I said wouldn’t post much when I first posted in the cremation thread about a week and a half ago, but topics I know something about (and I don’t claim to know much about hardly anything) always catch my eye.
My parents moved from Seattle to break virgin ground on Columbia Basin Irrigation Project land in eastern WA in 1955, when I was three years old. I grew up on a farm (sugar beets, alfalfa hay, wheat and barley, dry beans, green beans, certified clover seed) with small hog and cattle feeding components. We had hens to gather eggs from, a family milk cow (Clarabelle), and a big garden. We churned our own butter (hand crank) which we kid did while watching tv in the evening. Mom canned most of our winter food; potatoes, onions, and carrots were kept in a root cellar. Home grown beef, pork, and chicken were in the freezer. I was active in 4-H and FFA (dairy projects), and at one time milked up to five Jersey cows with two Surge surcingle bucket milking machines before going to high school each morning.
I subsequently obtained a degree in Animal Science from Washington State University, with course work in bacteriology, food processing, and food safety. Now in my sixty-second decade I have worked in agriculture my entire life, except for three years I took off to be a parish business administrator. Most of that time has been in hands on dairy production, as at the moment, but I’ve worked in sales and technical services for the cattle industry also. My 91 year old mother still lives on the 300 acre family farm; the crop land is currently rented out. I’m thinking of developing a seasonal fresh vegetable operation on part of it when I retire from my current position.
Four points:
Scary and/or sensational headlines and stories are always more fun for journalists and commentators to put out than sane, factual, rational ones. There
might be a little kernel of “truth” hidden in the “scary and sensational” but there is more often a WHOLE LOT of nuisance that must be sought out before one knows what is really going on.
The old “if Congress doesn’t act we’ll go back to the Roosevelt era farm bill and food prices will skyrocket” has come up several times in my lifetime. Congress has always acted at the last minute; I have no reason to believe they won’t again, somehow, someway. It should also be noted that not all agricultural commodities were covered by the New Deal farm program, but milk was.
The idea that raw milk (which I grew up with) is “better” is totally bogus. There is not a shred of credible scientific evidence to prove otherwise. There are plenty of “unsubstantiated, unproven, unverifiable internet opinions” on the topic. One may believe what they will, in these matters I stick with the scientific method. Raw milk
can be safe, and it generally is, but never nutritionally better than pasteurized milk. If there is any potential for contamination anywhere in the supply stream from the cow’s teat to someone’s mouth, because milk is such an excellent media for bacterial incubation the contamination can quickly become pathological.
Food Safety News. If one wants to drink raw milk or butter and cheese from it, the best bet is to milk your own cow and have fresh milk daily. The second best approach would be to get it from a very local neighbor that one knows very well. Personally I would never buy raw dairy products retail as I have no control over what “might have inadvertently” happened between the cow and my glass, and if something did go wrong on that trip, even though it would rarely happen, the result could be devastatingly pathological.
Despite the misinformation presented a couple of posts ago, the reason that pasteurization was initially introduced was because of widespread outbreaks of tuberculosis and brucellosis (undulant fever in humans) which are readily spread from cows to humans through milk (one of the few instances where there is direct transference of a disease between mammals of different species). Today it hypothesized that Johne’s Disease in cows
may cause Crohn’s Disease in humans who drink raw milk from contaminated cows, but the research is ongoing and inconclusive at the moment. After wide spread adoption of pasteurization for disease control it was observed that shelf life was vastly improved also.