A Nasty Bout of E Coli

I don’t get sick easily. This one hit me like a Mack truck. Lasted almost a week, and left me completely wiped out.

Since we are now raising some animals, you may raise your brows and say, “Well, what do you expect? Eating raw eggs fresh from the chicken, and raw milk without even pasteurizing it!” But I didn’t get it from the eggs, or the milk, or the home butchered duck or rabbit, or the homegrown veggies (fertilized in real manure). Nope… not one of those things gave me anything so debilitating. Even though my sometimes less than hygienic teens are now doing the washing and processing of our milk and eggs, they still didn’t make me sick.

I got it from a pasteurized, USDA scrutinized, nationally branded, and nationally distributed dairy product.

The fact is, on your average small farm, the risk just isn’t what people think it is.

And the risks on the supposedly sterile certified farms are not what people think they are either!

If you do not use unnecessary antibiotics with your animals, you do not grow superbugs. The greatest danger for foodborne illness comes from superbugs – those that have become really nasty because they are growing in animals with constant, or frequent exposure to antibiotics.

If you are exposed on a regular basis to normal foodborne bacteria, such as those normally present in healthy raw milk, and farm fresh eggs (you know, eggs that are only a few days old, not eggs that have set in warehouses, and distribution centers and trucks, and then on grocery store shelves for months before you get them – with any bacteria in them growing the whole time), the few harmful germs that are there are not plentiful enough to sicken you, and they serve only to strengthen your immune system, and they are accompanied by many healthy bacteria that do the same. The majority of bacteria in raw milk and raw eggs is healthy bacteria – on the grocery store shelves, they’d call them Probiotics and charge you a premium for them, but they are simply more effective where nature put them in the first place. (Kind of amusing that commercial yogurt consists of taking perfectly good milk, killing all the good stuff in it, putting a little bit back and letting that little bit grow – would have been best to just leave the good stuff there to start with.)

If a facility produces a small amount of fresh food, and some is contaminated, a few people get sick, and usually not very badly because the contamination does not have time to grow.

If a large facility, which produces massive quantities of food has a contamination issue, it usually affects large portions of the product. The product then goes into distribution channels and is fairly well aged by the time it reaches the customer – so the contamination is compounded by the extra time the bacteria has to incubate and multiply. Not only are more people affected, but they are affected more severely.

So while it may seem odd that daily life that is steeped in manure does not make me sick, and that a supposedly “safe” commercial dairy product did, it isn’t odd at all. In fact, that’s how it normally works.

There simply is no safer way to stay healthy than growing your own. The barnyard isn’t the real minefield, the grocery store is!