John Doyle gives raw milk “ink” in the Globe and Mail in a review of tonight’s raw milk movie on CBC Newsworld

Never mind that he thinks it’s all a bunch of neo-romantic claptrap — that’s just the standard skeptical reporter mindset. What matters is that he’s telling readers about tonight’s movie and they’re going to be so curious and intrigued, wondering whether what he says is true, that they’ll sit themselves down and watch it. Then they’ll make up their own minds. So it’s all good. Still, it is fun to hear how John disses Michael Schmidt and the whole idea of raw milk. I wonder what John Doyle drinks. Here’s a bit of what he has to say in his column today titled “What Marie Antoinette and Michael Schmidt have in common”:

“…Raw Milk Crusader: Michael Schmidt (Newsworld’s The Lens, 10 p.m.) is about the Ontario farmer who has made the distribution and consumption of unpasteurized milk into an evangelical cause. It’s a fascinating documentary with many passionate declarations on whether farmers should be allowed to sell raw milk and the public should be allowed to consume it. It’s rich in irony.

Michael Schmidt hits the small screen — tonight at 10 pm on CBC Newsworld

If you haven’t yet seen Norman Lofts’ 47-minute documentary on Michael Schmidt and the raw milk crusade, here’s your opportunity — if you’re a CBC Newsworld subscriber that is. And, as we’ve mentioned before, there’s a page here for people to comment on raw milk or on the movie.

picture of a bottle being filled with raw milk -- from the CBC page

Sorry to be repeating this stuff, but we sure don’t want anyone to miss out on this special happening.

Here’s that link again directly to the comment section.

And here’s a link to CBC’s promo page for the film.

“Rapprochement” with regulators?

David E. Gumpert of The Complete Patient discusses the challenges of sitting down with government regulators in the hope of re-working how raw milk is handled. In his latest post “Is true give and take possible when you’re accustomed to giving orders”, he tries to look at things from the regulators’ point of view. Here’s a sampling:

“…But what concerned me the most relates to the topic of the last posting–the effort in Michigan to bring the warring parties together in hopes of reaching common ground. I sense that concerns by consumers about “rights” and “control”–the kinds of things Milk Farmer and Blair McMorran worry about in their comments–are upsetting and threatening to most regulators. They’re used to working in a world where citizens draw back in fear and respect when the regulators show up. The idea of open debate, sometimes punctuated by sharp verbal jabs, is foreign to them, stuff to be avoided at all costs. It’s why the California Department of Food and Agriculture refused to participate in Sen. Dean Florez’s hearing on raw milk last April.

Speak up at the “Raw Milk Crusader: Michael Schmidt” discussion forum on the CBC Documentaries web page

That would be the forum set up for comments around Norman Lofts’ film — originally titled “Michael Schmidt: Organic Hero or Bioterrorist”, which will be shown tonight (Tuesday October 28th) at 10 pm on CBC Newsworld.

Here’s the link for the page they’ve set up around Norman Lofts’ documentary and in case you have trouble finding it, here’s the link directly to where you make your comments. And it looks like you don’t have to wait for the movie to air to start commenting. This is what I wrote for my opening comment, already yesterday; we’ll see whether it gets through moderation:

“I’ve been drinking raw milk on and off since 1975 and I fed it to my children while they were growing up. I’ve worked on dairy farms, both conventional and organic, and I noted that all the farmers on these farms also drank their milk raw. Never in all this time have I known of a single case of milk induced illness. I do however, know many people who’ve stopped drinking milk – now we’re talking store-bought pasteurized homogenized milk – because of a variety of acute or chronic reactions, which are generally labeled “milk allergy” or “lactose intolerance”. What’s more, I know of some individuals who got these labels and over time found that they could not only tolerate, but enjoy, raw milk. I guess that means they were not so much allergic to the milk as they were to the processing.

Albertans still like their milk raw

This excerpt is from a cbcnews.ca story titled “Raw milk warning irks some Albertans“. Apparently raw milk is illegal in Alberta too:

Science says...

“… Health Canada says drinking raw — or unpasteurized — milk can leave a person open to infection from E. coli, salmonella, streptococcus or staph infections.

“Some people say they’ve always done it, they’ve never got sick, so they keep doing it, but eventually, a lot of them do get sick,” said Dr. Gerry Predy, Edmonton’s public health officer. Health Canada says it put out the news release just to remind Canadians of the health dangers of raw milk.

“Home on the Range” raw dairy in BC debuts sparkling new website

Congratulations to our friends from Home on the Range raw dairy in Chilliwack BC, who are running what’s probably the largest cow-share operation in Canada with 200 families. They’ve just recently inaugurated a new website which looks suitably spiffy. Take a look for yourself.

Home page for new "Home on the Range" raw milk cowshare in Chilliwack, BC. Bravo!

And here’s an interesting pdf document they’ve put together outlining the details of how their cow-share arrangement works.

Milk sickens boy — factory food again

This is excerpted from a piece by Doug Schmidt in the Windsor Star titled “Masse seeks probe” from October 21, 2008. Once again, as in the lysteria outbreak, factory food was involved.

“With the local area suffering deaths and illness flowing from three major national food safety scares in recent months, MP Brian Masse is calling on the federal auditor general to investigate the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.

“Breakfast, lunch and dinner have now become a risk for Canadians and their families,” said Masse (NDP — Windsor West). “It’s disturbing to think any day you can consume food products that put your family at risk.”

Masse met last week with a Windsor man who has launched a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against a national dairy company after he and his children fell seriously ill after consuming store-bought milk a month ago that was laced with metal and possibly other foreign substances.