Have a cow, man!

Contrary to Bart Simpson’s famous saying “Don’t have a cow, man.”, we exhort all health-conscious mortals to consider the benefits of cow ownership. Clearly the best solution for the confirmed urbanite is fractional ownership — same idea as resort condos. This is the model for Michael Schmidt’s Glencolton Farms. But until that model gains wider acceptance in the legal and regulatory communities there are, believe it or not, other solutions.

The most obvious of these is the “small” cow. Dexter seems to be the small breed of choice for many would-be miniature cattle owners. First, we bring you an excerpt from a Toronto Star, Sept 6, 2008 story titled “Small cows have a big future in Ontario” by Francine Kopun:

Dexter cattle are user friendly. Photo by Fred Thornhill, for the Star

“Have a cow. Seriously.

Not a humongous, lumbering soft-eyed hay-eater. Those are for cattle ranchers.

The cow for you is petite, the height of a big dog, survives on grass and bushes and produces high-quality milk or meat. A mini-cow.

Chinese melamine-tainted milk solids still being sold in products in the U.S.! Now what about in Canada?

Halloween may just be scarier than usual this year — and not in a good way. Tobey (in the post below) is wise to wonder about the milk solids in his candy and where they’ve come from, especially judging by this report from Brasscheck. The report is about the U.S. but I wonder how different things are in Canada. Does anyone know?

In China, ANYTHING made with Chinese-manufactured milk powder before September 14th was PULLED from their store shelves.

In the US, this garbage is still being sold!

Do you know where your food is from?

Here’s a reader reply to the recent editorial in the Owen Sound Sun Times. From Letters to the Editor, Raw milk is the least of our worries”.

“This is a response to the Oct. 21 editorial that begins: “Michael Schmidt should stop flouting the law. The Ontario government does not have the capacity to ensure that the distribution of unpasteurized milk is safe.”

Right. Not hamburgers either, nor cold cuts, or any of the 80-some brands of melamine-laced pet foods that might have turned Misty’s kidneys to mush a while back.

I’m eyeing with suspicion a bag of chocolate-covered peanuts from Grady’s Good Earth Specialties (not a real name) of the container terminal town of Concord. With the dead babies and raccoon dogs in China (melamine again), I wonder where the milk solids listed on the label have been.

30-plus comments now on CBC page about last night’s raw milk movie broadcast

Here was my latest comment on that forum:

The use of governments as a tool by corporate interests to further their private advantage undermines what’s left of citizen respect for the moral stature of government.

In a comment on a recent CBC forum, a commenter who Michael Schmidt recognized as spouting the standard DFO (Dairy Farmers of Ontario) line about the dangers of raw milk made the fascinating statement that it was the DFO who was “prosecuting” Schmidt “and the other raw milk nuts”.

Clearly, the role of government in a civilized world is to stand up for the public interest in the face of corporate bullying.

“Benefits outweigh risks” — so say Bucks County raw milk drinkers

This excerpt is from an October 12th, 2008 story in the “Bucks County Courier Times”, titled “Raw milk drinkers say benefits outweigh the risks”.  Bucks County is in Pennsylvania where raw milk is legal.

“They like their milk straight from the cow — raw and unpasteurized — and so far as thousands of raw milk drinkers are concerned, the benefits of consuming raw dairy products outweigh the risks of getting sick.

In Bucks and Montgomery counties, there are only four dairies licensed by the state Department of Agriculture to sell raw milk and raw milk products.

Trent Hendricks has the only license to sell raw milk in Montgomery County. He sells about 600 gallons a week to a customer base of about 500 families out of his Hendricks Farms and Dairy on Green Hill Road in Franconia, near Telford.

Hendricks suffered a setback last month when the state suspended his license for about a week while it investigated an outbreak of campylobacteriosis, a gastrointestinal disease that sickened 10 or more people.

Exposure to bacteria is good for you — according to Yale University study

“‘Friendly’ bacteria protect against type 1 diabetes, Yale researchers find

In a dramatic illustration of the potential for microbes to prevent disease, researchers at Yale University and the University of Chicago showed that mice exposed to common stomach bacteria were protected against the development of Type I diabetes.

The findings, reported in the journal “Nature”, support the so-called “hygiene hypothesis” – the theory that a lack of exposure to parasites, bacteria and viruses in the developed world may lead to increased risk of diseases like allergies, asthma, and other disorders of the immune system. The results also suggest that exposure to some forms of bacteria might actually help prevent onset of Type I diabetes, an autoimmune disease in which the patient’s immune system launches an attack on cells in the pancreas that produce insulin.

Readers set John Doyle straight on what’s what with raw milk

John Doyle’s flippant dismissal of raw milk in his Globe and Mail column yesterday got a lot of readers backs up. Two of them posted extensive rebuttals in the comment section of yesterday’s post on the Bovine in which they challenge his assumptions and dismantle his “arguments”. I know some people have also written to John Doyle directly to express their displeasure with his public misrepresentation of the raw milk issue. If you’d like to add your voice, his email is jdoyle at globeandmail dot com. But please also post your reply as a comment on the bovine. We like comments. We like them a lot!

Talking about comments I might have expected there to be more of them on the CBC site. As of this morning there are only two, and one of those is mine.

There were a few comments posted on John Doyle’s column as it appeared on globeandmail.com

Two of the most insightful comments come from what looks like “the real” James McLaren:

“ James McLaren from Ottawa, Canada writes: Hey John, why don’t you do an editorial on the hypocritical and discriminatory way that raw milk is singled out for derision when our society permits everyone to poison themselves, if they so wish, with alcohol, tobacco and fast food? Why doesn’t the government step in and ban these too?