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Common cow gives milk, eats grass
By adamg on Mon, 05/10/2010 - 1:05pm
Cow
Cow munching contentedly on Boston Common grass this morning as she gets milked by raw-milk enthusiasts, who then downed her life-giving white liquid with gusto, in defiance of proposed state regulations that would bar such practices.
Why, I udder: The business end of the cow
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Comments
Thanks for the mammaries!
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Down with sanitation!
For too long the jackbooted thugs at the FDA have prevented us from ingesting things that are potentially contaminated with disease-causing bacteria. Intrusive government regulations have gotten between Americans and the enjoyment of their food. If some people have to die so that I can eat the kinds of cheese I want, that's a small price to pay. I mean, people who would die of salmonella are probably just children and the elderly anyway. Those people aren't me, so screw them.
ummm
Are they proposing that people should only be able to purchase unpasturized milk and cheese or that they should have the option and so should everyone else?
I agree with you. People
I agree with you. People should have the right to give themselves nasty diseases - as long as I don't get them.
No
People giving themselves nasty diseases would be fine...except that evolution of nasty diseases often happens in those people...which makes the nasty disease readily able to infect me again even if I've been vaccinated against its first form. This is the problem with the anti-vax argument of "what I do with my body doesn't affect you"...because it does.
HOWEVER, this is about being able to sell unpasteurized milk off of the farm it was collected in (they'd still be able to sell it direct from the farm under this new rule change). Pasteurization is NOT the same as vaccination when it comes to public health and germ exposure. If you can determine the health of the cow that is giving you milk, then you can be sure that what's coming out of it is safe or not. Pasteurization kills things that might have come from the cow and anything that might have contaminated the milk between the cow and the bottling. These are two situations the general public has no control over when trusting large dairy farms to produce milk for everyone...so pasteurization is a smart move to protect the general public. In the small unpasteurized farm/milk-share situations, as long as the farm/cow remains clean, the milk will be just as safe as any other milk and it's up to those participating whether they can trust the farm. The only protection by making them go to the farm to buy it will be whether the farmshare/pick-up locations were holding the milk in clean/cold/sanitary situations...and I have to imagine you wouldn't use a milk-share drop-off location that you thought wasn't handling the milk well, right? So, who does this protect? It just makes unpasteurized milk harder to obtain for everyone interested in it.
Here's the deal
Right now, you can join a club that will purchase raw milk from a raw-milk farm and then deliver it to you (or a place where you pick it up). The proposed state regs (link in my initial post) would outlaw this - you could only consume raw milk you purchased yourself at the farm where it was produced (the regs also spell out how the farmers have to minimize the risks of infection).
Am I missing something?
There's a sign back there that says "Raw Milk = jobs." How exactly does the FDA regulating milk cause jobs to be lost? I would imagine that the more regulations at the FDA, the more people jobs that are necessary to uphold those regulations...
a lot of people like to just
a lot of people like to just comment without actually looking up anything related to the argument, it seems. i have never had raw milk because well, it's hard to track down. but unpasteurized cheese curds are so unbelievably tasty. one of the best foods i've ever eaten. unfortunately i'd have to drive to quebec to get them...
seriously, though, do some research. as long as you're not pregnant, elderly, a small child, etc, you can make the choice to drink raw milk or eat unaged cheese made from raw milk with little chance of repercussion. oh, and i'm VERY pro vaccination. these are two completely unrelated arguments.
Frustrated radio reporter
This was more of an event for TV. A woman from one of the local radio stations went around muttering "I want it to moo! Just get it to moo!" Alas, the cow only eyed her boom mike placidly, then returned to nibbling the grass.