More than one way to destroy enzymes

From David E. Gumpert on the Complete Patient blog:

“So I was curious to read a lengthy article in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal, “How Much for Salad in  a Bottle?”, about the new “raw” juices that have appeared. Most of the article was about how carrying around the new juices has become a status symbol. It also marveled that such an expensive product has grown significantly in popularity, and attractiveness to the big food companies. The important stuff, right? One of the companies, BluePrint, was quoted saying it had $20 million sales last year, and was acquired by Hain Celestial Group. Another, Evolution Fresh, was acquired by Starbucks Coffee Co. for $30 million. 

In fact, the article never got to the regulatory part I was wondering about. But there was a paragraph near the end of the article that caught my eye. “To extend shelf life, some companies, including Suja, BluePrint, and Evolution Fresh, have turned to a process often called High Pressure Processing (HPP), which inactivates most microorganisms (emphasis added) while retaining natural freshness. HPP, also used to preserve guacamole and ready-to-eat meats, subject the food to intense pressure of thousands of pounds a square inch.”

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.

Milk with the shelf life of nuclear waste

From the Owen Sound Sun Times:

Editor:

Natural milk (from bovine) is acknowledged to be one of the most beneficial, nutritious food source there is, when taken from the cow under reasonable sanitary conditions and immediately cooled to prevent increased bacterial activity.

As in the consumption of any bovine product, approved herd health certification must be obtained. The open-ended declaration that “raw milk” is hazardous to ones health is a blatant fallacy.

The sale of natural (raw) milk is illegal. Why?

Today’s milk is being sold as “natural”. It is not.

The issues around raw milk as seen by a sixteen-year-old Canadian school girl

The author of this essay, Shay Lucas, is a 16 year old Grade 10 girl who has been drinking Michael Schmidt’s raw milk for more than 13 years. According to her parents she has never had to take antibiotic drugs. Shay has visited Glencolton Farms many times over the years and spent a week there this past summer helping out. She has attended many of the rallies and events and is a strong supporter of “Freedom of Choice”. Shay originally wrote this essay for her English class at school.

"Snow-frosted" raw milk cows munching on winter hay at Michael Schmidt's Glencolton Farms.

Raw Milk Should Be Accessible To All

Have you ever looked at the back of your milk carton and wondered why it says ‘pasteurized’? Why is it that Canadian dairy companies are adding vitamins and protein into your milk when they were already there in the first place, but were removed in the pasteurization process for so called safety reasons? For the past 70 years or so, raw, unpasteurized milk has been illegal to obtain throughout Canada. Through the pasteurization process, important and healthy assets which are originally found in milk are removed. This pasteurization process is a law which means the government is controlling what we put in our bodies and eliminating a health care solution that can help many. Allowing unpasteurized milk to be available in Canada will help our nation socially, environmentally and allow a health choice that will benefit people in many ways.

16 sick with Yersina after drinking pasteurized milk from a PA dairy

Photo via Barfblog

From Doug Powell, via Barfblog:

“The number of people sickened with yersina from pasteurized milk sold by a Pennsylvania dairy has risen to 16 from five at the end of July, and now
state and county health officials are telling consumers to discard any ice cream purchased from the Brunton Dairy farm after an unopened container tested positive for Yersinia enterocolitica.

Christine Cronkright, state health department spokeswoman, said 16 cases of Yersinia enterocolitica have been reported to date as a result of the outbreak − nine from Beaver County and seven from Allegheny County….”

Read more on Barfblog

Crimes against raw milk in New Jersey

From Russ on the “Volatility” blog:

“New Jersey is one of several states which explicitly criminalize the sale of raw milk. It’s therefore at the extreme end of a motley array of possible state attitudes. While the federal bureaucracy (no law) also criminalizes the transport of raw milk over state lines*, it’s up to the states to decide what happens within their borders. (The FDA often lobbies against decriminalization.)

[*This includes, according to a recent FDA assertion, the customer himself going to another state to purchase raw milk and then bringing it back home. The government soothingly claims it has no intention of trying to arrest or otherwise sanction such individual purchasers, but it wants to reserve the right to do so. Of course, it was just a year ago, in promulgating its totalitarian brief in the FTCLDF lawsuit, that the FDA claimed it had no aggressive enforcement plans against dairies and raw milk co-ops. That was proven to be a lie within weeks.]

How a “niche player” takes over the marketplace — parable for raw milk?

From Christopher Mimms, writing in MIT’s “Technology Review”, an article titled “How the rise of Apple is just like the rise of mammals”. Could there be a parallel here with raw milk? 

Image from Fashionably Geek.com. Click image to go there.

“The exceptional thing about Apple is not that it’s the most valuable consumer-facing brand in the world, that it has a market cap larger than Microsoft, or that its stock performance over the past decade bested Google. No, what’s different about Apple is that for a really long time—more than 20 of the 33 years it has been on this earth—it was a niche player.

“Whitewash” book criticizes pasteurized milk, doesn’t mention raw milk – WTF?

Thanks to Gordon Watson for this:

WHITEWASH: The Disturbing Truth About Cow’s Milk and Your Health

by Joseph Keon

My comment ; when I first got involved in the Campaign for REAL MILK, I thought that the Pasteur-ized / homogenized stuff on store shelves was not all that bad. Not as good as wonderful, fresh whole raw milk … but at least, not harmful.   I’ve since learned that what’s in the packages at the end of the supply chain in the industrial ag. model, is so far-removed from the real thing, that to call it “milk” is consumer fraud

In his recently-published book, Whitewash, Dr Keon provides plenty of evidence to prove why “homo milk” is genuinely hazardous to public health. Although it’s good at explaining why ‘homo milk’ is very bad,   the book’s fatal flaw is, it ignores the controversy about the difference between ‘raw’ versus “Pasteurized”.

Breast milk ice cream is pasteurized

Boing Boing has the story:

Logo from the Icecreamists website.

“Icecreamists, an ice-cream parlour in London’s Covent Garden, is selling human breast milk ice-cream for £14 a scoop. The breastmilk is purchased from lactating mothers, and the product (called “Baby Gaga”) is intended to raise awareness of breastmilk’s deliciousness and encourage more breastfeeding. The milk is pasteurised and flavoured with lemon zest and vanilla pods.

Looking deeper into the CDC data on raw milk cheese safety vs pasteurized

From David E. Gumpert at the Complete Patient blog:

“If you’ll remember, the data I had from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control covered 33 years 1973-2005. For subsequent years, I turned to the CDC’s online database, which goes up through 2008, or another three years. (Another, more accessible resource laying out a table of illnesses that includes cheese, and goes through 2007, is available here.)

If one of the FDA’s apologists had taken up my offer, they would have been able to play a little bit of “gotcha,” because there were more illnesses from raw milk cheese during those three years than in the entire 33 years before. Interestingly, there were also a comparable number of illnesses from pasteurized cheese.