WORTHINGTON -- Golly.
I want to tell you something about writing a newspaper column. This is not something I didn't know but it is something that has been under a rock or behind a bush for awhile.
The air is full of hot buttons. You can see some of them, some you can't see. If you press a hot button, no matter that you didn't see it, there will be loud shouts and resounding echoes along the full length of the valley.
Politicians are hot buttons. Everyone knows this. If I were to say, "Barack Obama is the greatest of all presidents and Tim Pawlenty is the greatest of all governors," (and I won't say this), we all know someone would be standing on every porch in the valley shouting angrily and waving a broom or a shotgun.
There are other things -- you don't even know the buttons are there, you don't even know you pushed one. No matter. Ka-bOOm!
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This column one week ago was about drinking milk, everything from drinking milk which was inside a cow's udder only minutes earlier to lessons that once were taught regarding pasteurized milk.
Ka-bOOm!
Stanley Beal of Round Lake, who ought to be writing a newspaper column, sent a letter which was not part of an explosion. Stanley only has a great story to tell regarding milk:
"One chilly morning in April 1925, about two months after my fifth birthday, I woke up with a very sore left hip joint. I could hardly limp down the stairs to dress beside the wood heating stove that kept us from freezing.
"It was the Roaring Twenties, but not at our house. My parents sold enough precious laying hens, whose eggs were bartered for sugar, flour, coffee that we didn't raise ourselves, to pay the five-dollar doctor fee to find out what was wrong.
"Dr. B.O. Mork and a Dr. Watson watched me limp around their office stark naked after X-rays with no shielding whatever...
"The diagnosis was Bovine Tuberculosis from raw milk from tubercular cows. Sunshine was prescribed, one hour on the left hip joint, front and back, daily. Don't ask me what I did not wear. I had an envious tan with no tan line. I was forbidden to walk. I spent the summer in a baby carriage, very scantily attired. I had to be carried every place -- my dad carried me all day at the Clay County Fair, as well as into and out of Sunday school.
"The news spread over the area like wildfire. Vets were run to death testing milk cows. Reactors went to market by truckloads. Pasteurization got a big boost..."
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Beyond Stanley's story -- now the hot button -- a fierce battle is raging between milk drinkers who want pasteurized milk and milk drinkers who want raw milk. Most readers don't write reminiscences. They refer to websites on the Internet.
The State of Minnesota wants it known (politely) that there is small worry for bovine tuberculosis in Minnesota:
ST. PAUL (Oct.1, 2010) -- Effective today, the majority of Minnesota has been upgraded to bovine Tuberculosis (TB) Accredited-Free. A small area in northwest Minnesota is changed to Modified Accredited Advanced (MAA). The State of Minnesota has been working with producers since 2005 to eliminate the disease from northwestern Minnesota and regain the state's TB-Free Status..."
Another blog (raw-milk-facts.com) is cited to declare:
"...Few people are aware that clean, raw milk from grass-fed cows was actually used as a medicine in the early part of the last century That's right. Milk straight from the udder, a sort of 'stem cell' of foods, was used as medicine to treat, and frequently cure some serious chronic diseases...."
Another, snottier website informs that cows never have been a source of tuberculosis. The TB came from unwashed milk buckets, dirty hands, sores on cows' udders.
Julie Buntjer and the Daily Globe are referred to for reporting (2008), "Less than a month after Nobles-Rock Community Health Services reported an active case of tuberculosis in Nobles County, the number has jumped to seven, including five children younger than the age of 13. All of the active cases are in Nobles County..."
There is more.
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You don't want to go there.
Ray Crippen is a former editor of the Daily Globe. His column appears on Saturdays.
