A matter of fact

One of the few avenues available to small family farmers for competing with factory farms is to cater to specialty niches. For dairies, one such opportunity is to sell products free of substances like pesticides, antibiotics and hormones that have come to characterize large-scale modern farming. There has been increasing public demand for such substance-free milk, due largely to public mistrust of rBST (also known as bovine growth hormone or BGH), with which most American cows have been treated for several decades. Even the ubiquitous Starbucks has buckled to pressure from its customers to provide hormone-free milk and half and half.

As noted in our front-page article last week, a blow was delivered to both such farmers and consumers when the Pennsylvania Agriculture Department recently decided to ban “absence labeling,” that is, verbiage saying that dairy products are free of rBST or of other substances like pesticides. Originally, they gave Pennsylvania dairies until January 1, 2008 to comply; that date was later moved forward, but only by one month.

As is almost always the case with health issues, there are studies on both side of the rBST issue: some studies find that it poses dangers including premature puberty and cancer, while others say those studies are “inconclusive.” The U.S. government has resisted pressure to ban the substance. But given that the European Union, Canada, Australia and Japan have done so, the idea that rBST is dangerous is obviously not fringe lunacy. Any American consumer who wishes to avoid it ought to have the option to do so.

In 2000, a Florida jury found that a FOX television affiliate “acted intentionally and deliberately to falsify or distort the plaintiffs’ news reporting on BGH [rBST].” The reporting had said that there are serious safety concerns about rBST, a conclusion the station tried to hide. A higher court later overruled the jury—not on the grounds that FOX wasn’t lying, but because there are no laws that forbid news organizations to lie.

So we live in a country in which it’s legal for a corporation to lie about rBST, but not for a small farmer to state a fact about it.

The First Amendment protects our right to free speech. Certain dairy farmers simply want to say their milk has no rBST. It is not false. It is not shouting “fire” in a crowded theatre. It is information the American consumer wants to have.

The agriculture department appears to have three chief objections to the labeling, two of which are bogus.

First, they argue that saying that some milk doesn’t contain rBST implies that other milk is not safe. But you can’t start gagging people on the basis of some possible inference that someone else might draw from their words. And taking the department’s argument to its logical conclusion, we should also outlaw labels claiming products to be no fat, or low carbohydrate, because people might think foods with fat or carbohydrates are unhealthy.

The second argument is that the milk comes with an “unjustified” higher price. We thought this country had a free market in which prices were set by consumer demand, not by a patriarchal government that decides what we should buy and how much we should be willing to pay. Whether the price is justified or not depends on whether you believe rBST is safe or unsafe; given the bans in most of the developed world, American consumers are entitled to their own conclusions.

The Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture does have half a leg to stand on when it claims that “there is no way of checking” whether cows have or have not been treated with rBST. They may be right that the cows are not being checked now—but we don’t believe that it is not possible to do so. Check them. That’s the kind of thing the taxpayers pay the government to do.

As for the defense that studies showing rBST to be dangerous are “inconclusive,” here’s how to arrive at a conclusion. Get a great big sample of people, like, say, the American public, and clearly label the milk they purchase as containing or not containing rBST. That way you’ll have a huge population of people who do ingest it, and a huge population of people who don’t. The studies you do correlating disease incidence with rBST consumption will run no risk of statistical insignificance with samples that large.

Conversely, the one way to make absolutely sure that we never find out the truth is to hide from American consumers the content of the milk they are drinking.

Also in this issue:

• Beware timber theft

Dr. Punnybone

Somewhere Over the Rainbow