Death by Oysters

By Sally Fallon Morell

If there ever were a good example of double standard coming from the food safety folks, it’s a November 2011 article on oyster deaths posted at Food Safety News (www.foodsafetynews.com/2011/11/still-too-many-raw-oyster-deaths/). The report expresses concern for the economic viability of the Gulf oyster industry, recovering from one of the worst environmental disasters in history, but also notes that oysters still kill fifteen people per year. FDA wants “post-harvest processing,” a euphemism for irradiation, which the industry and Louisiana politicians have resisted tooth and nail—so far successfully. So you eat oysters at your own risk, and government officials have held back from pronouncements that oysters are “inherently dangerous.”

But for raw milk, which has killed no one for at least twelve years, and perhaps for decades, FDA officials have nothing but opprobrium, and certainly no concern for the hundreds of raw milk producers and the economic viability of this growing economic sector. FDA has just posted new and fraudulent warnings against this health-providing food: www.fda.gov/Food/FoodSafety/Product-SpecificInformation/MilkSafety/ConsumerInformationAboutMilkSafety/ucm247991.htm.

(Feb 3, 2015 update: The FDA’s page has been removed but you can read it on the Internet Archive “Wayback Machine” here: https://web.archive.org/web/20120203015203/http://www.fda.gov/Food/FoodSafety/Product-SpecificInformation/MilkSafety/ConsumerInformationAboutMilkSafety/ucm247991.htm)