Category Archives: raw milk

Specious species claim

I read a lot of blogs and books on real food, farming, nutrition, and so on. (Disclaimer: I am not a nutritionist or a farmer, just a food blogger and an eater of real food.) There is one recurring truthy, specious factoid out there that just won’t quit. (Vocabulary below.) That one persistent truthy, specious factoid is “humans are the only animal to drink milk from other species.

Here’s the real fact: humans are the only animal that figured out how to obtain and store the milk of another species so that we could consume it on demand. Lots of other mammals would love to drink the milk of another species but have to rely either on extra-species largesse or on humans to get it. The proof is in the pictures.

Cats emulating bipeds:

happy cat

Some serious interspecies sharing:

sharing...

Even this (ewww):

Now here’s something you don’t see every day (unless you have a cat):

Scottie pinwheel dance for goats milk:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDa0z0gEvI4&w=480]

 

As it happens, humans are the only species that pay to live on the Earth.

 

Vocabulary

specious (Google)

  1. Superficially plausible, but actually wrong: “a specious argument”.
  2. Misleading in appearance, esp. misleadingly attractive: “a specious appearance of novelty”. In other words, sounds true but it isn’t

truthiness

Coined by Stephen Colbert: the quality of knowing something in your gut, or your heart, as opposed to in your head.

From Merriam-Webster:

  1. “truth that comes from the gut, not books” (Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report,” October 2005)
  2. “the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true” (American Dialect Society, January 2006)

factoid (Wikipedia)

A factoid is a questionable or spurious (unverified, false, or fabricated) statement presented as a fact, but with no veracity. The word can also be used to describe a particularly insignificant or novel fact, in the absence of much relevant context. The word is defined by the Compact Oxford English Dictionary as “an item of unreliable information that is repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact”.

 

What’s taking so long?

I wish there was progress to report but, Premier McGuinty still has not agreed to meet with Michael. What’s the big deal about simply having a conversation with a man? What the heck is he waiting for?

The Raw Milk Freedom Riders – Milk and Cookies Rally is scheduled for Tuesday, November 1, 2011 at FDA headquarters in Silver Spring, MD. The ride is beginning in PA, where participants will legally purchase raw milk, then illegally drive it over state lines. You go! Break a dumb law!

Speaking of dumb laws and people who do not know how to responsibly use their power, a farm-to-fork event got raided by the health department for no good reason.

In solidarity with Michael Schmidt

I’m writing to encourage you to participate in the Michael Schmidt Solidarity Raw Milk Fast on October 25, 2011. I am writing to draw attention to this hard-working, honorable, and peaceful man who is advocating for our rights to choose what we eat—a cause that shouldn’t need to exist or require activists.

Michael Schmidt began a hunger strike on September 29 to continue his efforts towards engaging a “constructive dialogue about the issue of non-pasteurized milk in Ontario and Canada.”

Last year, Schmidt was charged with selling and distributing raw milk. It is illegal in Canada to sell or distribute raw milk. It is however legal to consume raw milk from your own cows. Schmidt and the raw milk consumers had a cowshare arrangement where the consumers own the animals and Schmidt cared for them.  In turn, the consumers were provided with the milk from their own animals. Schmidt was found innocent of those charges. However, recently, the decision was reversed and Schmidt was found guilty.

On October 18, Schmidt sent a letter to Dalton McGuinty, Premier of Ontario. You can read it at The Bovine or The Complete Patient.

For the Michael Schmidt Solidarity Raw Milk Fast, a group will be assembling in front of the office of Dalton McGuinty, Premier of Ontario. They are asking for people to express solidarity with Michael’s fast by consuming only raw milk for the 24 hours. If fasting is not possible, they ask that at some point in the day, you raise a glass of raw milk to salute Michael.

Additionally, concerned people of the US and Canada are being asked to write to Dalton McGuinty, Premier of Ontario.
Dalton McGuinty, Premier
Legislative Building
Queen’s Park
Toronto ON M7A 1A1
1-800-387-5559
Fax: 416-325-3745

If you’re on Facebook, you can join the Support Michael Schmidt group.

For a while, people were posting comments on Premier McGinty’s Facebook wall to take the meeting with Michael Schmidt. At first, McGuinty’s people were deleting comments, now they’ve disabled commenting.

There are numerous places to get the back story as well as other ways to get involved:

In Michael’s own words (as posted over at The Bovine):

I have been fighting since 1994 for the right of men, women and children in Canada to be able to make the simplest and most important of all choices -what they eat.

Thank you Michael.

Stupid is

The folks at my natural foods store will soon be rearranging the milk on the shelves. An inspector told them that raw milk must be stored and displayed below pasteurized milk products to prevent contamination. They think leaking raw milk could contaminate pasteurized milk. I am laughing and crying at the same time.

I’m laughing because this is stupid. On so many levels. Still, I’m left with this nagging question: Isn’t milk sold in sealed containers?

I’m crying because this stupidity and government overreach is apparently legal and I have no alternative but to conclude that my country is stupid.

So, unrelated to the above, but interesting to view, I leave you with a prominent raw milk purveyor making outlandish* medical claims about this food:

* Outlandish because they are unsubstantiated by government-sanctioned studies and we are not allowed to do that. Ye (in case you were wondering) our government has not ever sanctioned a legitimate raw milk study.

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