Ten Years After the Melamine Milk Scandal in China, Parents Still Don’t Trust Local Baby Formula

From qz.com:

“The fear is so deep-rooted that it goes beyond milk powder—food rumors about things such as plastic seaweed and seedless grapes cultivated with birth control medicines frequently send consumers into a tailspin.

There are at least three reasons for the failure to restore people’s confidence in domestic food, notes Huang Yanzhong, a senior fellow for global health at the Council for Foreign Relations in New York.

 “It’s very hard to have a strong sense of optimism.” 

One is the excessive use of pesticides and fertilizers in the 1980s (pdf, p.3), which has contaminated farmland, and could be transferred to cows that eat that grass. The government has only just started to tackle the problem, Huang said in an interview with Quartz. China also has a top-down regulatory method, which makes it hard for the public to engage with the process, particularly given the lack of press freedom, he says. There is also a general perception of a “moral decline” in China, where people try to make money by whatever means it takes, Huang adds, noting that sometimes even farmers themselves don’t eat what they grow (link in Chinese) for the market….”

Get the full story on Quartz (qz.com).

Learning how to milk a goat

From Weed em and Reap:

Shouldn’t everybody know how to milk a goat. Photo via Weed em and Reap.

“Once upon a time there was a woman who bought a goat.

She was so excited to get FRESH milk every day!  She woke up early one morning, and with butterflies in her stomach she put her goat on the milking stand, poured some grain in the feeder, and started to tug. Nothing.  ”Hmmmm”, the woman thought.  She tugged and tugged.

After 30 minutes and approximately one teaspoon of milk later, the woman started to cry.

Milk ad campaign could include raw

Looking at this new ad campaign from the Dairy Farmers of Canada it’s hard not to imagine that they’re including raw milk as one of the options people might choose. 

From Jordan Twiss, at Strategyonline.ca

A couple of example ads from the new campaign. Click image above to see more at the Ad-ict blog.

“The Dairy Farmers of Canada (DFC) has rolled out a new campaign that aims to highlight the varieties of milk available to consumers.” 

Big dairy lobbies for aspartame in milk; that’s one more reason to drink it raw

From the Activist Post:

“Two powerful dairy organizations, The International Dairy Foods Association (IDFA) and the National Milk Producers Federation (NMPF), are petitioning the Food and Drug Administration to allow aspartame and other artificial sweeteners to be added to milk and other dairy products without a label.

The FDA currently allows the dairy industry to use “nutritive sweeteners” including sugar and high fructose corn syrup in many of their products. Nutritive sweeteners are defined as sweeteners with calories.

New film “Milk” airing tonight on CBC Doc channel, features Michael Schmidt

“Milk”,  the third documentary film in which raw milk and food rights activist Michael Schmidt has figured prominently, airs tonight at 8 pm on CBC’s Documentary channel.  See trailer below:

[vimeo https://vimeo.com/16449903]

From the cbc.ca promo page for the film:

“Milk: The Documentary is an entertaining, award-winning documentary that dares to question the conventional wisdom of the much publicized health benefits of milk and dairy products. An inquisitive man sets out to find the facts about milk and discovers more about the growing controversy surrounding it.

Michael Schmidt off to court this month

Michael Schmidt, in his kitchen, getting ready for an interview with documentary filmmakers, two years ago, in January 2010 on the eve of his acquittal on raw milk charges. The Province has since appealed that acquittal and, as a result, Michael has been convicted and fined on charges related to raw milk distribution. Last year a judge granted permission for Michael to appeal that conviction.

We’ve gone a long time without much overt legal sparring in the Canadian raw milk and food rights scene. But that’s soon to change as raw milk farmer Michael Schmidt heads to court later this month to face charges of conspiracy in connection with the disappearance of a herd of controversial heritage sheep that were under quarantine by the CFIA.

Milk skirmishes at the EU in Brussels

Nothing specifically to do with raw milk, but it sure does make for some dramatic looking pictures! Story from Agri 007 blog:

Farmers spray milk at riot police in Brussels, pic via Fox News.

BRUSSELS – Dairy farmers sprayed thousands of litres of fresh milk at the European Parliament in Brussels to protest excessive milk quotas and prices below the cost of production, reports Reuters news agency.

Dairy Linked to 3 Deaths, Miscarriage, and that’s from PASTEURIZED dairy!

Illustrating once again that pasteurization is not the panacea it’s sometimes cracked up to be — From AP via Cheeseslave blog:

“BOSTON (AP) — At Whittier Farms dairy, the fifth-generation owners brag of the quality of their Holstein cows and still deliver milk right to your door, in glass bottles. Customers like the products because they are a hormone-free taste of old New England.

But health officials now say three elderly men have died and at least one pregnant woman has miscarried since last June after drinking bacteria-contaminated milk from the dairy’s plant in Shrewsbury, about 35 miles west of Boston.

GMO milk to make “designer humans”?

From Sad in America via Know the Lies:

Image via Know the Lies blog.

In the near future, human development can potentially be dictated by corporate America, through the Bill & Malinda [sic] Gates Foundation and their $8.3 U.C. Davis grant. ~ David Peters

Monsanto’s head of the FDA’s food safety division is threatening to get rid of raw (real) milk, and the real reason for this may have reared its ugly head. 

Holy Cow — the war on raw milk starts to look a lot like the war on drugs

From Elkhart Country Grass Roots Hub .

“Extending for four decades now, the war on drugs has ingrained a certain ideology into society. What was sold as an initiative to get dangerous drugs off the streets has conceived a totalitarian mindset that government has the authority to control everything you eat and drink and, if you disobey, the state can fine you, destroy your property, raid your home and throw you in jail. I’m not talking about cocaine or meth. I’m not even talking about marijuana. I’m talking about milk.

According to Time Magazine , “for some Americans, milk has become a test of their freedom. And they’re not paranoid kooks either; the government really is out to get them, authorizing seizures of bottles and jugs of unpasteurized milk and, in one recent case, a full-on, agents-brandishing-guns raid.”