DistilleryDairy

A distillery dairy from the mid-1800s.

If the green holiday ad on this and other pages promoting a gift opportunity looks strange, it’s because ads in general look strange here. I don’t accept outside advertising, primarily to avoid conflicts of interest and to avoid dealing with questionable promoters.

The policy stood me in good stead when the fermented cod liver oil scandal broke in August. Unlike a number of bloggers, I didn’t have to worry about jeopardizing my income stream by reporting what was really going on, and I didn’t have to shut down my reporting at the orders of someone with a different financial interest. (And I don’t say this to disparage other bloggers; just to explain this blog’s approach.)

But the fact of the matter is that it costs money to run this blog, and I thought I’d explain that reality in this post, before providing some relevant news.

The only way the blog earns money is from the sale of my books, and from speaking engagements. Blog readers were very generous last winter when I did a crowdfunding campaign to complete production and initial promotion of my latest book, The Raw Milk Answer Book: What You REALLY Need to Know About Our Most Controversial Food.

That book came out as scheduled, and has been well received by readers of this blog, as well as by a number of raw dairy farmers who have ordered it in quantity to make it available to their new customers.

I realized from its few months in the market that it is often more useful to newbies than it is to experienced raw milk consumers, who generally have spent years following the political, health, and research aspects of raw milk. The Raw Milk Answer Book enables beginners to much more quickly get up to speed on the subject—with easily understandable and nonpartisan information—than they otherwise could.

So I am encouraging all this blog’s readers to consider giving The Raw Milk Answer Book as a special gift. It comes in three formats—print, electronic, and audio—and all are priced at $15 or less. It can easily be delivered as a gift to your relatives and friends. It has at least a couple advantages over most of the “stuff” being promoted as gifts this holiday season:

  1. It is a great gift for your friends and relatives who are kind of, vaguely, sort of, interested in raw dairy. These are the people who look at you kind of funny when you tell them about your raw milk habit, and then ask you curious, or even accusatory, questions. “Aren’t you afraid of getting sick?” “Do you worry about giving it to your kids?”  “How do you know you’re buying from a safe producer?” Now you can just give them the book, and very quickly, they’ll be informed enough to discuss the subject intelligently with you. They won’t necessarily agree with you, but they will end the accusatory questions.
  2. You’ll be helping support this blog. Because this blog’s popularity has expanded, so have the costs associated with maintaining it and keeping it up to speed technologically. Over the last six months, I’ve had to move it to a new site, add new administrative tools, and upgrade the service so it is now “in the cloud,” among other steps. And even with all that, as some of you have experienced, we still have work to do to properly manage the increased number of comments.  But I’ve continued to provide coverage of developments in the world of food you won’t easily find elsewhere, from the controversy over fermented cod liver oil to the ongoing government attacks on raw milk cheese to the continuing struggle of Canadian dairy farmer Michael Schmidt.

And here are a couple of new developments in the world of dairy….

First, we are seeing growing recognition in the mainstream media of pasteurized milk as the “new gluten.” New York Magazine posted an article earlier this month claiming pasteurized milk is “as controversial as gluten….Dairy and gluten have become evil twins in ‘elimination’ diets, the holistic therapy of the moment, as people swear they feel less bloated and lethargic without them.”  Indeed, the article claims gluten may be taking unwarranted blame for making people feel bad—blame that should be going to processed dairy. It points to “Australian researchers who suggest that at least some of the people who think they’re sensitive to gluten (and who don’t have celiac disease, the gluten-induced autoimmune disorder) really aren’t. The true culprit, they argue, may be a group of common carbohydrates lumped under the acronym FODMAPS (fermentable oligo-,di-, and monosaccharides and polls). They’re found in foods like beans, onions, and, yes, milk—lending credibility to those ‘dairy sensitivity’ claims.”

The second recent development of interest to raw dairy drinkers is the possible return of “swill milk.” This is the stuff of sick cows in the middle and late 1800s—the nutritionally-deficient leftovers from fermented grains used to make gin and whiskey and beer.

Amazingly, the use of distillery leftovers to feed cows is making a comeback, as an offshoot of the microbrewery revolution. Proponents say the leftovers from microbreweries tend to be nutritious supplements for farm animals of all types, including dairy cows. This from one recent article:

“To be clear, the issue (in the 1800s) was not the use of spent grains as feed, but rather the mode and method of feeding. Spent grains represent a cheap, nutritious, and otherwise sustainable way to feed animals. Breweries today do not feed cows directly from their stills, nor do they confine dairy herds to tiny stalls with no exercise.”

It isn’t especially surprising to see it used to feed cows producing conventional milk; after all, such cows are generally fed grain-based diets.

But now it’s being debated as a realistic feeding option for cows used to produce raw milk, which typically are fed primarily or exclusively pasture-based diets. Here are some excerpts from one email discussion among dairy farmer members of the Raw Milk Institute (I have been asked to leave the farmers’ names out).

Farmer 1: “A raw milk consumer shared with me that during a recent beer tasting event, the brewery bragged about ‘how sustainable they were’ by saying that ‘all of their spent distillers mash was delivered to a local micro dairy’ that was also a cow share and made great raw milk!….This does not mean that cows milk  when it comes from distillers’ mash fed cows is bad…but the risk for pathogens in the common environment is questionable.”

Farmer 2: “We are getting spent barley grains from a local brewery, and giving them to our pigs and chickens–this REALLY cuts down on our grain bills. Giving a little also to the cows, who love it!  It’s something we could stop if persuaded that it is not a good idea. But so far have not seen any health problems. I had a friend who was a bootlegger in the 1940s and also had cattle.  He said his cattle were healthiest, sleek and fat, when he gave them the mash from his still.”

Is swill milk really the next big thing? I can’t say for sure from a nutritional viewpoint, but from a branding and image perspective, it is very bad news. Raw milk opponents paint bleak images of a return to those awful days of the 1800s when many thousands died. Why help feed that image?

And thanks for considering The Raw Milk Answer Book as one of your holiday gifts.