Health inspectors check out third annual raw milk symposium in MN

The latest from David E. Gumpert at The Complete Patient blog:

“Last Thursday, the day before the Third Annual Raw Milk Symposium was due to get under way at the Embassy Suites Hotel in Bloomington, MN, hotel chef Pierre Jean Laupies had a visit from two local health department inspectors.

“They said they received a complaint,” he related in a conversation this morning. “They told me, ‘Do not use raw milk. Do not handle raw milk.’” (Who made the “complaint”? Ah, the inspectors couldn’t say. Maybe Joe in communicable diseases, or Mary in restaurant inspections. Or maybe an inspector just saw the Symposium’s reference to the upcoming “unveiling of our Traditional Foods Menu” for the weekend, and  didn’t know what the hell traditional foods are.)

If food sovereignty was a basic right…

From Russ, on his “Volatility” blog:

“The mostly unspoken basis of the 1787-88 Constitution, in the minds of its framers, was to establish a monopoly on political and economic power by elites: Landed, merchant, creditor elites. Their success depended mostly on their having a coherent ideology and plan.

In the same way, if we envision a New Constitutional Convention, it won’t do to be scattershot, starting on an ad hoc basis, speculating about how this or that sounds good. That’s sort of what I did in this post, proposing a list of possible amendments. Let’s review:

* The enshrinement of Food Sovereignty as a basic right. (This would certainly have been the First Amendment if anyone in 1788 could have contemplated a day when the federal government would explicitly deny we have a right to grow and eat the foods of our choice. But even the opponents of the centralized government who demanded the inclusion of a Bill of Rights, as suspicious as they were, never contemplated such an obscene assault on our liberty and dignity.)

Natural selective breeding shown to be better than GMOs, by Swiss researcher

By Ethan A. Huff, on Natural News:

(NaturalNews) Twenty years of careful research and development on a new apple variety has produced an amazing fruit that New Zealand’s Scoop news states is “sweet, tangy and delicious.” And the most amazing aspect of Swiss orchardist and researcher Markus Kobelt’s new RedLove apple variety is that it was designed to be resistant to disease, appealing to the palate, and easy to grow — and all without the use of any sort of artificial genetic modification.

For many years, researchers from other organizations have been working on creating a genetically modified (GM) apple variety that would be higher in nutrients, more resistant to disease and pests, and appealing to growers and consumers. But Kobelt beat them to the punch with his new non-GM variety, which was created using only natural breeding and cross-pollination techniques, rather than genetic manipulation, which means that it also bears none of the very serious health threats that GM varieties do.

The start of pasteurization in the U.K.

Gordon Watson sends this:

Over the years in my political/religious activity, I learned that a Big Lie must be tracked-back to its root in order to undo it. Below is the transcript of discussion in the House of Lords, when Great Britain was considering heat-treating the milk in commercial distribution; 1946: a textbook example of how the Big Lie technique works. Most instructive for us, today, is seeing how proponents of compulsory Pasteur-ization have been singing the very same song = note for note = for 60 years.

Lord Rothschild mocks the objection that the effect of his Bill would make raw milk unobtainable for those who want it as, “totalitarian” … saying ” …nobody in his senses would attempt such a measure” … yet that’s exactly what did happen here in British Columbia.Thus, the judgment of those opposing compulsory heat-treatment, has been borne out.  

Asking how “Food Safety” factors into “the future of food”

Bill Marler, in the Huffington Post, from a story titled “What is the ‘future of food’ without food safety”:

“I attended the Future of Food Conference in Washington D.C. this last week and was amazed by the speakers that author Eric Schlosser and the Washington Post put together. From Lucas Benitez, Co-Founder, Coalition of Immokalee Workers to Michael R. Taylor, Deputy Commissioner for Foods at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Wendell Berry, Author, Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, Will Allen, Founder and CEO of Growing Power Inc. and even The Prince of Wales popped in only days after the wedding of the century for the keynote address.

It was truly an impressive list of speakers with a deep commitment to issues surrounding the future of food, and with a clear commitment to a vision of small, organic agriculture. The discussions ranged from workers rights to GMOs, from frozen vegetables to global warming. Obesity was also discussed along with the trend of booming backyard gardens. Sustainability was the catchword of the day along with going local, organic farming and the ever-present mantra, “know your farmer, know your food.” Lunch was served family style touting local, organic agriculture — meat and vegetables. White House Chef Sam Kass shared recipes as some in the audience gushed how hot (not temperature) the president’s chef was.