Milk lovers getting a raw deal as petty bureaucrats attempt to hobble cow-share operation in B.C.

You can get anything you want at Alice's Home on the Range as long as it is raw milk and you are a cow share holder! Photo from Home on the Range website.

Thanks again to Gordon Watson, who is fast becoming our west-coast correspondent, for bringing to our attention this story by Brian Lewis of the Province newspaper in Vancouver, which is again about the “Home on the Range” cowshare farm in Chilliwack B.C. Here’s an excerpt:

“Canada may be a land of “milk and honey” for most of us — but if you’re an advocate for raw, unpasteurized milk, life isn’t always so sweet.

Just ask Alice Jongerden, a 38-year-old mother of five who runs a small dairy farm in Chilliwack along with her husband.

For over a year now, this farm has produced raw milk and related products such as yogurt, butter and cheese on behalf of about 250 shareholders who co-own the animals

This cow-sharing arrangement is necessary because Canada is the only G8 country that doesn’t allow raw milk sales.

Raw milk advocates prefer their milk to contain all the original ingredients as Mother Nature intended — including beneficial enzymes which pasteurization removes along with bacteria.

Regulators maintain that unpasteurized milk is unsafe because it “may” contain salmonella, E. coli or listeria, but reports of illness are few and far between.

Raw milk even has “the coolness factor”

Here’s some verbal rant by a dude who probably doesn’t know the first thing about milk and probably doesn’t drink it himself, and yet even he can see that raw milk is “cool”, that it’s “hip”, and that it’s the happening thing. Here’s what roflcopter_down says, under the heading “Raw Milk Conspiracy”:

“I love conspiracy theories. I don’t believe any of them, but they really amuse me, so I like to read about them. I just found a new one linked to me on my Gmail account. It’s the Raw Milk Conspiracy.

Now, I know about the people who say milk is bad for you, and you shouldn’t drink it. That’s nothing new. However, there are actually people who believe that raw milk is actually a wonder cure with amazing health benefits that are lost when milk is pasteurized. Various agencies and groups supress this knowledge because they make money off of pasteurized milk one way or another (some claim that raw milk can last virtually forever while pastuerized milk has a short shelf life, so it sells more).

“Don’t believe these raw milk nuts!” — CBC adds Health Canada warning to Michael Schmidt movie writeup

Get a load of this — our national public broadcaster has added a warning from Health Canada at the end of their writeup on the showing of the Michael Schmidt Raw Milk Crusader film on CBC Newsworld. What gives? Did the mandarins at Health Canada read the 44 overwhelmingly supportive comments in the discussion section and decide something had to be done because somehow the public clearly was not getting the “right” message? The last time I looked, several days ago, this warning wasn’t there. So it’s clearly some sort of “band-aid” solution. See for yourself on the CBC website. It’s at the bottom of the story.

Michael Schmidt in California today to speak at Weston A. Price Foundation’s “Wise Traditions” conference

Last year at this same conference, Michael was awarded the “Activist of the Year” prize. This year he’ll be speaking, taking part in panel discussions with Mark McAfee and presenting Norman Lofts’ award-winning film “Michael Schmidt: Organic Hero or Bioterrorist”.

Wise Traditions 2008 will be the ninth annual conference of its type. Click here for complete conference information. Here’s what they say about Michael in their online listing of presenters: (And that’s the picture they use — he looks pretty determined, eh?)

Organic Hero or Bio-terroir-ist?

Michael Schmidt: Organic Hero or Bioterrorist, produced in 2008, details a year in the life of a Canadian activist farmer whose dairy farm was raided by 25 armed officers.

It tells the story of raw organic milk in Canada and the right of informed consumers to choose and procure the food they eat, directly from farmers they trust. The film had its world premiere at the Slow Food on Film Festival, Bologna, Italy, May, 2008