Hey, Mr. Fed Man!

Real milk!

Northern California is a strange and wondrous place. But not always good. One huge disappointment has been the lack of edible dairy products. My spine really responds well to dairy fat (probably the Wulzen Factor, an anti-stiffness compound found in raw fats). I was horrified to discover that raw milk is illegal in Humboldt County. I got really spoiled living in the Dairy Kingdom that is New England. Raw milk was legal from the farm, and most of the farms selling it understood that grass-based feeding is what educated consumers want. And it was $5-6/gallon, which seems reasonable to me.

Not so in Humboldt. I can score any strain of MaryJane  on any street corner in Arcata, but not milk. No butter or cheese worth eating, either. It’s all grain-fed, homogenized, and pasteurized. I see cows all around me, but neither they nor their products are getting the respect they deserve.

The basic rundown for those of you who are new to this:

• Cows evolved to eat grass, not grain. Grain destroys the delicate balance of their rumen and ultimately kills them. Grain-feeding alters the balance of fats in their milk and meat. This is the main reason the Omega-3 to Omega-6 ratio is off in most US Americans–in fact, some people have literally no measurable levels of Omega-3s in their bodies. An over-abundance Omega-6s has been implicated in everything from depression to asthma to Alzheimer’s.
• Cows on pasture–given the appropriate climate, soil, and topography–is a food system (ie, a biotic community) that could go on forever. Annual monocrops (grain), in contrast, are inherently destructive to the soil, which is the basis of life itself. Growing grain for people is stupid; feeding grain to animals is stupider still.
• Homogenzing milk turns it (the fats especially) into substances that the human body can not recognize as food. Pasteurizing milk destroys the enzymes that make milk more bio-available. Many people who think they are lactose intolerant can in fact drink raw milk from grass-fed cows just fine.
• Best book on the subject: The Untold Story of Milk by Dr. Ron Schmid.

I’ve pretty well stopped eating any dairy since moving to Humboldt County as a consequence. Once in desperation I bought some mozzarella that’s produced locally. A half-pound and 24 hours later, I had a rash all over my hands and my face. So I’m not making any of this up.

Today, however, I finally managed to get into the Milk Underground and bought a gallon of the good stuff. A gateway drug, clearly, as I intend to get some cheese from the same woman in two weeks.  She’s a wonderful, Weston Price-inspired food warrior, with a history similar to mine: 30 years as a vegetarian and the destroyed health to show for it. Now she has a secret shed with a refrigerator of contraband and a table of WAPF propaganda. You know how when you meet somebody who has the same information and you can almost immediately finish each others’ sentences? We instantly agreed that we need a huge shift in the food culture of the USA–what we think we know about food, what we’re producing, and how it’s being produced. And the hard, sad part is that the people who should be at the forefront (environmentalists) don’t even understand the problems, in large measure because they’ve been led astray by the vegetarian myth.

So: Viva Nutritionistas! Don’t Tread On Ruminants! The Revolution Will Not Be Pasteurized! Monocrops Are Murder!

And my favorite slogan so far: Eat Fat! (then in little letters below that: Raw and Grass-Fed)

So come and get me, Mr. Fed Man. My only regret is that I have but one life to give for my dairy products.