The trial of Michael Schmidt is over, and now we await the verdict from the court.
The renegade dairy farmer from Durham, Ont., faces 20 charges related to the sale of unpasteurized milk products. He has pleaded not guilty on all counts.
The outcome of the trial - which has garnered media coverage far beyond its importance - is largely irrelevant.
Mr. Schmidt is, by all accounts, a well-intentioned man. He honestly believes that unpasteurized milk has health benefits for himself and his clients.
It seems somewhat absurd to jail a man for selling a product that clients desperately want and which, on the surface at least, seems harmless. But, hey, it happens to pot dealers every day.
What is not harmless is Mr. Schmidt's attack on pasteurization and on food-safety regulations more generally.
Under the guise of civil liberties and freedom, he and his supporters have uttered all kinds of nonsense and portrayed themselves as martyrs for pure food.
Hardly.
Under Ontario's Health Protection and Promotion Act, it is illegal to "sell, offer for sale, deliver or distribute milk or cream that has not been pasteurized or sterilized." Other provinces have similar rules.
Pasteurization of milk has been mandatory for decades (since 1938 in Ontario), and for good reason.
Before pasteurization - the life-saving invention of Louis Pasteur involves heating a product for a predetermined time at a predetermined temperature to kill bacteria - countless Canadians were sickened and killed by contaminants in milk. Most of them were children and pregnant women, and most were felled by consumption, the once-common term for tuberculosis. We have, through the sound application of public health laws, eliminated bovine tuberculosis in domestic cattle.
But there are still many bacteria that can be found in raw milk, including listeria, salmonella, campylobacter and E.coli 0157.
Yum, yum.
Still, consumption of raw milk is perfectly legal. Farmer Schmidt and his acolytes can suckle the milk from the teat of a cow, a goat, a cat, or any other lactating mammal to their hearts' content.
Their rights and freedoms are in no way compromised.
What the law restricts is the commercial sale of raw milk.
Mr. Schmidt tried to circumvent this fact by selling "cow shares" and arguing that his clients were actually proprietors and free to consume raw milk from their own cows.
Whether that little manoeuvre exempts him from the law is up to the courts to decide. But it seems unlikely. After all, bar owners tried this technique to sidestep anti-smoking laws, selling "shares" in their establishment and arguing that patrons were smoking in a private club. Judges saw through the subterfuge.
Mr. Schmidt and his supporters have made some broad claims about the supposed superiority of unpasteurized milk - implying that it is more wholesome and has additional health benefits such as lessening the symptoms of asthma, skin disease and allergies. The implication here is that pasteurization somehow robs milk of nutrients, but these claims have little scientific basis.
Let's be clear: Pasteurization robs milk of its pathogens and not much else.
Another oft-repeated claim of Farmer Schmidt is that the sale of raw milk is allowed in many European countries. Never mind the dubious nature of a "everybody else is jumping off the Empire State building" argument but do bear in mind that this claim requires an asterisk or two.
Countries that allow the sale of raw milk such as France, Holland, Belgium and Italy do so for historical reasons, principally to protect their artisanal cheese makers. When milk is sold "raw" it comes from highly monitored small herds and with a strict warning that it must be boiled (read: pasteurized) before consumption.
Another argument is that meat - which can also contain pathogens - is sold raw, so why not milk? The practical reason for this is obvious. It is easy and efficient to pasteurize milk; it is not practical to cook meat before selling it, but its refrigeration (designed to minimize the growth of bacteria) is mandatory and regulated.
What the trial of Mr. Schmidt and the broad sympathy it has garnered for his "cause" has revealed, more than anything else, is the public's widespread ignorance of food production.
We have a laughably romanticized view of farming, and Farmer Schmidt has played into this with the depiction of his farm as a pastoral idyll where his coddled grass-eating herd could not possibly harbour something as unseemly as a germ.
Food is essential to human life, but it is inherently risky. The increasingly frequent outbreaks of food-borne illnesses such as listeriosis should remind us of this reality, and of the need for regulation and consumer protection.
And the last thing we need is to go adding to the list of risky foods by casting aside techniques like pasteurization that have served us so well.
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