Raw Milk and some food logic

I've been reading the book The Untold Story of Milk by Ron Schmid. It's a long book and deals with many issues that tie into raw milk. If you read it, here are some chapters I recommend.


3. Bad Milk: The Distillery Dairies
Discusses the origin of bad milk and why pasteurization came into practice.

6. Good Medicine: The History of the Milk Cure
Many examples of doctors using raw milk for treatment of various illnesses with good results.

7. Enzymes: Essential to Organic Life
Francis Pottenger's ten year experiment with cats studying the effects of raw versus pasteurized milk. The length of the study and the number of cats involved is impressive.

The book is very thorough in the presenting the issues that are part of the raw milk debate. If you're willing to invest the time I recommend reading it. I would have preferred if it would have had some tables, charts, or graphical snapshots comparing raw milk to pasteurized. Something to synopsize the points being made. You're left to cover a lot of material.

There are many websites devoted to raw milk that will give you the main points more succinctly. RealMilk.com is one of them. The Weston A. Price Foundation website, which sponsors the first site, is another good ones. You'll get the basics, and then some, in a much briefer format.

Personally, I'd like to be at a level where I have a few talking points to debate/promote raw milk. I've been attempting come up with philosophy on raw milk and organics to anchor to when there's lots of commentary flying around from both the pro and con sides.

Here are my thoughts thus far:

• God made everything and it was good.
• God made food for our nourishment.
• The closer the food remains to God's original design the better it is.
• The more the original design is modified with man's limited knowledge, the more the opportunity presents itself for unintended consequences. Think kudzu, nutria.

Food Safety:

• Due to sin, there is disease and such in the world. Things die, moth and dust doth corrupt.
• Nothing is perfect, so the opportunity exists for food-borne illness to be present in any food.
• Food produced in a clean production environment is less likely to provide opportunities for food-borne illness.
• Food produced in a dirty production environment is more likely to provide opportunities for food-borne illness.

Many claims are made by raw milk and organics that I'd like to research and find some hard numbers that back those claims.

To investigate:

• Our ancestors died primarily due to poverty, non-food-related diseases (health-related factors only)
• Our recent generations die more due to lifestyle-related maladies - smoking, drinking, poor diet, lack of exercise
• That is, external causes of death have decreased, while internal causes have increased

Study these:

• obesity rates by decade
• heart-related disease rates by decade
• cancer rates by decade
• TV watching by decade
• diet changes by decade - sugar, flour, processed
• life expectancy by decade
• fertility rates, miscarriages
• compare US to other countries, developed and non-developed

Given what I've read so far, raw milk is safe. Not perfectly safe, but safe. Nothing is perfectly safe. Buy from a dairy that you trust. That's one of the benefits of buying local. You know where it comes from, you can see it being produced. That can't be said for milk from the store. Read the book above for stats on commercial/industrial dairying. You may wind up skipping the dairy case at the grocery store next time.

Numbers-wise, I've seen that raw milk has a lower incident rate of food-related illness that pasteurized milk, eggs, meat, and produce. I highly recommend the PowerPoint presentation at the RealMilk site. This gives the stats in a brief format.

Where I'm coming from

Sometimes it seems that some people's interest in things is due to fad. "Hey, everyone's being green." Oat bran comes and goes. And goes. :-) Atkins, South Beach, Zone all have had their time in the sun.

Much of my interest comes from my background. My grandparents were farmers and went to the local farmers' market (LFM) for over 40 years. For a time in high school and in college I sold veggies at the LFM, too. "Why I remember back in summer of '88, I think it was... Hoo, that was a hot one!" I remember reading a lot of Rodale gardening books from the library. Through my grandparents I had a connection to the way things were done in the past.

From early on I can remember my mom being into health food. She'd make homemade granola and I'd beg for Cap'n Crunch at the grocery store. She got raw milk from a couple of dairy farmers in the area. Through the years, both my mom and dad have been done lots of reading on nutrition and alternative medicine.

The Bible says, "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it." Prov 22:6 So now as an adult, I still want the Cap'n Crunch, but eschew it for the granola. Thank you Mom.

Ten years ago my wife and I went to Tampico, Mexico on a missions trip as leaders of our church's high school group. One boy we met a church brought his latest treasure to the vacation Bible school we did for three days. It was the electronic part from a musical greeting card. He proudly showed all his friends and us. The battery was almost dead and barely made any sound, but it put a smile on his face.

I befriended another boy named Daniel who was about 10. I didn't know Spanish, but played tic-tac-toe with him and made a point to sit with him during class. The last day there he gave his marble. I figure he had only one marble and he gave it to me.

Next to the church lived a man and his toddler daughter. They lived in a one-room concrete block shed with no glass windows, dirt floor, no bathroom. The "stove" was a fire-pit/50 gallon drum rig.

Last summer, my cohort from The Lemming Media Group, got me to thinking about social issues. I used to think of social issues as "those" issues. My box was Evangelical, God-fearin', Republican, good guys who know that those other guys are Democratic, tax-raisin', sin-lovin', long-haired, no account varmints. The environment, poverty, and such are issues for those guys. I learned from him that poverty and justice and are on God's agenda, too.

Around the same time I worked at our local CSA (communtiy-supported agriculture). Met a whole lot of people who don't think like I do on most issues, but developed a common ground on organic and such.

So the last year has been incorporating the best of the past and the best of the present. So where I'm coming from is that I'm looking to live out my faith by not just saying that "Jesus is Lord". I want to add to "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength", "Love your neighbor as yourself". Faith without works is dead. To have a relevant faith for our times.

Welcome to The Lemming Awakening

"The Lemming Awakening? Are you calling me a lemming?"

The name is inspired by my friend's movie blog, The Lemming Apocalypse, and his other blog, The Great Lemming Revival. So I opted to join the The Lemming Media Group. Inside joke, sorry.

Maybe you will chuckle at the name or possibly be thinking, "Uh oh, this is gonna be one of those kinda blogs." With the "those kinda" being the whacked-out, extremist, anti-whatever, pro-whatever, fringe-thinking blogs that you just can't stand. Hmm, well, that might be. So stick around and find out.

The point of the blog is to create awareness and to promote these:

• organic, sustainable agriculture
  
• family farms
• eating local
• nutrition
  
• cooking
• living it out as a family

The lemming part comes in, as I'm defining it, as a lack of awareness. Do you know where your food comes from? Do know how it was grown? Do you know what that growing practice does/does not do to the environment or the food? Do you know what your food does to/for your body?

Lemming is tongue-in-cheek. There shouldn't be anything in this blog that indicates, "Those people are such total lemmings.", like I was using as an insult.

I'm hoping strike a balance between philosophizing, information, and our family's narrative. The book I've almost finished, Plenty by Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon, is an example of what I'd like to do as a family and as a blog.

Stick around. This makes me think of a TV pilot. I hope I don't get canceled after the first episode. :-)