I am a big raw juice fan, have been for many years. After I make the juice, usually a couple of cups or more, I store the leftover juice in a wine bottle, and use a vacuum device to reduce the air supply. Raw juice, like raw milk, is a fragile food because its many enzymes and other microorganisms deteriorate quickly when exposed to air.
Occasionally, when I dont get a chance to replenish my juice supply, I will buy one of the several brands of raw juice that have shown up in Whole Foods and a few other upscale retailers over the last couple years. I try not to buy them too often, partly because they are very expensive ($8-$10 for a small bottle), but also because they dont taste quite right to me. Even though it looks like there is some pulp in the bottle of vegetable juice, I can never taste or feel it. Beyond that, it somehow feels as if the juice is missing something. Hard to describe, since it is subtle.
I always figured the taste problem had to do with the production date, which you can kind of infer from reading closely the sell-by info on some of the bottles; a stacker at one Whole Foods told me the bottles are dated to expire 14 days after production. But even if I bought a bottle that seemed to have just arrived, it never tasted much different from one that had been on the shelves for some days, and nowhere near as alive as the juice I make at home. (I should emphasize that the juices I am referring to here are made by not made by Whole Foods but rather by companies with the name Suja and BluePrint; some Whole Foods stores have juice bars, and the juices they make are much like what I make at home.)
I have also wondered how these new commercially produced raw juices managed to skirt the restrictions that have gradually been placed on raw juice by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration along with state public health agencies since several serious outbreaks from tainted apple juice occurred in the 1990. Because of the restrictions and labeling requirements, nearly all fruit and vegetable juices sold at retail today are pasteurized.
So I was curious to read a lengthy article in Tuesdays 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.
So now I had an explanation for why the stores mass-bottled juice tasted different from mine. (I now realize I’ve had the HPP-treated guacamole, and it never tasted quite right, either.)
The next paragraph made mention of a federal court suit filed last month against Hain, noting that the suit alleges HPP destroys some probiotics and enzymes, and contending that the companys claim the juice is raw amounts to false advertising. Rather than standing up for the integrity of its product, Hain declined comment. Not very inspiring.
I went and located the suit, which is 36 pages, which was filed by four consumers, as a class action suit. At one point it states: Juice is 100% Raw only if it contains all of the same enzymes, nutrients, probiotics, vitamins, and minerals as the fruits and vegetables had prior to being juiced. However, that is not the case with the (BluePrint) Juice Products. Once subjected to HPP, some of the enzymes, nutrients, vitamins, probiotics, and minerals contained in the pre-HPP Juice Products are no longer present. In fact, Defendants have admitted that HPP has an impact on the structure of the components responsible for nutrition and flavor.As such, Defendants cannot truthfully market the Juice Products as 100% Raw when, in reality, the pre-HPP and post-HPP juices are not identical.
I am big on not assigning guilt before those charged have had their day in court. But I have tasted, and read, enough to not want to buy those raw juices any more.
It makes sense that the HPP juices shouldnt have the same benefits as fresh untreated juice. We are increasingly learning about the differences in health benefits between pasteurized and unpasteurized milk. There have been assessments showing the nutritional differences between factory and pastured eggs. On and on it goes.
As Dave Milano, Mark McAfee, and others have argued here, we seem to have to repeatedly learn the lesson (or at least yours truly has had to learn) that it is impossible to process and re-package nature in a jar or in a pill. And kudos to the people who were outraged enough to call the food corporations on their deception.
A storm is moving in here…the garden is finally done, the pigs and chickens all moved into their winter houseing high tunnel, and the cows are bedding a moved to their winter digs too. Hay is in the barn. Wood is in the shed, and canning and preserving supplies are stored away. That means…I can FINALLY download your book to my kindle. The Raw Milk Revolution was so formative to us about 5 years ago when we started down the road as milk producers, and were just starting to understand the issues. Can’t wait to read this one!
Anyways I think you hit on a major point that I often try to make her, that refining or processing in any way is ever the equivalent of the real thing. One of my on going at-home issues with the wife is that she believes in, and accrues dozens of bottles of supplements, vitamins and similar krap. Why not just eat well and then you won’t need any supplements? Although I’ll admit I don’t eat enough turmeric and ginger… we’ll get to work on that.
Every week I buy raw orange juice that is squeezed and presented for sale at a very high price at my local Whole Food store. In fact, WF sells a whole range of raw juices at a premium…all of these juices are produced in the store and they all taste incredibly fantastic!!! They are alive and I can not get enough of them!!
What is it about WF??…. they will sell 6 different kinds of raw juices and not sell raw milk???
As far as Pascalization ( High Pressure Treatment at 50,000 PSI ) it is just a very stupid attempt at using “Standards of Identity” laws to label a food raw….what does this mean? Well…it means we have won!!!
Raw is now the “value added magnet” and consumer bait. It is the “go-to food group”. Why else would industry be trying with 50,000 PSI of might to try and produce a raw food to sell??? They want raw so bad they can taste it…but they can not follow us into this market.
Even the poor CA Almond is guilty of this SOI tragedy. When “raw means pasteurized” and ” super-crushed means raw” and it is ok to lie to the consumers…that signals then end of truth and that signals a trust of the farmer and a distrust of the government. It is dooms day for industry that lies to try and sell something that is misslabeled. In the era of the internet….it does not take very long for a consumer to figuer this one out.
Truly raw cheeses are another big lie. When raw milk cheese are heated to 159 degrees and pasteurized cheeses are heated to 161….that is a huge lie. Consumers figuered this out pretty darn quickly!
When will they learn the biggest lesson of all. You can not cheat mother nature and safety, quality and wholesomeness. These are the elements that create a “farmer value added” that actually takes work and cooperation with nature not the application of 50,000 pounds of weight crushing on her chest.
Mark, I should have made clearer that the questionable juices being HPP-treated are made by companies outside Whole Foods. Like you, I’ve had raw juices made on the premises at Whole Foods, and those are always fine.
This extreme pressure exposure inactivates microorganisms and enzymes that lead to food spoilage.
http://hppfoods.com/features/hpp/
Although this is not recommended — or even humanly possible — if you were to scuba dive in the deepest proclaimed section of the world’s oceans — the Marianas Trench — you would be subjected to pressures of 16,000 psi. High-pressure processing (HPP) commonly processes food at 87,000 psi.
We have known of HPP for over a century, but the equipment has only become more available and reliable over the last two decades.
Researchers theorize that HPP kills microorganisms by breaking noncovalent bonds, resulting in disruption of microorganism cellular functions. Widely held theory also suggests that protein compression and denaturing are principle mechanisms for microbial inactivation in HPP foods. Evidence suggests that when the HPP system releases pressure, it shocks large molecules (like proteins), but it leaves the smaller molecules (like flavor compounds and antioxidants) intact.
http://www.foodproductdesign.com/articles/2004/07/food-product-design-new-technologies–july-2004.aspx
Most companies, especially high-volume meat and poultry brands, do not own their own systems, instead using use contract-manufacturing tolling services in Nebraska, Milwaukee, California and elsewhere at roughly eight U.S. sites.
http://www.packworld.com/applications/food/did-you-know-youre-eating-hpp-processed-foods
There are application limitations to HPP, namely products with low moisture; the common comparison is that of a marshmallow, which will be squished under pressure vs. a grape, which comes out fine. Still, ongoing research may lead to new applications. HPP has been proven to extend the shelf life of milk from 15 or 20 days under refrigeration to 45 days at room temperature. And Raghubeer has presented research on sterilizing herbs using HPP to preserve their heat-sensitive bioactive phytochemicals and essential oils.
Believe it or not, there are recorded experiments of using high pressure to inactivate microorganisms as far back as 1884.
http://www.foodprocessing.com/articles/2009/avuretechnologies/ -2009
“the integrity of these raw ingredients is kept largely intact through an advanced cold-pressing process that avoids traditional pasteurization, which we now know destroys beneficial enzymes and other nutrients. These factors unavoidably translate into higher costs for manufacturers trying to meet growing demand for fresh, raw and unadulterated foods.”
http://www.naturalnews.com/042919_bottled_green_juice_status_symbol_nutrition.html#ixzz2kosWVQfq
Occasionally I will juice lemons ahead of time, but I usually squeeze as I need daily. The only other thing I juice is Valencia oranges, which are only available here where I live for about 1 month out of the year and heaven only knows where they come from. I juice them by hand, freeze the juice into cubes and use it in all kinds of things, or let my grandkids have them as “popsicles”. If I can get enough of them I sometimes squeeze a couple glasses of fresh juice. I’m not a big fan of juicing, I usually just eat the fruit and call it good. I do enjoy a buttermilk smoothie with fruit from time to time. Jack LaLanne Power Juicer that we bought years ago still works well, but I’m no longer on the juicing kick.
Thank you. I was just interviewed in connection with the book for NPR Morning Edition’s Atlanta station, about the 100-Year War Against Raw Milk. It’s due to air Monday morning, at http://www.wabe.org, at 7:35 and 8:35 a.m. I’ll have a direct link when it is available.
Yes…Shawna I want you to blush. You deserve the applause!!
Shawna has recognized that the Family Cow Milk Safety Act that is soon to be introduced into the CA Legislature will need a testing facilitity. The ACT legallizes and sets reasonable guidelines for sale of raw milk from the Family Cow Operations that exist all over CA. There is an expectation that each of these operations will need a testing facility or lab arrangments. Shawna is putting this together and it is very hopeful that perhaps one of our University labs will assist with this testing.
Great work Shawna. My grandfather once said…
“the measure of intellegence is foreseeing a problem in the future and doing something about it in the present”. Shawna…you are smart!! Thank you for your leadership and being LISTED by RAWMI.
The small herd operators are IN. Hopefully the lab will be too. I am very optimistic.
PS: Mr. Dave Gumpert, you are responsible for my puffy eyes today. I know I am late to the book party, but what a great read. Up WAY too late last night. 🙂
… and here’s another six, just say know http://www.naturalnews.com/042935_raw_milk_conventional_dairy_food_processing.html
A portable lab that could roll into rural communities, do milk and perhaps other food safety testing, remain long enough for cultures to incubale and provide consultation to producers, and then move on. It would be cool. The farmer I talked to mentioned that the longer and further a sample travels from the farm, the more potential for error or adulteration.
Maybe this is a business waiting for someone….
Thank you, Shawna…much appreciated. Sorry to infringe on your sleep time. 🙂
This happens all to frequently in our so-called democratic nation, where ruling political parties irrespective of their color or philosophy, choose to abide by iniquitous, autocratic principles.
Frank Meyers and his supporters have had to come to the sobering realization that a government cannot be effectively challenged from within a system where it acts as its own judge, jury and executioner.
http://deanoftea.blogspot.ca/2013/11/trenton-ontario-farm-to-be-occupied-for.html
Ken Conrad
It’s just a place and time in your life. Moove on as we must.
If you’re drinking raw, whole milk, you will, for the most part, avoid each of these issues.
It doesn’t take a PhD in human biology, to figure out that such milk is the wrong thing for a man to be drinking. I mean, a real man … one who’s interested in reproducing after his own kind – as instructed by the God of Israel. The problem with the milk parallels America’s reliance upon its meat supply coming from steers. Our God commanded us NOT to castrate our animals. Where’s the research to determine the relationship of the consumption of steer meat to the rise in homosexuality? To which query, all the lib-tards shriek ” hate crime!” as they swoon in unison! To which I say = “hey! what if it’s true?”
Swoon in unison, I saw them open for ah… ah… I forget.
Then, once witch-hunting had become an institution, it could be used for all the standard scapegoating and misdirection ploys.
So yes, your analogy was very apropos. And since there is a potent spiritual element to farming and our general connection to the earth, or lack thereof, we can expect that as the anti-system movement becomes more spiritually potent, there will be an attempt by the system to religiously demonize us.
But in this case I think we have the advantage, as even fundamentalist Christians (those most likely to let themselves be used by corporatism) are becoming skeptical and alienated from the system and its poisoning of the earth and humanity.
Meanwhile it’ll be hard for a system based openly on nothing but mercenary greed, competition, and fear to muster any kind of spiritual force on its behalf. This is one of its Achilles heels.
Here is a direct link to the NPR Morning Edition interview with me on “The 100-Year War Against Raw Milk”. It’s about 13 minutes total.
http://wabe.org/post/got-raw-milk-government-wants-know
There’s nothing wrong with the concept of preserving food. Otherwise, those in northern climes would starve in the winter! I steam-juice fresh fruit into gallon jars, which self-seal, and are room-temperature stable all winter. I would never call this juice “raw,” but I prefer it to supposed “raw juice” that has been packaged in dead dinosaurs, been handled by perhaps tens of people, shipped thousands of miles, and then sat in a grocer’s cooler case for who knows how long! The carbon footprint of my juice is very near zero. That seems to be worth a few enzymes to me!
Let’s not lose sight that traditional food preservation processes have a place. Humans have had to “eat with the seasons” for all but a tiny sliver of their time on this planet.
I provide a “semi-raw,” “nearly zero-mile” ice cream to my fellow herd shareholders. It has blackberry pureé that was prepared within hours of picking the blackberries. The berries are steam-juiced, and the remaining pulp is put through a “Roma” hand-cranked sieve. The resulting blackberry pulp is frozen until needed. But the cream, milk, eggs, and honey are all raw. (The honey is the only ingredient that comes from off-farm.)
My clientele favour local and seasonal just as much as organic and/or raw. They are all good — the details are in achieving a balance!
http://www.naturalnews.com/042949_milk_definition_aspartame_dairy_industry.html
“Besides the fact that the proposal is unbelievably deceptive at its core, there is still a lack of substantial evidence to prove that the chemical additives the industry is hoping to hide in milk are even safe in the first place. Aspartame, which is perhaps the most well-known artificial sweetener in the world, has been repeatedly shown to cause chronic headaches, neurological damage, cancer and, yes, even weight gain and obesity, the very things it is marketed as supposedly combating.”
Btw, I will never ever drink Beck’s again. German beer? Ya right show me the cow. They got bought out and chose the profitsy over the quality. St. Pauli Girl is still the real thing far as I can tell but things change, often before you know it. And don’t worry about me, my head injury turned out to be a dud said my dog. Nice weather we’re having in NE if not everywhere else. Where did I put my glass? Glasses? Suds? Have a nice.
And…they still wonder why they do not get paid anything for products that are: pasteurized, homogenized, standardized, supplimented, now artificially sweetened products that are made from milk.
Interesting to read that the dairy industry is petitioning for change of at least 17 SOIs for dairy products. Also interesting to see that the mainstream media used stock footage of OPDC products sitting on the store shelf for their story.
When the story is about milk, the media is now using RAW MILK AS MILK!!! That is a windchange for the good!
As Andy Rooney said in 2005, “if they want to sell more milk, they go back to selling what comes out of a cow”.http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18561_162-1007432.html
Andy Rooney and Hyprocates were both so right.
Kids don’t normally do the family shopping, so using kids as their excuse is pretty lame, but ya know, lame is all they have left.
If we can launch a manmade space rocket-ship to Mars and take pictures and samples of soil….we sure as hell can do something as simple as produce raw milk safely!!! NASA created HACCP. NASA brought us velcro…NASA is a spirit of innovation in America. If NASA wanted to test raw milk to know if it contained a pathogen in 10 minutes…guaranteed it would happen quickly.
Where is the spirit at the FDA??? It is an American tragedy. It is a tragedy, because the NIH and the Human Biome project already gave us the answers about what we are as humans and the role of bacteria in our bodies and… the FDA refuses to look at those answers because it cheats from the FOOD INC losers that live inside the FDA that report to big industry….A big industry that refuses to embrace the best of our technology to do good for America and serve its gut ( immune system ). Instead, big industry serves its own glutony and 9 kids die each day from Asthma and 1 of every 3 boys born in 2025 ( at least ) will have austism and a really messed up gut. A big industry that wants to serve addictive artifical sweeteners to our children in what they label as “MILK”
America the beautiful….but it is also America the tragic and sick and sad!
We have the technology to produce raw milk safely. We at RAWMI have the processes and the data. Now…it is the commitment and the Mars shot to awaken the Food Inc that rules us. It will be a Mars Shot…..these people need something as big as a rocket up their bad sides to wake up!!
How the Space Shuttle Was Born by Mike Wall, SPACE.com Senior Writer | June 28, 2011
…………………………………………………………….
The last-ever space shuttle launch that of Atlantis, scheduled for July 8 will come just over three decades after the first one, which took place April 12, 1981.
But that’s not to say NASA’s shuttle program just turned 30 years old. It’s actually pushing 40, since President Richard Nixon officially announced its existence in January 1972. And the shuttle’s roots go much deeper than that, stretching all the way back to a 1930s Nazis concept vehicle… called the Silbervogel (German for “silver bird”).
The story of the shuttle’s birth is one of big dreams and slashed budgets, of shifting visions, of NASA and the nation’s attempt to find their way in space…
The “von Braun paradigm,” was an idea widely circulated at the time by the famed German rocket engineer Wernher von Braun. Von Braun came to the U.S. as part of Operation Paperclip and quickly jump-started the nation’s rocket-development programs.
Space exploration, in the von Braun paradigm, should involve the following sequential steps: Put a human in space; develop a reusable spacecraft, making access to space cheaper and easier; use this vehicle to build a space station; inhabit the space station and employ it as a base from which to launch manned expeditions to the moon and, later, Mars.
NASA’s funding kept drying up. By 1972, Nixon had cut it to $3.4 billion. NASA’s original vision for the space shuttle was a fully reusable, two-stage vehicle that would be piloted in both stages, Launius said. The hypersonic, winged first stage would carry the shuttle orbiter on its back, up to an altitude of at least 50,000 feet (15,240 meters). The first stage would then fly back to Earth and land like an airplane, while the orbiter cruised into space.
Budget issues kept this from happening, and NASA ended up designing the shuttle system we see today… Similarly, funding issues kept the agency from developing a second-generation space plane, leaving NASA to operate the shuttle for 30 years.
“It’s ’60s and ’70s technology,” Launius said. “People at NASA didn’t think they’d be flying that shuttle through 2011.”
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The gut is not just the ( immune system ) and it is not only determined by the probiotics like raw milk and yogurt that we eat. It is also determined by all the bacteria and so called pathogens we are exposed to in early childhood. All of which determines our brain chemistry, our mood and in effect our personality.
Sounds more like Monsanto than milk farming.
You can steam-juice on a standard stove-top, or on a wood stove.
The advantage is that you end up with room-temperature-stable juice. We deal with >50 kg of blackberries every year, and they go mouldy in three days! Thanks to steam juicing, we can make blackberry jelly (or blackberry ice cream!) in the middle of the winter, when no fresh fruit is available locally.
While it is nice to have fresh/raw products any day of the year, they are an artifact of energy-rich living, which is coming to an end soon. It’s time to re-learn traditional food preservation techniques.
Amazon.com also carries other brands of steam juicers, but the Norpro has the highest ratings & satisfaction of users.
Thanks for mentioning this Jan, I had forgotten about this technique. As a kid growing up on the farm, I remember my aunts all coming together to do this. I just may want to get one of these & do this. You are absolutely correct…it is time to re-learn traditional food preservation techniques!
I knew I’d seen quotes like that here before, and that some people here want only corporatized “legalization”, and prefer criminalization to decriminalization.
It might be clarifying if people were to rank these three in order of preference. My preference is the reverse.
I’d prefer the illegal/extralegal status quo to “legalization”, which if anything might be even more repressive from our point of view. I’ve seen people here say that Hershberger opposes the Wisconsin milk legalization bill because it would impose such onerous new rules on “legal” milk that community producers like himself would be worse off than now.
Even leaving general corporatization aside, the concept promises corruption of the product (what kind of industrialized “product” will be allowed to be called “raw” milk; just look at the juice controversy which was the subject of this post) and Food Control Act-type increased burdens for small producers.
Got Raw Milk? The Government Wants to Know…
http://wabe.org/post/got-raw-milk-government-wants-know
1. Very good questions and very very good answers by David.
2. Before debating the safety of raw milk one must realize that it is not our governments responsibility to tell us what to eat. That is why we don’t make anything truly illegal in this country no matter how toxic or dangerous it is. They can require labeling if they want but only because it’s what we want. It isn’t even there job to require a warning label. That’s up to the insurance company.
3. The question isn’t can we prove our hundreds of claimed benefits of raw milk. The real question is can anyone prove our claims to be false.
4. The governments claim that raw milk is high risk is flat out wrong. It is not even supported by their own data. We even have a study that shows raw milk to be low risk. If anyone would bother to ask the 10 million U.S. raw milk consumers theyd know that the only risk is in not drinking raw milk.
5. Pasteurization of milk started in the late 1800s which is when these outbreaks started. Babies were dropping like flies until formula came out in the 50s.
6. David said people at the turn of the century didn’t understand illness and where it came from so how could they know if it came from raw milk? These are the same people that said raw milk caused strep throat.
7. This is not really a debate it’s a war that started over one hundred years ago when consumers first found out that dairies were secretly pasteurizing their milk.
8. Raw milk’s proponents are it’s customers. The opponents are it’s competitors.
9. We appreciate the seriousness of the states accusations against raw milk but do the courts appreciate the seriousness of our accusations against the state. We are doing everything in our power to find the cause of these so called outbreaks of foodborne illness. Can the government say the same?
10. Refrigeration does not improve the safety of raw milk. It is even safer after it sours.
11. Processors claim the pasteurization of milk improves it’s safety when in fact the opposite has been proven to be true.
12. David the way you described raw milk’s legality was the best I’ve ever heard.
13. Your point about labeling was very good also.
14. Your point about the dairy processing lobby was good but just between us the medical lobby is much much bigger.
15. Isn’t it interesting they want us to put a warning on raw milk but they don’t even list the ingredients on pasteurized milk.
16. It may be difficult to prove that raw milk is the safest food but even the state doesn’t say it’s the most dangerous.
17. The government is not concerned with conserving resources.
Some of these points would be difficult to argue in a public debate and even harder to cover in a 13 min. 20 sec. interview but they are, never the less important.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2509705/Mother-fined-putting-Ritz-crackers-childrens-lunch.html
The right way to analyze any particular example like this is to ask first if it’s corporate welfare. In this case, as usual, the answer is Yes. The school probably has a contract with Ritz. At any rate it tries to make you “buy” them.
Second is to see it as generic nanny-statism, which is just a “softer” form of police-statism. This is that too.
Similarly, the corporate state’s assault on real milk is 1. economic warfare on behalf of Big Ag, 2. working out a police state template for the broader assault on all non-corporatized agriculture and food.
Could there be a more clear indication that we have been bought and brainwashed? Mom sends her kids to a daycare center that has harmful and intrusive rules that she herself has authorized? You can’t make this stuff up.
Having children tends to focus the mind on the state of the world you know, and many years ago when mine were pre-school age, the question of what to do about school loomed for us as the primary, state-of-the-world issue. The public school system was a horrendous mess in our region, both culturally and educationally, but not being radicals (at the time) we couldn’t see much of an alternative. We looked at all the standard options of course–private schools, religious schools, new neighborhoods–but they all seemed to be mere buffed-up forms of the same devil. There didn’t seem to be a way out, and things were looking pretty grim, until I happened to hear a radio interview with a home-schooling mom from New York City. This lady, prior to homeschooling, had been a working mom–a lawyer–with kids in the public school. She had obviously been pretty well entrenched in the system, but had also become gradually disenchanted with the public school offerings. She responded, as she explained, in the way good parents do in such situations, attending school board meetings and parent-teacher conferences, writing letters, and generally engaging whatever opportunities the system gave her to create change. But nothing changed. Then suddenly, she had a great dawning notion: Her kids were HER problem, not the school’s problem. When that light came on, everything changed. She gave up her high-paying job, and brought her children home.
So, oddly, a NYC lawyer inspired my wife and I to become home-schoolers–a conversion which ultimately changed the trajectory of our lives by redefining normal in countless ways. I think the world could use a quite a bit more of that. Oh, were there more like the NYC mom!
I don’t have kids myself, but I have several friends who homeschool, mostly for the same reasons you describe.
I too think the world needs a lot more of this. Everything you say applies to our food production and distribution as well – disillusion, trying to work within the system, realizing that won’t work, our food is our problem and responsibility, let’s bring it home.
http://thebovine.wordpress.com/2013/11/19/food-police-in-manitoba-schools-are-puttin-on-the-ritz-fining-parents/
http://globalnews.ca/news/975825/mom-charged-10-for-lacking-ritz-crackers-in-daycare-lunch/
Does Canada not make a distinction between *school* and *day care*? Are they considered the same thing up there?
Not only that, this incident is nearly a year old already so things may have changed, maybe even for the worse, who knows. The picture of the note received from the school clearly shows the date this occurred as December 2012.
I then received an email showing a new post to The Bovine, and it also concerned this issue. Gotta give credit to the right sources!
There must be a parallel and simultaneous effort to open consumer access, and teach farmers proper practices. Marcie McBee is a perfect example. Her heart is in the right place for sure. She was a Grade A dairyman for many years and never knew about standards for raw milk!! Never heard of coliforms or how to control them. Never knew that Ecoli pathogens were a part of the coliform family. Why should she??? Grade A dairies do not concern themselves with that information. Kids got sick because of the raw milk access cart before the food safety horse was trained.
Freedom is not all you guys think it is. It comes with an I credible amount of responsibility and it must come with sober interest in safety and that means a plan and testing. Marcie called me last night and texted me this morning. It is amazing how much she has done with just 30 min of mentoring. Her counts are dropping like crazy and now she has some basic tools to measure her progress.
Save your tomato throwing at these words. If you do not support responsible and knowledgable production of raw milk…. Then let all of the preventable illnesses of children lay at your feet!!
You can call this tomato throwing if you want to, but I simply fail to understand how you can cheerlead for regulation with one breath and then cheerlead for raw milk with the next breath. If you are for regulation from any sort of “official department” you are essentially saying that raw milk is dangerous, and that it’s especially dangerous until someone official says it isn’t.
And, you said it yourself – – – Marcie never knew about coliforms and never worried about them until someone falsely accused her dairy of an illness which had nothing to do with her raw milk supply.
What am I not understanding here?
D, there is epidemiological evidence linking Marcie’s dairy to a number of illnesses, and this should be (actually is) enough to get her serious attention. Mark isn’t talking about state regulation, he is talking about self regulation. Anyone in business, and especially the food business, must do all they can to ensure that people aren’t getting sick from their product. Credible evidence a producer’s product has made people sick, even if not absolute and final, should be enough to encourage stock taking.
I’m glad Marcie is following up, and I’m sure her herdshare members are as well.
What the Act doesn’t state is how big your barn must be, what type of drain cover you must have, what kind of light fixtures you need to use, how many holes your sink must have, how many inches your toilet be from your kitchen, how many acres of stainless steel you must install, etc. It says, produce clean milk and then you can sell it.
Almost too common-sense to be true.
The funny thing is that those who impose and enforce this policy are so ignorant, of what a whole grain is, and regarding the notion that every meal has to contain one. It’s like the kind of idiot who smugly nitpicks someone else’s grammar while making basic spelling mistakes himself.
There’s a misdirectional straw man. No one here said any such thing. We simply reject your frequently reiterated notion that the likes of the FDA and CDFA could or would ever deal with real farmers and citizens in good faith, or that they have any legitimacy over our agriculture and food in the first place.
It sure is.
I also had an enamelled steel one. They work well, but begin to rust if they get chipped. Stay away from the aluminum ones, for obvious reasons!
Mjayrussell, reported by whom? Several people have made the statement about shiga toxin on this blog, as if the fact somebody or another made mention of it makes it a fact. But I have yet to see a link from a credible source. Wouldn’t you think the TN authorities would state that somewhere publicly if it were so? They referred to the epidemiological evidence, didn’t make mention of shiga toxin in the court order allowing Marcie McBee to resume operations. I’m perfectly willing to accept it, but not based on rumor mongering.
“Health department officials have been contacting persons who may be at risk in addition to
collecting raw milk samples from consumers as well as raw milk and manure samples from McBee Dairy Farm. To date, several raw milk samples, including the most recently collected, have been negative for E. coli O157. However, one raw milk sample obtained from a consumer and several manure samples collected from McBee Dairy Farm revealed DNA for Shiga toxin, the toxin that causes Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome andis produced by E. coli 0157. Analysis of these samples is ongoing.”
From Twitter feed:
Knox County H. D. ?@KCHDKNOXTN 8 Nov
An update on the E. coli outbreak investigation: http://ow.ly/d/1F3Z
Michele
I love my parents for homeschooling this sore thumb! And may I raise more non-conformist square pegs to plague the system in the next generation (one of the reasons I have 5 kids 🙂 )
http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/epidemiology
epidemiology [ep??-de?me-ol´o-je]
the science concerned with the study of the factors determining and influencing the frequency and distribution of disease, injury, and other health-related events and their causes in a defined human population…
analytic epidemiology the second stage in an epidemiologic study, in which hypotheses generated in the descriptive phase are tested.
descriptive epidemiology the first stage in an epidemiologic study, in which a disease that has occurred is examined. Data necessary in this phase include time and place of occurrence and the characteristics of the persons affected. Tentative theories regarding the cause of the disease are advanced and a hypothesis is formulated.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTxtgLpddUg
4. Association; cucumbers, because 67% of the 45 ill interviewed ate cucumbers while only 44% of the well people surveyed ate cucumbers and not because of any actual Salmonella contamination found.
5. Blame; 2 Mexican producers because 6 of the 45 ill interviewed eat their cucumbers and not because of any actual Salmonella contamination found.
Outline of the process of an epidemiological study
1. Establish that a problem exists
2. Confirm the homogeneity of the events
3. Collect all the events
4. Characterize the events as to epidemiological factors
5. Look for patterns and trends
6. Formulate a hypothesis
7. Test the hypothesis
8. Publish the results
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiological_method
Parents have the right to choose and to say “NO” to government propaganda that creates health problems for the majority of people who blindly follow it.
BTW, for those who choose to go grain-free, here’s a good page: http://www.marksdailyapple.com/top-8-most-common-reactions-to-your-grain-free-diet-and-how-to-respond
Parents have the right to choose and to say “NO” to government propaganda that creates health problems for the majority of people who blindly follow it.
BTW, for those who choose to go grain-free, here’s a good page: http://www.marksdailyapple.com/top-8-most-common-reactions-to-your-grain-free-diet-and-how-to-respond
This sounds suspicious. Toxins are generally proteins, and would not have any DNA. Living organisms have DNA, toxins do not. If they found DNA of a particular pathogen, they should have reported that.
As we should also be suspicious of the kind of elitist who believes in credentialism.
Ok I’ll now back off on the bad music jokes and switch over to the bad milk is good or better side, or just go away again you choose, I’ll be somewhere until I’m not. You too.
Ken
Michele
I guess TN wanted to make a scavenger hunt out of finding that claim about shiga toxin. So be it.
This just out today from Marcie McBee, as a press advisory: “We have regular testing in place now that will show us we have clean milk but it still does not make it 100% safe, as no living food is 100 % protected from having a bacteria enter it. My customers and I feel that we are well informed and able to make our own decisions about the food we consume. We also feel that the health department has done nothing to help us improve or locate a problem here. We have not been informed on any testing that we could have done or could incorporate to detect or prevent a problem. In the future I hope to be able to work with the University or the health department to help them and the farmers connect in better ways. Ways that are beneficial to the health of the public, the farm, and the government.”
This is a farmer who clearly wants to do better. I hope those searching high and low for the TN info on shiga toxin will credit McBee’s effort here, in the face of an information desert for farmers.
Ora Moose, please explain your fears of Russ? His responses are based on research and careful thought, as far as I can see. If you specifically disagree with a point, it would be more mature to explain why you do so than to basically say “You’re stupid”, which is laughable since the man obviously is not.
Reading his blog has opened my eyes to many truths about the system, for which I thank him.
Additionally, your comment is written in such a confusing manner, that I honestly can’t figure out what you’re saying.
1) What is a “corporate realities raid”?
2)Put WHAT to good use?
3)Let others do what for him? Think for him, or turn off his brain?
Who knows, maybe you were paying him a veiled compliment and I’ve misunderstood you; your comments in recent months have been so incoherent and loaded with non sequiters (and mysogenistic jokes), anything is possible.
It appears that responses are being distributed willy-nilly on your site.
My response to Russ @ 11/21/2013 – 18:52
Was definitely not directed at Mama who responded to Ora @ 11/22/2013 – 02:03.
Ken
Thanks for the advice. That’s exactly what I’ve done (the first part of what you said). That’s how I’m able to report on, for example, system technocrat types.
Meanwhile, it sounds like you’ve taken your own advice on the last part. That’s how you’re still able to be so scared when you hear the truth.
Well, at least I sobered you up for a minute so you stopped cluttering the thread with idiotic jokes.
Ken, it seems as if the site has problems once the comments on a particular post go to a second page–that’s all I can figure. My comment here, though, seems to be going where it is supposed to be. Unpredictable.
I agree about being suspicious of credentialism. The evidence for credentialism itself is compromised by conflicts of interest that have been well exposed over the years as monied interests. Not to say that has happened in this case, but all too often these “findings” and “tests” are performed by only one lab. It would take more than one result to convince me of some of these attack-like findings especially when people are also becoming ill from foods from major bigfood producers – with seemingly little interest in pursuing resultant data. Modern science brags on double-blind studies and then doesn’t do them with one of the most important factors in life – food.
And, like others here have mentioned, maybe the real culprit of some of these illnesses isn’t the milk at all – maybe it’s the treatment modality. We will never be sure about that sort of thing because money talks and power roars, and it is apparent that bigmedicine has much more money than a small dairy farmer and that biggubment has even more power to gain by making raw milk seem dangerous.
It’s too bad our gubment doesn’t put this much energy into cleaning up drinking water supplies. It’s totally scary what’s in the water.
https://www.facebook.com/montrealofficial/posts/130823253770167
How exactly is it possible for the author of this to be a constructive partner for raw milk, would someone please tell me?
The notion that formal credentials necessarily mean someone has any particular knowledge is a logical fallacy, “begging the question”. Why should we trust someone or believe he has any reality-based knowledge? “Because he has a credential granted by the system.” But the system’s authority, intentions, and intelligence are the exact things we’re questioning. Or at least I am, though clearly some here are not, which is what was the reason for my first comment.
In truth, if you look at corporate system technicians, you’ll find that the average cadre may have a high level of instrumental knowledge in a very narrow speciality (but removed from any moral or democracy context), but is amazingly ignorant and stupid about everything outside that specialty, about general knowledge, and about how holistic systems work. That’s why the vast majority of them are capable of believing in a system based on poisoning our crops, soil, water, and food. Anyone looking at this from outside would immediately see the infinite insanity and evil of industrial agriculture, and yet from the sensory deprivation tank inside, where PhDs live, it looks fine.
I also wondered why Mark seemed especially delighted that she was a helpmate in setting up the marler web site. ???? At first I thought he was being sarcastic, but then I re-read his post and, well, no, he wasn’t.
I asked Mark the other day why he seemed to be playing both sides against the middle. I can in no way see how “cooperation” with her builds bridges to success or whatever he calls it. I mean, I think his heart is in the right place but we’ve seen how these things can turn against us – quickly. Her being friends with lawyers like marler doesn’t make me feel any better about the whole thing either. Does the word interloper fit here? You have to be able to recognize the enemy and a disguise is a pretty handy and useful tool. Cui bono?
But, that’s just me.
If getting your PhD in Vet Med makes you forget Biology 101, then I’m glad to not be in the group of experts whose statements you appear to blindly accept.
Living creatures have DNA. Toxins do not: “Toxins can be small molecules, peptides, or proteins that are capable of causing disease…” — Wikipedia. The character sequence “DNA” does not appear on the Wikipedia page for “toxin” nor for “shiga toxin.”
If they detected DNA for an organism that produces Shiga toxin, they should have said so. But referring to “DNA for Shiga toxin” just makes them look silly, if not ignorant, to those who have taken rudimentary biology. It’s roughly the same as finding human DNA and then concluding there’s a bathroom nearby, or convicting someone of drunk driving because they had the DNA of Saccharomyces cerevisiae (fermentation yeast) in them.
Well now, that’s so generous of them, to condescend to us peasants. We’re not worthy!
“Openmindedness and a willingness to learn is generally positive.”
Yes indeed, and I hope you’ll take some time off from being McAfee’s flunkey, be open minded, and start learning something about the way Big Ag and the corporate state work.
You can start by ceasing to regurgitate the straw men that anyone here is saying real milk doesn’t have “risks”, or that there’s an either/or here between collaboration with governments which are clearly our enemies, and total chaos. I and others have consistently argued that the Community Food movement needs to gather information and educate about safety and good practices. But we say, in accord with the evidence and with the clear need to build this movement outside the system, that this safety information system must also be part of our movement and not an extension of the government. Not necessarily in direct confrontation with the government (but ready to do that too where necessary), but also not reliant upon it or in any way acknowledging its legitimacy. So we do want something similar to RAWMI, but not in collaboration with the government, which wants only to use the fact of this collaboration to give legitimacy to its assaults. (And to get the help of turncoat “raw milk dairymen” in doing so.)
Rejecting the legitimacy of Big Ag-based alien bodies like the FDA and CDFA is, of course, a core aspect of the basic principle of the movement, that Community Food is a sector completely separate from and independent of industrial ag, and that therefore “regulation” adapted to the needs and aggrandizement of the latter is inappropriate and impractical for the former. Indeed, such bureaucracies are, by their nature, bound to seek to destroy the former. And so they’ve been trying to do, and will continue under the Food Control Act.
With RAWMI we have a kind of triangulation, which wants to pretend that Community Food and Big Ag can work harmoniously together, and in that way lure people who are straying from Big Ag orthodoxy back into the slaughterhouse.
Bacteria including those designated, as pathogens have always existed. They are an absolute necessity, without which life would not be livable. The knowledge weve acquired with respect to these complex microscopic creatures is miniscule. In fact and I will say it again, they are hardwired with a desire to survive and our growing knowledge of these microscopic creatures emphasizes how little we know with respect to their existence and ability to survive. Clearly they are governed by intelligence far superior and more then likely beyond human understanding.
In fact and contrary to the following article, (although the article demonstrates the almost miraculous nature of microorganism),it is my belief that the more we manipulate bacteria and their environment, their complexity magnifies in relation to their growing ability to survive.
The NCBI article states,
If its naming had followed, rather than preceded, molecular analyses of its DNA, the extremophile bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans might have been called Lazarus. After shattering of its 3.2 Mb genome into 2030 kb pieces by desiccation or a high dose of ionizing radiation, D. radiodurans miraculously reassembles its genome such that only 3 hr later fully reconstituted nonrearranged chromosomes are present, and the cells carry on, alive as normal. In its ability to repair severe DNA damage, D. radiodurans is similar to several bacterial species (Cox and Batista, 2005) and the bdelloid rotifers (Gladyshev and Meselson, 2008), which also periodically contend with the DNA-shattering effects of desiccation. In this issue of Cell, Slade et al. (2009) provide the most comprehensive picture to date of how such miracles are wrought D. radiodurans cells are more than 200 times better able to repair and survive DNA breakage than Escherichia coli, which by comparison has a moderate capacity for repair (Cox and Batista, 2005 and references therein). Some of the prowess for repair displayed by D. radiodurans may result from having more complementary or homologous DNA fragments to engage as repair partners. Whereas E. coli carries 14 identical chromosomes per cell, D. radiodurans carries 410 copies of its two chromosomes per cell. Beyond this difference, the steps of repair in D. radiodurans appear to be conspicuously normal.
The differences in the repair capacities of D. radiodurans and E. coli seem ever more paradoxical. Daly et al. (2007) have suggested that protein stability to ionizing radiation is what makes D. radiodurans special, that is, that its repair proteins have normal functions but are afforded better protection from damage by oxidation and radiation. If so, it raises the question of whether E. coli might be able to repair a genome fragmented by restriction enzymes even though it cannot repair extreme damage induced by radiation.
Now this is where the article gets freaky, for it seems our knowledge is directly proportional to our desire to control and likewise our contempt for the natural order of life, Could the genes for extreme-repair potency of D. radiodurans be identified by introducing long stretches of its cloned DNA into E. coli and selecting for extreme resistance to radiation? Possibly, but the search would be difficult unless extreme repair requires only one or a few linked genes in addition to the standard repair genes that both organisms seem to share (for discussion see Cox and Batista, 2005).
However, if the miracle of extreme repair could be recreated in a tractable model bacterium like E. coli or the naturally transformable Bacillus subtilis, it might open up interesting applications for synthetic biology, which seeks to recreate life from its parts and to reassemble complete genomes of a species (e.g., Gibson et al., 2008).
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3319128/
Do you really believe that we can control the presence of perceived dangerous microorganisms in our environment and food using current methods and without causing ourselves more harm
Ken
Otherwise, it’s like matching two samples of pure water; they all have the same molecular structure.
(Actually, I understand there are two distinct Shiga toxins. So “matching” it is the equivalent of a coin toss, rather than a 100% certainty.)