How many people in this country raise vegetable gardens every year? How many of us have received little gifts of extra tomatoes, peppers, or corn-on-the-cob from our friends and neighbors? Some people have even been enterprising enough to sell some of their extra veggies at local farmer's markets for a little extra income. Seems like a pretty harmless, normal sort of activity doesn't it?
Apparently not any more. Seems like some Health Department employees think that fresh veggies (the kind that don't come wrapped in plastic and haven't been trucked over hundreds of miles) are a danger to our health. So dangerous in fact, you can't even feed them to your animals. You can read about the Farm to Fork Farm Dinner Fiasco for yourself. And here I thought it was just raw milk that was so dangerous and unsanitary! How naive of me. Perhaps I should only feed my kids out of a can from now on, that should be safe, right?
Friday, October 28, 2011
Thursday, October 13, 2011
Got Milk?
Well, if you are talking about raw milk, then no, probably not. That is because, unless you are fortunate enough to be able to buy the cow, even finding raw milk available for purchase can be like finding the proverbial needle in the hay stack. Why is that, you might ask. If you ask the FDA, or the CDC, or any number of other government agencies, they would tell you it is because raw milk is unsanitary and dangerous and causes the spread of disease. In a lot of states, buying raw milk in any way is illegal. Consuming it is legal, you just aren’t allowed to buy it. Makes about as much sense as politics usually does, right?
So what do you do if you want to drink raw milk and you don’t have the space, time, or money to be able to care for a cow? Well, the law (so far anyway) still says that drinking milk from a cow that you own is legal. So the majority of raw milk drinkers have begun to do what are called cow shares. You buy a partial share in a cow on someone else’s farm. Therefore you own part of this cow yourself, making it legal for you to drink her milk. After all, the law is about not selling the milk, which of course no one is doing. Just selling the cow.
I used to wonder why the government was trying so hard to stop me from drinking this milk. Not to sound like a conspiracy theorist, (although I probably do anyway) I think now that the main reason, maybe the only reason, is money and politics. The money is behind the huge corporations, oops I mean dairies, that sell the pasteurized yuck that most people think of as milk. I think too it should be pretty obvious by now that wherever the money is, there shall the politicians be also.
It seems pretty silly to me that, what with the “obesity epidemic” that things like sodas, energy drinks, and sugared-up so called “juice drinks” are still perfectly legal and can be bought in any grocery store. But of course they are still legal! We would be outraged if they were taken off the shelves in the name of health, wouldn’t we? That is because we as American citizens have the right to make our own choices about what we put in our bodies. Except for raw milk, that stuff can really make you sick. And we wouldn’t want to risk that, would we?
So what do you do if you want to drink raw milk and you don’t have the space, time, or money to be able to care for a cow? Well, the law (so far anyway) still says that drinking milk from a cow that you own is legal. So the majority of raw milk drinkers have begun to do what are called cow shares. You buy a partial share in a cow on someone else’s farm. Therefore you own part of this cow yourself, making it legal for you to drink her milk. After all, the law is about not selling the milk, which of course no one is doing. Just selling the cow.
I used to wonder why the government was trying so hard to stop me from drinking this milk. Not to sound like a conspiracy theorist, (although I probably do anyway) I think now that the main reason, maybe the only reason, is money and politics. The money is behind the huge corporations, oops I mean dairies, that sell the pasteurized yuck that most people think of as milk. I think too it should be pretty obvious by now that wherever the money is, there shall the politicians be also.
It seems pretty silly to me that, what with the “obesity epidemic” that things like sodas, energy drinks, and sugared-up so called “juice drinks” are still perfectly legal and can be bought in any grocery store. But of course they are still legal! We would be outraged if they were taken off the shelves in the name of health, wouldn’t we? That is because we as American citizens have the right to make our own choices about what we put in our bodies. Except for raw milk, that stuff can really make you sick. And we wouldn’t want to risk that, would we?
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