas of hunger, no more than the exact amount Wiley had calculated would nourish a fit young man was given. More significant, the food was “pure”: fresh roast beef, pork, chicken, and turkey; eggs, milk, and cream from dairies personally inspected by Wiley; seasonal fruits and vegetables, or high-quality canned goods preserved by heat sterilization only.

Into this food, Wiley slipped the suspected toxins. To test the effects of borax, he contaminated the milk and butter with boric acid and borate of soda, two varieties commonly added to meat and dairy products. (Perry asked for a raise: borax was a trickier ingredient than the salt he used to season the queen's meals.) When the men learned to taste borax and started avoiding the tainted foods, Wiley resorted to giving them the borax in capsule form. In an adjacent laboratory, their “secreta” were analyzed by government chemists.

After a month or so, some of the subjects began to feel nauseous and depressed and to complain of headaches. Two retired from the squad. Wiley had to navigate a delicate matter of public opinion, describing the men's reactions to borax as unpleasant enough to demonstrate its harmfulness, without making it seem as if he had endangered them. When one of the dropouts died, several years later, of tuberculosis, his mother blamed the Poison Squad, a claim Wiley dismissed as absurd. He did, however, conclude that borax, taken in small doses over a couple of months, or in large doses over a short time, caused many of his subjects to become “ill and unfit for duty.”

The experiments made Wiley famous. “It is getting so bad that people point to me on the street and say, ‘There goes the man that runs Uncle Sam's cooking school,'” Wiley told
The Chicago Daily Tribune
. “It's getting unbearable. The other night, walking down the aisle of a theater on my way to my seat, people nudged one another, pointed me out, and said, ‘There goes Borax.'” (That might have been wishful thinking: most people called him
Old
Borax.) As the experiments continued, his extreme eaters were likewise turned into figures of fun, captured in songs and skits: “Thus all the ‘deadlies' we double-dare / to put us beneath the sod; / We're death-immunes and we're proud as proud—/ Hooray for the Pizen Squad!” The men contributed to the caricature, divulging all kinds of details to reporters—for a practical joke, one had dosed his squad-mate with quinine found in the lab—and giving themselves the slogan “Only the brave dare eat the fare.” Colleagues began to accuse Wiley of practicing “yellow chemistry.”

•   •   •

I
n spite of Wiley's well-publicized experiments and the efforts of numerous women's groups around the country calling for a federal law, a comprehensive pure-food bill proved elusive. Wiley later wrote that “There seemed to be an understanding between the two Houses that when one passed a bill for the repression of food adulteration the other would see that it suffered a lingering death.” Then, in 1904, Upton Sinclair, a struggling novelist with a toddler and an ailing wife, went to Chicago on assignment for the socialist paper
Appeal to Reason
. His purpose was to write about the mistreatment of immigrant workers in the stockyards and the abuses of the Beef Trust, the six firms that dominated the American meatpacking trade. Wearing old clothes and carrying a lunch pail, he spent seven weeks wandering around the plants and talking to the men and women who worked there.

Sinclair fictionalized his findings—lightly, he said—and published them serially, taking his readers on a tour through what he called the “spoiled-meat industry.” His allegations were shocking: he told of putrid hams refreshed with chemicals and sausages made from meat that sat on the floor with rat droppings and poison. The processers, he wrote, used “everything about the hog except the squeal”—a culinary boast today, then taken as evidence of corporate avarice—and labeled the scraps under whatever name would sell. Lamb and mutton were actually goat, and the recipe for “potted chicken” called for tripe, pork fat, beef suet, beef hearts, and veal bits. (Speaking to
The New York Times
later, Sinclair supplied additional ingredients: “the meat of unborn calves and cows' udders.”) The industry, he said, favored tubercular cows—they fattened efficiently—and when European distributors sent back sausages too moldy to sell, the packers would remake them for the home market, using borax to hide the spoilage.

Sinclair's central figuration was that just as cattle and swine were chopped up, ground down, and exploited in every conceivable way in the great factories of Packingtown so, too, was the human labor force. His most shocking contention brought the metaphor to life. In the steamy, ill-lit cooking rooms, he wrote, workers sometimes fell into the vats, where, forgotten, they would stew “till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham's Pure Leaf Lard!” A poster for the movie version of his story that appeared several years later showed a cameo of a man falling backward into a vat, wisps of vapor reaching for him like hungry ghosts.

After being turned down by numerous publishers who thought its claims too sensational,
The Jungle
was accepted by Doubleday, Page—which sent a lawyer to Chicago to assess its validity—and came out in early 1906. That winter and spring, the papers were full of Sinclair's revelations. Here was an explanation for the tinned meat, so disgusting that a general referred to it as “embalmed beef,” which had sickened many soldiers, including those in Roosevelt's command, during the Spanish-American War. Defenders of the Beef Trust resorted to embarrassingly weak arguments. “In Vats, But Not In Lard” ran the headline of a
Chicago Daily Tribune
story intended to debunk Sinclair. The deck was less than reassuring: “Bodies of Father and Son Who Lost Their Lives in Tank in 1897 or 1898 Probably Were Pulled Out and Not ‘Canned.'”

Americans, naturally, were repulsed by the notion that they might be at worst unwitting cannibals, and at best rat-eaters. The country was only 130 years old; the Donner Party tragedy, in which a group of Midwesterners seeking a better life in California got trapped in the Sierra Nevada mountains and resorted to eating their dead, had happened a mere sixty years before. Appetite was a site of colonial anxiety: Were Americans going to be savages or gentlemen? Would the country's wilderness make its new citizens wild? Civilization itself seemed to be at stake. “There can be no more important public issue than the wholesomeness of the people's food,”
The New York
Times
said. Sales of prepared meats dropped steeply—or so said the packers, whose best political leverage lay in claiming vast economic repercussions. President Roosevelt read
The Jungle
and ordered a special investigation; his agents found no proof of tinned human but issued a report saying they'd seen men climbing over heaps of meat in dirty boots and relieving themselves on the killing beds. “In a word, we saw meat shoveled from filthy wooden floors, piled on tables rarely washed, pushed from room to room in rotten box carts, in all of which processes it was in the way of gathering dirt, splinters, floor filth, and the expectoration of tuberculous and other diseased workers.” According to Roosevelt, the crisis demanded “immediate, thorough-going, and radical enlargement of the powers of the government.”

•   •   •

I
n the two days before
The Jungle
was published, Harvey W. Wiley, flanked by assistants carrying what
The
New York
Times
described as “numerous multi-colored bottles, which contain poisonous substances of various kinds,” testified before a congressional committee on behalf of the latest pure-food bill. When the congressmen asked him about naturally occurring instances of the additives he tested—the benzoic acid inherent in cranberries, for instance—he laid out a personal philosophy of food and culture. “Assuming that the food of man, as prepared by the Creator and modified by the cook, is the normal food of man, any change in the food which adds a burden to any of the organs or any change which diminishes their normal functional activity, must be hurtful.”

With the momentum generated by
The Jungle,
the Pure Food and Drugs Act, also known as “Dr. Wiley's Law,” passed, on the same day as the Meat Inspection Act, which required pre- and postmortem inspection of animals, as well as inspection of all meat products, with special attention given to the rendering process. Together, the laws gave broad new responsibilities to the Department of Agriculture and began to establish an American standard for edibility. Dr. Wiley's Law made it a crime to adulterate or misbrand any food or drug sold in the country. Food was considered adulterated “if it contain any added poisonous or other added deleterious ingredient which may render such article injurious to health,” and misbranded if it was deceptively labeled, not in its original container, or failed to disclose certain ingredients, including cocaine, heroin, and cannabis. The Bureau of Chemistry, guided by Wiley, endorsed old-fashioned smoke, salt, vinegar, and sugar, while coming out against chemical preservatives. Food Inspection Decision 76, the first ruling from the USDA after the passage of Dr. Wiley's Law, banned borax.

Eventually, Wiley's influence diminished—he made the mistake of condemning saccharine in front of Roosevelt, whose doctor administered it to him daily—but he continued to decry preservatives. “[M]odern housewives are veritable Lucrezia Borgias, handing out poison from the ice box, from the broiler and the skillet, and the little tins of dinner she buys when breathlessly rushing home after her exciting bridge games at the club,” he said. “The average ice box is a charnel house, which not only holds death, but spreads it.” His obsession with labeling, too, was unallayed. Toward the end of his career in government, he sued Coca-Cola—he was anticaffeine—because although the drink no longer contained cocaine, its name suggested otherwise.

•   •   •

W
hat is normal when it comes to what people eat? When a congressman pressed the point with Wiley, saying, “Who is to define normal food; there is a great difference of opinion about that,” Wiley, the first gatekeeper of the American food supply, simply said, “I will admit that.” To him, normal was the food of his rural Midwestern childhood. In 1907, he published “Foods and their Adulteration,” a reference book based on his Poison Squad work, in which he denounced the “sophistication of food articles” as a crime against humanity. Intended for the ambitious housewife, the book outlines chemistry experiments that can be performed at home to detect the presence of unwanted additives and preservatives. But it is also a work of taxonomy, reflecting the cultural biases of the United States in that moment. Under the heading “Animals Whose Flesh Is Edible,” he acknowledges that every animal on the planet has at one time or another been food for someone, before stating that “in a civilized community, however, except in times of disaster and dire necessity, certain classes of animals only furnish the principal meat food.” He limited the list of civilized proteins to cattle, sheep, and swine. Goat flesh was rarely eaten, he wrote, “and horse meat scarcely at all.”