Changing the Definition of Milk to “Help” Consumers

So, this came across my screen today:

“Flavored Milk; Petition to Amend the Standard of Identity for Milk and 17 Additional Dairy Products

A Proposed Rule by the Food and Drug Administration on 02/20/2013

SUMMARY

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is announcing that the International Dairy Foods Association (IDFA) and the National Milk Producers Federation (NMPF) have filed a petition requesting that the Agency amend the standard of identity for milk and 17 other dairy products to provide for the use of any safe and suitable sweetener as an optional ingredient. FDA is issuing this notice to request comments, data, and information about the issues presented in the petition.”

You can, and should, read the whole thing here: https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2013/02/20/2013-03835/flavored-milk-petition-to-amend-the-standard-of-identity-for-milk-and-17-additional-dairy-products

The dairy industry just wants to help you! You, as a consumer, are just too stupid to know  that there’s sugar in milk (and this is what the petition says, not me), and so they just want to make it easier for you to make completely uninformed choices.  Because, educating consumers…well, that’s just silly.

There are so many things wrong with the propose amendment that I am only going to have time to cover a few:

1. Children don’t like the label “Reduced Calorie.”  It is not the FDA’s job to market to children, so it isn’t their job to come up with a definition of food that makes kids want to eat more of it. It’s their job to monitor food safety and quality. If children have a problem with “reduced calorie,” education of both children and parents, not re-labeling for better marketing, is a far more ethical way to deal with that issue.  And, it’s been proven to work.

2. “Safe” sweeteners. No one thing is “safe” for everyone. People have allergies, medication interactions, and other issues that can make what is “safe” for one person a life-threatening issue for another.  Having unlisted ingredients on any product is a safety hazard; but, especially in a product like milk, where the only ingredient ought to be “Milk,” it’s a large and irresponsible safety risk. Those with allergies, or their parents, would have no reason to suspect added hidden or new ingredients in what is supposed to be a whole food (would you look for aspartame in an apple? a green pepper?), and because these ingredients  can be listed as many different things (or, not listed at all, depending what they are and how much of them is present), they would have a difficult time finding out that they were present.

This would, of course, disproportionately impact the poor, especially children who receive free or reduced lunches and breakfasts through school, which almost always include milk. These parents and children often do not have the resources to research hidden ingredients, or access to news that they are now being added to a food that is generally considered a “whole” food.

3. Promoting good eating habits and reducing childhood obesity.  Yes, I can definitely see how including more processed additives to a whole food is going to promote good eating. Wait..what? No, no I can’t.  Added processed ingredients and sweeteners are part of what has gotten us in this mess in the first place.  That children are more likely to drink sweeter milk is no shock. The shock is that we keep giving it to them. Kids are also more likely to not do their homework, not take their bath, not do their chores, and not clean their room if left to their own devices. That is why we have parents and other adults who supervise them.

Also, the whole “kids won’t drink it” line regarding white milk is just wrong. When flavored milk is taken out of schools, milk consumption initially drops, but rebounds quickly.  And, of course, this isn’t just about flavored milk. This is about 17 different dairy products, including yogurt and white milk, having added sugars and artificial sweeteners (you can use the term “non-nutritive” all you want).

4. Consumers don’t know there’s sugar in milk*. This is a straw-man argument. Whether it is true or not has absolutely nothing to do with adding hidden sweeteners to milk and changing the definition of milk to accommodate that. If consumers don’t know there’s lactose in milk, or that lactose is a sugar, then the problem is (again) education. Lack of education isn’t solved by taking choices away from consumers, it’s solved by…well, education.

5.  The proposed amendments to the milk standard of identity would promote honesty and fair dealing in the marketplace and are therefore appropriate under section 401 of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.  I have no idea how changing an established definition of a whole food to include ingredients that are not naturally found in that food, with the express purpose that the consumer have no indication those ingredients are present, can be seen as “honest and fair dealing.”  Lack of disclosure, bait-and-switch definitions, and pretending it’s all for the “good of the consumer” is pretty much the antithesis of “honest and fair dealing.”

6. Accordingly, the petitioners state that milk flavored with non-nutritive sweeteners should be labeled as milk without further claims so that consumers can “more easily identify its overall nutritional value.”  To be read: consumers are so stupid that they just can’t handle more words on a package, and so it’s just better not to clutter their pretty little heads with all that crazy nutrition talk. The dairy lobby and the FDA should just take that horrible burden off their shoulders by lying and hiding the truth, because blissful ignorance is much better for everyone.

It is not the FDA’s job to treat consumers like 2-year-old children who can’t be trusted to make reasonable decisions without being baby-talked into it. I don’t need to be goo-goo and ga-ga’d at, thanks.

So, why is the dairy industry even doing this?  Are they just concerned for all of us uneducated consumers making poor eating choices for ourselves and our families? No. There are several reasons the industry is lobbying for this amendment: decreasing costs by lowering quality and camouflaging it with cheap additives, and increasing consumption by providing unnaturally sweet dairy products to the public. But, of course, they want to do it under the flag of public health and concern. Don’t let them.

If you are as outraged at this idea as I am, please take a moment and leave a comment on the FDA’s page. Consumers do not have the same money and political leverage as the dairy lobby. All we have are our voices, and they need to be loud and numerous if we want to keep special interests out of our food.

*Citation needed. 

“Winning” the “War on Raw Milk”

We need to focus here, people. I don’t actually care what your personal beliefs are in terms of the health benefits of raw milk, or the health risks of pasteurized. I don’t care what religion you are, or if you think you’re child’s teeth will be better, or if you believe it cures various diseases. You know why? Because in the fight to legalize this food product, those things simply don’t matter. They’re diversions, they’re sensationalist, and they’re hurting our chances of winning.

What!? That’s outrageous!

No, it’s not. It’s a fact. Regulators don’t give a damn about nutritional value. If they did Mountain Dew(TM) and PopRocks(TM) wouldn’t be legal.  Consumables are not regulated because they are more or less nutritionally valuable than something else. Or, if they’re nutritionally valuable at all. They are regulated on safety for consumption.

When people start talking about anything as “miraculous,” whether it is or not, people stop listening. Me included, actually. Sensationalism makes people supporting the cause look uneducated, uninformed, superstitious, and generally a bit crazy, even if they’re not. This is not a recipe for winning over your Congressman, folks.  And, even if there are studies backing your beliefs, we’re back to the first point: no one cares.

Great, So What’s Left?

Reality. Stop debating on points that don’t matter, and start debating points that do.

1. Scientific facts. The government’s own data shows raw milk is quite safe by any standard used. Foods are not banned unless they are demonstrated to have a certain degree of risk, which raw milk demonstrably does not have.

2. Regulation and disease testing is already possible and economically viable, and done quiet effectively in countries like Europe.

3. The very real dangers that were present when raw milk was first banned no longer exist or are easily managed by testing and regulation, therefore the ban no longer needs to exist.

4.  Other foods, shown to have far greater health risks to the public are legal and widely available.

Leave it at at that.

We do not, and should not, argue about health benefits or nutrition. Adding noise to this argument takes away from the easily understandable, provable, reasonable points. It makes it easy to dismiss us as a “radical” faction of foodies who just don’t understand what we’re talking about. It diffuses the point, which is that there’s no reason it should be illegal instead of simply well-regulated.

Stop wasting energy on things that are beside the point. Focus. Remove your personal feelings, and stick to the facts. We can’t fight Corporate Ag with money, so we need to fight them with reason and clarity.

Related articles

• FDA’s double standard for regulating: raw milk farmers vs big corporations (thebovine.wordpress.com)
• Raw milk is bigger than you’d think – $1,000,000 gross in Vermont in 2011 (thebovine.wordpress.com)

Dioxins: A Call for Reason

With the EPA set to issue new standards for dioxin limits, a lot of articles about this are circulating. I’ve lost count of how many I’ve read in the last two days alone. Corporate Ag is throwing a fit, bloggers are having a field day, and I’m left kind of scratching my head. Why? Because, I am confused. Most articles, including some government articles, state that diet is 95% of human exposure to dioxin.

That’s not what’s confusing, of course. What is confusing is the recommendations that have been extrapolated from this. I’m hoping someone with more knowledge about microbiology and chemistry can help me here.

Clearly, the first recommendation that comes up is to avoid animal fats, and eat a more plant-based diet. Now, while I think American’s eat too much meat, this just confuses me. Animals store dioxins in their fats, and I do get that it might be concentrated as it moves up the food chain; but, we are animals. Won’t humans also store dioxin from contaminated plants in their fat? Is there something about us that means we don’t process or store dioxin from plants, instead needing an intermediary step, such as an animal, to make that happen? Or is it just that it’s more concentrated?

The next recommendation is to eat more fish and dairy. Except, of course, they’re cited by the Federal government (yes the same one that I just linked as saying to eat more of these foods), according to Micheal Gregor of NutritionFacts.org as the next biggest culprits of human contamination. Do you see my confusion here? And, according to Illinois Department of Health, animals that grazed had lower levels of dioxin contamination than fish or other seafood. In fact, their biggest recommendations seem to be skinning and grilling your fish washing your produce, and moving away from the fire when burning personal waste.

Another article states that eating locally-sourced foods can increase or decrease your exposure to dioxin, and qualifies it with “if you’re not eating from the commercial food system.” I can’t find the article right now, but I’ll dig for it again. The point was that it made it sound like commercial foods are safer, which just strikes me as illogical. I’ll stick with plant-based foods for the example. Dioxins are apparently most readily spread via water and air, both of which land them on and in soil. Seeds are planted in the soil, plants uptake the dioxin. The plants are harvested and eaten. Commercial or small-farm, this works pretty much the same way. In fact, all food is local to somewhere, no matter how it’s produced. Am I missing a reason why land farmed by Big Ag would somehow be inherently safer? Actually, wouldn’t it seem it would be less safe, since there’s a shot that dioxin-containing chemicals were used on the plants at some point (either now or in the past), and dioxins are fairly persistent?  I truly don’t understand his assertion. And, the EPA itself states that most exposure comes from our commercial food system (hence, Big Ag’s freak out).

Someone help me out here.

Related articles

• Live and let dioxin: Big Ag is worried about scaring us off meat and milk (grist.org)

The Moderate Foodie Activist: Getting to Know Me

I was having a twitter interchange with Michele Simon the other day, in which she mentioned that she had expected me to disagree with something she’d written. It got me thinking about how people perceive food activists in general, and me in particular.

I am a foodie, and I am a food activist. I am also a food moderate.

Those statements don’t typically go together in the food movement world, especially the internet part of if, and it tends to really throw people who deal with other food activists and foodies regularly.  Many of the more vocal people in those fields are extremists, as tends to be true with the very vocal majority on most issues. But, it does make for some confusion when someone runs up against my view points, because they come into it with expectations that, while valid in general, don’t work for me specifically. There are lots of people that I wish would stop “helping” my food causes, because all their doing is making me look nuts by association, and making it difficult to be taken seriously.

A great example is raw milk. I drink raw milk, I advocate for the choice to drink raw milk, I believe that the science shows that raw milk can be perfectly safe and has some good nutritional benefits. This is where the confusions starts for people that tend to deal with raw milk activists most of the time, because they assume that if the above is true of me, then I also must fall in line with the rest of the “raw milk” party line of thinking raw milk is magic, wanting no regulation, and the complete elimination of pasteurization. In fact, I disagree with all of those ideals pretty strongly.  Raw milk isn’t magic–it comes from a cow, not a unicorn.* It is, however, a nutrient dense food that people should have the right to consume so long as they are, like all things, truthfully informed of risks (not fear-mongered into believing one sip is likely to kill them and their families). Reasonable regulation would be incredibly helpful for farms and consumers all around. Raw milk should be a choice where it’s feasible, but there are plenty of good reasons for pasteurized milk to be available, as well.

Another example, and the one that brought this post to mind, is animal treatment and longevity. In this case, the assertion was that more animal lives are saved by giving up eggs and milk than by giving up meat. In conventional farming, this is totally accurate. In what I’ll call “ethical” farming (local, humane, etc.), it’s actually often not accurate because animals generally have significantly longer lives. This was extrapolated to mean–and for many people in the local food movement, does mean–that everyone can eat all the animal products they want, as long as their “ethical, ” and that we should strive to parallel the production of the current US food system.

Again, I disagree with my more extreme counterparts.  Ms. Simon, in this article in the Grist, points out that designing a system that is “sustainable” which simply mimics the current food model–one that has demonstrably made the US fat and unhealthy and done incredible environmental damage–is part of where the food movement is getting it wrong. I agree, and I totally understand why she was surprised that I agree. Many local foodies and sustainable activists spend all their time pointing out how we can produce just as much, when what we really need it to produce less and in a better way. As I’ve said before, and as the WHO agrees, we already produce substantially more food that the world needs, and we throw much of it away (1/3-1/2, depending on which stats you use).

We don’t need to produce as much meat as we do now, and we certainly don’t need to be eating as much of it as we do now.** I realize animal products aren’t the only, or even the main, culprit in our national disease and obesity epidemics, but just because we could potentially produce as much meat ethically as we can in conventional farms doesn’t mean we should.  The nutrients those of us who are omnivores–and even those who are paleos–believe we need can be gotten from a fairly small portion of animal products, with the rest of the diet composed of vegetables and fruit.

Moving on. I am a firm believer in local food. It keeps money in the local economy, is key to food security and safety, creates community, is more nutritious because it can be picked at the peak of ripeness, and much of it has additional advantages like less environmental impact (depending on how it’s grown). I don’t, however, believe we need to get rid of all corporate agriculture. There’s a reasonable place for it, and the truth is that not everyone lives close enough to a rural area to get their produce from a local farmer. There are food deserts, there is poverty, there are transportation issues. What we do need is agriculture reform, where huge amounts of cash don’t flow into political coffers to keep subsidies coming, where poorly researched products aren’t legalized due to corporate pressure or funds, and rules aren’t made to encourage large agriculture at the expense of local producers.

I believe that eating too much grain, even whole grain, isn’t particularly good for you. I don’t believe eating a moderate amount of brown rice, whole grain bread, or pasta is a problem.

I believe that corporate agriculture is run by people who are greedy and don’t particularly care about the public health if it means hurting their profits, but I don’t believe there’s some secret collusion with the government to keep people sick.

I believe ethical farming is part of the solution to our environmental, security, and health problems in the US, but I don’t believe it’s a panacea.

I could go on and on. My point here is that not everyone who believes in better food, local food, and/or food freedom is extreme. There are lots of us in the middle, where reason, science, and freedom meet practicality and responsibility. Where idealism is great, but tempered with the reality we have to work with.

*I don’t remember who said this, but I loved it. If you know who it’s attributed to, please let me know.

**For total honesty, I was a lacto-ovum vegetarian for about 6 years in my 20s.

Related articles

• Government Data Proves Raw Milk Safe (wapfchicago.com)

Volume Discount. Or, Stop Playing With Your Food!

We’ve been mislead about how to have a healthy relationship with food. For some reason, we’ve been taught to think that “good” or “healthy” eating and nutrition is about getting the largest volume of food into our stomachs with the least amount of calories. I am not sure where this trend started, but it’s definitely perpetuated in our food marketing, media, and a lot of nutrition advice.  Our society’s idea of nutrition has become about how much sheer volume we can pack into ourselves without “exceeding calories.”

This is not a healthy way to eat. It’s not a healthy relationship for our nation to have with food. If it were, we wouldn’t have the skyrocketing obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and other lifestyle-related disease rates we do today. The answer is simple, but it goes against the unfortunate American value that “bigger is better,” and the more you have the more you’re worth. Ergo, the more you can eat and stay “skinny,” the better you are, the healthier you must be.

There are many reasons that most people who lose weight put it back on, but one of the biggest is this: they have not changed their relationship with food and food culture. We’ve gotten used to feeling “full” all the time, and believing that it is necessary and good to feel this way. That we should be able to eat large amounts of food without gaining weight. That we all “deserve” to be able to eat whatever we want, whenever we want, and that it’s nutritionally reasonable to poke, pull, and tweak foods to fit into what we want them to be instead of what they are.  That we should be able to eat the way we want to eat, instead of the way we need to eat, without consequences. All of this despite demonstrable evidence that it’s a failing formula.

The fix for this is simple, and the more research that is done, the more it’s holding up: eat quality, whole, nutrient-dense foods, and eat them in an appropriate quantity.

A skin-on, bone-in chicken breast has only 50 or so more calories than it does skin off, and only about 2.5g saturated fats.* If you’re watching your weight, the answer isn’t to skin your chicken to save 50 calories, it’s to eat less chicken or do more exercise. In my last series about nutrition rules, you’ll note I said eat more veggies, and stop eating whole cuts of meat as frequently. Why? Because it makes far more sense to eat more vegetables and get the fiber and nutrients, while eating less meat and dairy but still getting the complete and natural fats, than it does to find “work-arounds.”

But what about those FDA “portion” sizes? It’s important to remember those are generalizations (and, frankly, bad ones). For a smaller/shorter person, a reasonable portion is much less. For a taller/larger person, much more.   Yes, as a small person I’ll be able to eat less skin-on chicken or whole milk than my partner, who is extremely tall, will be able to eat. And, that’s okay. It’s okay to eat less food, or less than than an “FDA” portion of a certain food. It’s okay to stock up on green veggies and take a smaller portion of the whole higher-calorie whole food, of which more and more studies are showing that removing nutrients (including fat) has detrimental effects (or, at the very least, removes potential beneficial effects and essential nutrients). Saturated fats are now being shown to help balance HDL and LDL cholesterol, for example. Which doesn’t mean an overabundance of saturated fats are good for you, either. Again, the answer is simply to eat it, just eat less of it.

This isn’t a new or even radical viewpoint on my part. Pretty much this same thing has been said in countless works on the subject, including the best-selling “French Women Don’t Get Fat.”  French cuisine isn’t exactly known for it’s use of skim milk, margarine, or skinned chicken. Yet, despite it being a best-seller and making the talk-show rounds, eating habits in the US have not changed. We still demand larger and larger portions, and try to find ways to make those portions contain less and less calories.

And yet, as a nation we continue to wonder why we’re getting fatter and sicker.

(Author’s note: Any inflammatoy/name-calling/trolling posts or off-topic vegan/paleo/locavore/whatever proselytizing comments will be deleted.)

* Info from Julie Upton, dietician writing in “Eating Light” magazine. I don’t have this online, so you’ll need to find the issue for yourself.

Raw Milk: The Choices I Make, and Why

Raw milk has risks. It just does. That means it is exactly no different from anything else we ingest, from lettuce to alcohol. I choose to accept these risks,because I know what they are, and I’ve decided that any potential risks from raw milk from a local, well-vetted farm with excellent husbandry and milking practices is still lower than that of drinking conventional milk.

Here’s the deal:

-Not all of us who drink raw milk are uninformed, on jumping on some bandwagon. I’ve done the research. In fact, part of my job is literally to research food illness, benefits, husbandry practices,etc. I didn’t just hear someone says “raw milk is awesome” and decide “hey, I must drink that!” Raw milk isn’t a recent thing for me. I grew up drinking milk warm, directly from the teats of the cows and goats I milked on our farm. We didn’t pasteurize, but we were taught really excellent husbandry and milking practices. And yes, we milked by hand. We weren’t a dairy, we were too poor to have a milking machine, and as kids we were excellent free labor for our parents.

-I trust my local farmers far more than I trust corporate agriculture. I can stop by and visit my cow, help feed, watch the milking, and see what they do with the milk (including the fact that they’re drinking it, the same as we are) anytime I want, without notice. They provide any information I ask, including testing/herd testing information, with appropriate  verification if requested. I didn’t just wander onto some field with a guy milking a cow and say “hey, can I have some of that?”  Which is essentially what I’m doing if I buy food from corporate agriculture. Corporate Ag sickens thousands each year, from eggs to dairy to produces. Do people get sick from local goods? Of course. But, after looking at all the facts, I believe that–for my family–the risks of non-GMO, grass-fed, pastured, unpasteurized cow’s milk is simply far less than trusting a corporate food system we already know is horribly corrupt. I’ve been sick from mass-produced goods. I have never yet been sick from anything I’ve gotten from my local, vetted farmers. I realize that’s anecdotal, and I don’t expect others to make my choices. But *I* should have a right to make an informed decision about what I eat.

-The risks are, from all the data I can collect since the data is fairly sparse, pretty statistically insignificant. I know that when it’s you or a family member, statistics become irrelevant; but, when making reasonable food choices, they can be helpful. Depending who you listen to, between 3 and 10 Million people drink raw milk in the US. There is, from all the data I could find, an average of 100-150 cases of hospitalization a year reported, meaning they were serious enough to be diagnosed and hospitalized. Only 2 recorded deaths since 1998 that I could find (there may be more, I am willing to revise this, so please let me know). This means that reported cases of illness are between .00005% and .00016%. Even assuming there are, say, 100o unreported cases a year, you’re still only looking at well below a 1% chance of getting ill from raw milk.  I’ll live with that.

-Not all of us who drink raw milk espouse Weston A. Price Foundation values. I am not a member. I do believe in whole foods, I do believe in not eating processed sugars or many simple carobhydrates. I do think we get too few CLAs, Omegas, and the like in our diets as Americans overall. That is about where my paradigm similarities with them ends. I don’t have a problem with them. They’re free to make whatever food choices work for them, and I do applaud the fact that most members bother to educate themselves on what they’re eating, which is more than I can say for the vast majority of Americans who choose to eat crap “food.” I just don’t believe everything they do, and their paradigm borders too closely on fanaticism for me, personally. It’s also frequently tied to religion, and I prefer to keep religious issues out of my food choices.

-I don’t think raw milk is magic. Yes, there are many people who’ve got stories about it curing this or that, and maybe it does. Or, maybe it doesn’t. I don’t know, and that’s not why I choose it. I’m healthy, I am not looking for a panacea. I, personally, notice my (very mild) seasonal allergies are non-existent when I am drinking local, raw milk regularly. The same is true of local, raw honey. Is it psychosomatic? Possibly. But, since that’s not why I drink it, I don’t actually care. I drink it because I like the fact that the cow (from my farm) has been fed no corn or GMO feed, that it eats grass and therefore likely has higher levels of good fatty acids, that the milk tastes better to me, has a higher fat content (yes, we do actually look for that–Thadd needs something like 4 thousand calories a day, and we get almost none of them from simple carbs or sugars) , that it actually contains no hormones or antibiotics (as opposed to “allowable” amounts), that it’s only hours old when I get it, that it supports local agriculture, and that I can make cheese and other products from it much more readily than I can from high-heat pasteurized milk.

-I don’t feed it to the world. Thadd and I drink it. I do make my own cheese, and some of those cheeses can only be made with raw milk or, in some cases, low-heat pasteurized milk. Unfortunately, the latter is not available literally anywhere near me, so the former is my best choice, even if I didn’t want to drink it. These products, and the raw milk itself, are used for only ourselves. We have no children, and typically when we have guests over, we’re drinking local wine, cider, beer, or freshly-made lemonade, not big glasses of milk.

-You can know the risks, and still elect to take them. Simply because someone chooses to do something someone else views as “risky” does not mean the chooser isn’t aware of the risks. People who climb Mt. Everest are doing something I would personally never do, but I am pretty sure they’re aware of what they’re getting into. People have many different reasons for choosing what they choose to do, and can look at the same information, and come to a different decision. For some people, any germ associated with food is abhorrent. For me, food without germs is abhorrent. I think, overall, that germ theory has led us in the wrong direction, and is one reason we’re so sick as a nation. (I don’t use hand sanitizer, but I do wash my hands thoroughly. I don’t use bleach to clean my house, but I do clean well with soap and water.)  Of course, germs are not the same as pathogens, and while I realize that pathogens can be present in raw milk, appropriate practices keeps the risk of that very small. Small enough, in fact, that I choose to take it because for me, it’s a smaller risk than the long-term effects of what is in much commercial milk.

-Not all of us believe that raw milk should flow freely like a river down a mountain, unhindered and unregulated. I certainly don’t. I would love it if our government could take a step back from lobbyists who contribute heavily to their campaign funds, and draft real, reasonable regulation that would help ensure the safety of a raw milk supply and the products thereof. It’s not impossible. Other countries have done it well (some so well it can actually be gotten at vending machines, and the instances of illness are reported to be the same as pasteurized). Europe is famous for its fresh, raw milk cheeses. People are not hospitalized or dying in droves from fresh ricotta or aged Roquefort (the latter of which is required, by law, to be made from fresh, raw sheep’s milk). Unfortunately, our government, and many people who seem to speak on either side of this issue, seem to see no middle: it’s either a free-for-all, or a felony.  When really, it should be more along the lines of: here are solid regulations for husbandry, milking, testing, storage, and transport. Follow them, or you will be liable, just like other food companies (oh, wait…other food companies get people sick and hospitalize them all the time with no real consequences). So, until and unless those who do the regulation can get their collective heads out of their collective arses,  it leaves those of us in the middle with a lot of vetting to do on our farms.

Raw milk is not for everyone. There are plenty of instances when pasteurized milk is the better choice. But, there’s no good reason why the choice can’t be offered in a safe way.

Related Articles

• Why Hide Serious Government Data on Raw Milk Drinkers? (via Food Freedom) (healthisahabit.wordpress.com)
• Real Raw Milk Facts

Fast One Fridays, Oct. 29, 2010

Fast One: More bad news for HFCS:  The HFCS in many sodas contains significantly more fructose than the companies reported. What This Means To You: HFCS could be an even greater contributor to obesity than previously thought. And, as importantly, there’s NO SUCH THING as moderation of this product, because you simply cannot have any idea how much you’re getting in anything you eat that contains it.  We all know that too much sugar of any kind is bad for us, whether it be table sugar, honey, maple syrup, or HFCS. The difference here is that HFCS is in so many things because it is artificially cheap, and you can’t know for sure how much or in what formulation you’re intaking it. So, just stop eating it. If you need something sweet, make some homemade cookies, or lemonade with local honey. You’re waistline (and your brain, since mercury has been found in a large percentage of HFCS) will thank you for it.

Fast One: Morningland Dairy is headed to court, after lodging a formal complaint against Missouri Milk Board’s order to destroy their products. What this means to you: Do you like having a choice in what you eat? Do you want to be able to eat raw foods, or local foods, or foods produced by someone with a face that’s not employed by one of the Big Ag companies that already own 90% of our farms and dairies (which, btw, they still try to tout as “family farm,” so be aware of that misrepresentation)? If you do, you need to speak up. Donate (see button at the end of this post), write your representatives and let them know the FDA needs to follow due process, blog about this, and just generally raise some hell. I don’t know about you, but I am terrified to see our food options continually taken away from us.

Fast One: Only 1% of chemicals on the market today are tested for safety, says Senator Lautenburg (D-New Jersey).  The laws are lax, and only 5 chemicals have been banned in the last 34 years. This means of all the chemicals on the market, only about 200 have been tested at all. What this means to you: Who knows, since this stuff isn’t tested? Okay, that was flip, I know. The point is there, though: we can’t have any real idea of the implications. It is terrifying to think companies have little regulation, and few rules about what they can or cannot put on the market without testing. We come into contact with these things every day, regardless of how “crunchy granola” we are, because they’re in everything from flooring to cell phones to clothing. What can we do about it? Write your representatives, and ask for tougher laws. Minimize what you can (chemicals in food, etc.).

Got interesting food news?

Morningland Diary–Fight For Your Food Rights.

If you care about food rights and haven’t read about this, you need to. This is an outrageous violation of due process, and a blatant attempt by the FDA to  crack down on raw foods.

Was Hillendale Farms, who produced *millions* of contaminated eggs that sickened thousands of people, asked to destroy it’s chickens, or it’s undistributed eggs? No.

Have *any* of the conventional, large, corporate dairies had to destroy all their remaining product when their milk or cheese made someone sick? No.

Yet this farm-run dairy, with no reports of illness or contamination in it’s 30 year history, is being told to do exactly that, with no reliable evidence of contamination, improper testing procedures, and no due process. This impacts not just the farm, but also the people who rely on them for employment.

Please read their story and pass it along. If you can, please contribute to their legal fund.

Related Articles

• FDA Orders Morningland Dairy to Destroy 50,000 Pounds of Raw Cheese (eatdrinkbetter.com)
• Morningland Dairy recalls cheese over Listeria and Staphylococcus risk (walletpop.com)
• We’ve got Regulatory Authority! Get Used to It (barbaradiamond.blogspot.com)
• Criminalizing Nature’s Most Perfect Food: FDA’s war on private food contracts (radyananda.wordpress.com)
• Morningland Dairy Stops Cheese Production After Listeria Fears (nowpublic.com)
• Morningland Dairy Recalls Raw-Milk Cheese Sold in 48 States (organicauthority.com)
• Almost 69,000 Pounds of Cheese Recalled Over Possible Contamination (aolhealth.com)