Tipping Points 9: Chicken Feed

Tipping Points 9

May 17, 2010

Chicken Feed

 We got six chickens in mid-March.  We had planned for four hens, but we bought five hens and a rooster!  We named them almost immediately as each one has a distinct personality.  A chicken can live as long as twelve years.  Hens are born with a finite number of eggs.  Once the eggs are gone, decisions must be made about the difference between pets and stew-pot candidates.

For me, getting chickens has been a long-held dream.  For John, raised in urban Boston, getting chickens has been a huge leap into an unknown terrain of increased responsibility, pressure on our limited yard space, and the Maine winter.  Nevertheless, John found our chicken coop at the Maine Organic Farmers and Growers Association’s Common Ground Fair last September.

Designed and made by Stephen Gingras of Augusta, Maine, our coop is made for four chickens.  Upon seeing it, we knew we could never make something so perfect.  Our coop has an internal roost; three egg boxes, one of which we use for food; an inside power switch so we can use a light bulb for heat on cold nights; a free-range opening under the egg boxes which our tall rooster finds undignified; a let-down door with a window for easy coop cleaning; a tin roof; a detachable cage; and wheels.

You can see more views of our coop at www.rootscoopsandmore.com.  Gingras coops are kits, but Stephen and Lori delivered ours assembled and helped us drag it up a steep incline.

I didn’t need to obtain chickens for good eggs.  In the Camden, Maine, area we are blessed with many small flocks of healthy, free-range chickens whose eggs can be found at local markets.  My personal favorites are the eggs Rose and Peter Thomas produce and sell at their Vegetable Shed, which is on 173 in Lincolnville.  I visit this farm frequently, so I know these chickens free range, eat organic food, and have yolks that are a deep gold to pumpkin orange.

We traveled to see our children in November, and winter, which is hard on chickens, was closing in when we got home.  Getting chickens would be a spring project.

I am reminded how egg-spoiled I have become when I travel.  Commercial eggs, organic or not, have yolks that are the same color nearly as the white.  They taste bitter, and when hard-boiled are rubbery and altogether disgusting.  It’s sad that most people these days do not realize how delicious a good egg is or that a good egg takes good chicken feed.  Indeed, I doubt eggs from commercial layers, even if fertilized, could make a chick.

So, the problem I researched all winter was what to feed the chickens.  All the commercial feeds, including the organic feeds, are 90 percent corn; 10 percent soy; and have about 20 chemicals, meal waste products from other industrial processes, and soybean oil that my research warns goes rancid and can be both highly processed and trans fat laden.  The corn/soy ratio does not contain enough protein, so organic rules allow the addition of a synthetic essential amino acid, methionine.  The organic brand our chickens were eating is all mashed up so it is predigestable, which means a chicken will eat more of it.  Industrial theory is a stuffed chicken lays more eggs.  This feed looks like bran cereal, and our chickens eat it last when it is mixed with our feed.

Organic rules stopped the addition of unspeakable animal by-products into chicken feeds, but rather than choosing a healthy protein source or a better grain/legume ratio, the organic industry chose cheapness.  Corn and soy are cheap.  Corn fattens, and while soy, which must be cooked, provides protein, it has a dangerous antinutrient package that American industry has never been able to fully detoxify.  If soy antinutrients slowly poison animals, what are they doing to humans eating chicken eggs and flesh?

Also, all commercial chicken feed is throwing off the omega 3 and 6 ratios in both eggs and meat.  Human diets should have a ratio of 1:1, or not more than 1:3 (omega 6).  The American diet today is giving most Americans an omega 3 to 6 ratio of 1:20-25.  This boosted omega 6 imbalance is not healthy and is likely part of why so many people have chronic illnesses.

Further, chickens are omnivores, not vegetarians.  They will eat grains and legumes, which are low in omega 3, only after choosing greens, insects, meat, fish, and milk products.  Grain/legume mixtures should be supplements only, offered for free choice, and should include at least five different whole grains.

Bolstered by reading G. F. Heuser’s FEEDING POULTRY, published in 1955 at the advent of the commercial chicken industry when people still had small flocks, and by my own research (see, for instance, www.lionsgrip.com/chickensidealfeed.html), I determined a feeding program.  The chickens would free range for greens and insects, and I would supplement with meat; fish; milk products like yogurt, milk, whey, and buttermilk from making butter; some leftovers from the kitchen; and a grain, legume (no soy), and seed mixture that I found from Greener Pastures Farm, www.greenerpasturesfarm.com.  I don’t always mix everything listed, but I do include the major grains and the two legumes.  I wish our Maine farmers would offer an organic, whole-grain, no-soy legume mixture.

Rose and I began hunting pullets, which are coming into laying, in early March.  Since I only wanted four hens, Rose offered to give me four of a larger order.  Most commercially raised pullets have been debeaked, which prevents chickens crowded close together from pecking each other.  When I see these maimed creatures, I feel like I’m going to burst into tears and vomit.   I wanted also to avoid shipping day-old baby chicks.  Surely, I believed, someone local has some pullets.

And, someone in Vassalboro, Maine, about 40 minutes away, did.  There were some year-old Copper Black Marans that were not breeding quality and some excess Wheaten Ameraucanas.  The Marans, a solid, docile, friendly breed, are common in France, but in America are rare.  Chefs highly prize the deep chocolate brown Maran egg.  The Wheatens, which streak about the yard like flashes of wily quicksilver, lay a blue egg.

I have the Maran rooster, Rose has the Ameraucana rooster, and we each have a selection of both breeds that is weighted toward our rooster.  We’ve gotten an incubator and plan to hatch eggs to replenish our flocks and to offer local baby chicks next spring.  Rose now has gorgeous egg colors ranging from deep chocolate brown, to light brown, to rose, to blue, to white.

In addition to being fascinated with chickens, I wanted to create a holistic garden circle where I could add composted animal manure to our vegetable beds which, in turn, would help feed the animals.  The chickens don’t produce as much fecal matter as I had expected.  It’s easy to collect droppings around the yard for the dedicated composter which will compost for a year.  I only need to change out coop bedding once a month as I remove fecal matter daily .

Our chickens are scratching only bare soil surface.  And, while they walk sometimes on emerging plants, they are light enough and not numerous enough to do damage.  Though they pruned some new leaves on the raspberries, so far they have not destroyed one single plant.  They do make dirt baths in bare soil, so we got some wood ash from friend Margaret Rauenhorst and made a dedicated space.  Dirt baths are important deterrents for chicken pests.

I also wanted to use the chickens for pest patrol.  Our chickens steadily work our beds, so I am expecting fewer pests this year.  For the moment, I may also have fewer worms since I am a sucker for the company and conversation that starts if I weed with a trowel.  Worms are generally at a deeper level, so if I weed, all six come to supervise and to eat whatever worms they can get.

When our asparagras started emerging  and it was time to plant peas, we got some flexible plastic fencing for the big vegetable garden.  Next, we enclosed temporarily the strawberry patch.  I know we will have to pen our chickens in early June when it’s time to plant potatoes, seedlings, and seeds in non-fenced beds.  But we hate to pen them as it limits their “chickeness.”

We’ll have to pen the rooster when the grandchildren are here in July.  Napolean is as tall as our two little girls, and he is unpredictably protective of the hens, as our irrepressible rat terrier, No No Penny, will testify.  She is scared to death of him.  He does not seem to think the calmer rat terrier, Reynolds, is a problem.  But, when I forget and wear my red rain clogs, he decides I am a threat.  Otherwise, he is a sweet boy and lets me pick him up and hold him, which I do frequently.

In April, our five hens laid 110 eggs, or an average of 3.6 eggs a day.  On many days now, we are blessed with five eggs.  The yolks are a deep, rich, golden orange, and all six chickens seem healthy and happy.   

Turkey Tracks: Nancy’s Dirt Bath

Turkey Tracks:  May 7, 2010

Nancy’s Dirt Bath

Nancy is an Ameraucana Wheaten chicken.  She is one of two Wheaten hens we have.  The other one is named Sally.    Nancy was Martha Washington.  But, she isn’t a Martha.  She’s a Nancy.  And, Sally was Sally Ross until we recalled that the flagmaker was not Sally Ross, but Betsy.  We already have three chickens with “B” names.  We don’t need another one.  Anyway, Sally is a Sally.  The Wheatens lay medium-sized blue eggs that are as smooth and shiny as polished rocks.  These girls needed American names because their flockmates are French Copper Black Marans.

Both of the Wheatens love dirt baths and take several every sunny day.  It’s something to watch.  Here’s something of a sequence though this dirt bath thing goes on for a long time:

Then, there’s always the moment when the Wheatens go so into the moment that they look like they’ve died, which can really give you a start if you’ve not seen them do it.  Oh my God, you think.   Something’s killed one of the chickens!!!

 

Turkey Tracks: Sunrise on Mount Desert, From Isle Au Haut

Turkey Tracks:  May 6, 2010

Sunrise on Mount Desert, From Isle Au Haut

I’ve been working on two small art quilts that will hang in our newly painted bedroom.  I’ve finished this one:  Mount Desert From Isle Au Haut. 

 

 

Mount Desert is Acadia National Park near Bar Harbor, Maine, and it is one of the most beautiful places on this earth.  The highest mountain is Cadillac Mountain.   Mount Desert is pronounced “dessert,” like a sweet.  The first time I heard this pronouncement I thought the person saying it was making a mistake.   Instead, I just didn’t know–which is not unusual.  I have always read so much that I know many words by sight, but have, often, not actually heard them pronounced.  They exist in my brain in an alternate universe.   

Isle Au Haut, or High Island, is where Linda Greenlaw lobsters.  You remember her, right?  She was the woman long-boat captain in THE PERFECT STORM.  She still lobsters I think.  But she also writes books.  Her mother is a famous cook on Isle Au Haut and in the region.  Linda and her mother wrote a cookbook together. 

John and I visited Isle Au Haut for our son Bryan’s 40th birthday celebration–a visit planned by his wife, Corinne.  One goes to the island on the mail boat, and we went out in a storm, which was quite exciting.  The only cars on the island are old ones, so everyone bikes and hikes around and, occasionally, get rides from local people with cars.  Berries grow wild, and the air smells so sweet.  It’s a magic place.  We stayed at the Inn at Isle Au Haut, and the view in the quilt is from the inn’s dock.      

The companion piece pictures the Blue Moon we had in December 2009.  The moon is rising over the Camden Hills and Megunticook Lake.  It is almost done.  But, with the early spring, I’ve been out in the yard a lot and have not quilted very much.   

Turkey Tracks: Seedlings

Turkey Tracks:  May 6, 2010

Seedlings

We are having the warmest spring.  I feel like plants are about a month early this year.  We put up our first pea trellis this year, and I planted peas in the garden in mid-April.  The peas are all up now.  So, I planted the second batch a few days ago.  I can only stay in the garden for a little while on cloudy days as the black flies are horrendous right now. 

It has been horribly dry too.  We’ve already had to water the garden and the strawberries.  For one day I thought we had lost the strawberries.  I just had not realized how dry it was.  And, it is not normal to have to water in Maine in April and early May.   

I planted seedlings inside about a month ago.  They are all up now, and seem to be growing well.  We enclosed the little porch upstairs.  It faces southeast and has no overhang, which is perfect for the seedlings .  Here’s what they looked like about 10 days ago. 

Outside the picture frame are about 70 sprouted leeks.  I’ve never planted leeks, so I’m quite excited about those too.  The seedlings are several kinds of tomatoes, cabbage, broccoli, and Brussels sprouts.    

 

Turkey Tracks: Jeanne Marie Robinson

Turkey Tracks:  May 6, 2010

Jeanne Marie Robinson

Rest in Peace

A friend and I drove to a gallery in Topsham last week to pay homage to a selection of Jeanne Marie Robinson’s quilts.  Jeanne Marie, who died very recently of cancer, was an amazing quilter.  She created whole worlds out of cloth.  She loved applique, but she combined applique with traditional piecing and with art quilt techniques.  She had a unique vision that will be sorely missed by anyone who has ever seen one of her quilts.  

Here are two quilts that hung in this memorial show:

JMR 1

Jeanne Marie was also very generous with her work.  For the past three or four years she donated one of her pieces for the Coastal Quilters yearly auction fundraiser.  Of course, her donations always brought in the most money for any one single item.

In her youth, she was a nationally known ballet artist.  It was only in her later years that she turned her talents toward fiber art.  Boy are we who could see her ongoing work glad that she did!

Tipping Points 8: Drinking Real Milk

(You may want to read my essays in order.)

April 26, 2010

Tipping Points 8

Drinking Real Milk

 

I started drinking real milk as an act of faith four years ago.  I can still remember how shocked I was that anyone would risk drinking real milk when my neighbor casually said how lucky she felt to have been able to buy real milk locally for her children.  I did not try it right away.  I asked other friends if they drank “real milk,” began to read labels, and began to notice how much of our milk is now ultrapasteurized.  I will confess that I am now addicted to raw milk. 

I recently traveled to Norfolk, Virginia, which is a wasteland for the kind of quality food we enjoy in Maine.  The best I could do for milk was organic whole milk that was homogenized and ultrapasteurized.  To my surprise it tasted bitter, as does milk that has been allowed to boil.  And, it had none of the silky smoothness or the energy, the feeling of life held in a living product, that I experience with real milk. 

Ron Schmid, in THE UNTOLD STORY OF MILK (2009), notes that “milk in general—both pasteurized and raw—is a particularly safe food.”  In 1997, “milk and milk products accounted for only two tenths of one percent of all reported cases of food-borne illness.”  However, when an outbreak occurs, it “usually involves many individuals” (274). 

But, does commercial milk supports human health?  Schmid argues that commercial milk is a compromised product that can and does produce allergic reactions and chronic illness. 

Schmid discusses two competing paradigms which emerged in France in the 1860s:  Louis Pasteur’s germ theory, or the belief that germs cause illness, and Claude Bernard’s milieu interieur theory, or the belief that “illnesses are caused by a failure of the immune system to adequately cope with infectious agents” (43).  Robert Koch’s discovery and isolation of the organisms causing tuberculosis and cholera (1880s) gave Pasteur’s germ theory broad acceptance.  But, Schmid notes, this “mechanistic understanding of disease banished the individual’s power to prevent it and placed the mandate to cure squarely in the hands of the medical professionals” who became allies with the drug companies, since the belief arose also that disease germs could only be “overwhelmed and eliminated” by drugs (46-47). 

Yet, Schmid notes, “ample evidence existed to support Bernard’s alternative theory” of the strong immune system (47).  And recent studies by the Institute for Genomic Research (2008) demonstrate that a healthy human body carries about six pounds of beneficial bacteria which perform myriad tasks, to include creating conditions where pathogens cannot take hold (48). 

Dr. J.E. Crewe, a Mayo Foundation founder, practiced milk cures in the 1920s and 1930s.  White blood (real milk), fed exclusiverly to patients, built up resistance and produced results that Dr. Crewe claimed were so “ `uniformly excellent that one’s conception of disease and its alleviation is necessarily changed’ “ (83).  

Dr. Francis M. Pottenger’s studies on hundreds of cats over 10 years showed that those fed raw milk “thrived with virtually no illness” and produced “generation after generation of healthy cats” (92).  Cats fed pasteurized milk; evaporated milk; or condensed, sweetened milk became diseased and were “eventually unable to reproduce.”  These cats, writes Schmid, were “highly susceptible to infectious and chronic illness and exhibited degenerative skeletal changes” (92).

Dr. Edward Howell, who died in 2000 at 102 years, was considered by many nutritionists to be “the world’s leading expert on enzymes” (10).  Dr. Howell believed enzymes facilitate “ `every chemical reaction that occurs in our body’ “ (10).  He believed that one is born with “ `a certain enzyme potential,’ “ and if we use up our supply of enzyme activity too quickly, we die.  Thus, eating enzyme rich foods, among them real milk, helps our body preserve its enzyme potential, while eating refined foods uses up our enzyme potential.

Dr. Weston Price, a dentist, traveled the world in the 1930s to study healthy people.  The archive he left gives invaluable testimony about the foods healthy people ate.  Dr. Price demonstrated through biochemical analysis that native diets of healthy people were “rich in nutrients poorly supplied in modern diets” (139).  Included in the list of foods commonly used by some of the healthy people Dr. Price studied are whole milk, cheese, and butter from grass-fed animals (141). 

Numerous qualified observers in the early 1900s reported that cancer, diabetes, tuberculosis, and dental caries did not exist among Eskimos who ate a nutrient-dense, high protein, high-fat diet rich in fermented foods and kelp (110-115).  Nomadic peoples, some of whom exist today, consumed meat; meat fat; organs; and whole, real milk from healthy pasture-fed animals and fermented and foraged foods (112). 

Enzymes process human food.  When we eat, food initially rests in the upper part of our stomachs for thirty to forty-five minutes where the enzymes in the food itself begin digestion.  When the lower stomach opens, the body has to secrete enzymes and acids to process food.  Thus, people eating enzyme-rich foods stress the body less (104-105). 

Milk contains eight identifiable enzymes which facilitate the utilization and digestion of milk.  Fermenting milk enhances these enzymes.  Two of these enzymes destoy pathogens.  Indeed, Schmid notes, lactoferrin was approved by the FDA in 2004 “for use as an anti-microbial spray to combat virulent E. coli contamination in the meat industry” (107).  Pasteurization destroys these enzymes and most of the vitamins C, B6, and B12  and changes the “physical and chemical state of calcium and other minerals that affect absorption” (108). 

Homogenization “crushes milk by forcing it under high pressure and temperature through holes in a die” (250).  People used to judge the quality of their milk by the layer of cream on the top of the glass bottle (250, 262).  The campaign to break down consumer resistence to homogenization took thirty years, but by the 1950s the milk industry “succeeded in convincing Americans to accept a product designed solely for the profit and convenience of manufacturers and distributors” (251). 

After pasteurization and homogenization, milk can be “transported over long distances and stored for a long time” (250).  And, ultrapasterized milk does not require refrigeration if stored in an airtight container.        

Inside a milk factory, all milk is combined and then “separated in centrifuges into fat, protein and various other solids and liquids.”  Then milk is reconstituted at standarized levels for whole, lowfat, and nonfat milk (240).  Homogenization permitted the industry to standardize the cream levels to 3 ½ percent from the 4 to 8 percent butterfat levels of pasture-fed cows.  The skimmed cream makes profitable products for the industry, like ice cream (262), where, as reading labels shows, the cream is further stretched with additives. 

However, Schmid writes, “when fat is removed, it is replaced with protein-and-vitamin-rich skimmed milk powder or concentrate.”  But, drying milk both produces nitrates, “which are potent carcinogens,” and causes “oxidation of the cholesterol in milk.”  Oxidized cholesterol initiates “the process of injury and pathological plaque build-up in the arteries.”  Finally, “the body needs vitamin A to assimilate protein,” so when we “consume foods rich in protein without the supporting fats,” the body “draws on the vitamin A stored in the liver”—a depletion which begins “ushering in a host of diseases.”  Adding calcium and synthetic vitamins to milk, Schmid writes, is “unlikely to benefit consumers…since synthetic versions are poorly absorbed and may often have toxic effects” (217).  Nonfat dried milk is not listed on the label since the FDA allows this practice as an industry standard (240-242).   

So, cooking milk, fracturing its chemical components, and adding additives changes real milk drastically.  Certainly the industrial process is introducing new and dangerous pathogens into milk. 

Schmid cautions that anyone who has undergone chemotherapy should not drink raw milk as it is a living food.  But, he notes also statistics from a 2003 USDA/FDA/CDC paper showing that “deli meats are ten times more likely to cause illness than raw milk” and that pasteurized milk is twenty-nine times more likely (320). 

Here in Maine, we are so lucky.  We can buy delicious, nutrient-dense raw milk from local farmers in our local markets.  My children can and do buy real milk in South Carolina, too.  Those of you who live elsewhere can go to the Real Milk website, www.realmilk.com, to locate real milk sources. 

So, go ahead, refuse to let the milk industry and the government scare you.  Buy local real milk!

Tipping Points 7: Betrayal of Our Trust

(You may want to read my essays in order.)

April 26, 2010

Tipping Points 7

Betrayal of Our Trust

  

“You could get undulant fever,” my mother said when I told her a few years ago that I was drinking raw milk, that we could buy it in our local markets in Maine.  “You could get tuberculosis,” said my younger sister who struggles with a severe case of Parkinson’s.  Typhoid fever, scarlet fever, and diphtheria lurk in our national perception of raw milk. 

Ron Schmid in The Untold Story of Milk (2009) describes how at the end of World War II, when “thousands of small farms throughout the country still sold raw milk directly to consumers and through local distribution channels,” a massive campaign to demonize raw milk began.  As Will Allen describes with the chemical industry in The War on Bugs (2008), the campaign was waged in part in popular magazines.  The first salvo of the war against raw milk began in The Ladies Home Journal in 1944 with an article called “Undulant Fever.”  The article claimed—without any documentation—that “tens of thousands of people in the U.S. suffered from fever and illness because of exposure to raw milk.”  In 1945, Coronet published “Raw Milk Can Kill You,” by Harold J. Harris, MD.  Articles in The Progressive and Reader’s Digest followed in 1946 (150). 

Schmid shows that Harris, in his Coronet article, fabricated a town and an epidemic.  Harris located Crossroads, USA, in  “ `one of those states in the Midwest area called the bread basket and milk bowl of America.’ “  Harris claimed  “ `what happened to Crossroads might happen to your town—to your city—might happen almost anywhere in America.’ “  Harris claimed undulant fever struck one out of four people in Crossroads and, “ `despite the efforts of two doctors and the State health department, one out of every four patients died.’ “  Harris later not only admitted his malicious fabrication, but, Schmid writes, other statements he made demonstrated that “he knew such a thing could not possibly happen” (150). 

Undulant fever, or brucellosis, is, Schmid says, an “infectious disease that occurs in cattle and other animals and is transmitted to humans primarily through physical contact.”  Brucellosis is an “occupational hazard for meatpackers, veterinarians, farmers and livestock producers and handlers.”  Milk drinkers risk exposure only if a “grossly infected” animal sheds the organism into the milk.  Actually, nationwide statistics from the U.S. Public Health Service from 1923 to 1944, or for the 21 years preceding Harris’s article, show there were 256 cases of undulent fever, with 3 deaths (151).  But, because of this industry campaign, my mother, who grew up drinking raw milk, stopped drinking it.   

Some, like Jean Bullitt Darlington, who in 1947 wrote a three-part series entitled “Why Milk Pasteurization?” in the Rural New Yorker, tried to combat industry-produced lies.  Her articles “Sowing the Seeds of Fear,” “Plowing Under the Truth,” and “The Harvest is a Barren One,” obviously, had no impact on the milk industry’s juggernaut (151).  But, I doubt my mother, who lived in rural Georgia, ever read these articles.  Demonstrably, the milk industry’s juggernaut succeeded.

We’ve known, Schmid writes, since 1882, with the work of Robert Koch, that “the human and the bovine tubercle” are “neither identical nor transmissible, and that humans had nothing to fear from bovine bacillus.”  Schmid writes that “the only way the bovine tubercle may pass directly into the milk is if the disease in the animal has become generalized and tubercular lesions have formed on the udders.”  Another indirect route is fecal contamination (35-36). 

The human tubercle may contaminate the milk if a tubercular milker coughs into or otherwise mishandles the milk.”  (35-36)  But, the closed-system automatic milking machine, invented in 1920, prevents the contamination of raw milk by human milkers.  And, today, “most states no longer test for bovine TB because it is nearly unknown in America…though most states that license the retail sale of raw milk do require testing the cows used for milk production” (71-74). 

 Applied Dairy Microbiology (2001) is a comprehensive reference text for dairy microbiology.  In it, Schmid says, Elliot T. Ryser, PhD, of Michigan State University, discusses the safety and quality of milk and, without references for what is “incorrect information,” claims that bacterial infections like diphtheria, scarlet fever, tuberculosis, and typhoid fever were linked to raw milk before World War II (232-234).  Meanwhile, Schmid notes, Ryser does not discuss the 1927 Montreal pasteurized milk-borne outbreak of typhoid which affected nearly 5,000 people and killed 450 people.  Further, Schmid writes, Ryser claims, without references, that the 1986 banning of all interstate shipment of all raw milk products reduced raw-milk related outbreaks of milk-derived illness except in farm families (308-310). 

Schmid notes that Ryser does call aflatoxins, which derive from mold in grains, “ `a major public health concern based on the potential impact of chronic exposure.’ “  Schmid agrees with Ryser that aflatoxins are “potent liver carcinogens for both animals and humans.”  Aflatoxins, Ryser writes, are “ `relatively unaffected by pasteurization, sterilization, fermentation, cold storage, freezing, concentrating or drying….’ “  Yet, Schmid notes, Ryser does not discuss “the desirability of grass feeding,” or “the possibility of utilizing pasture-based systems,” or “the importance of using less grain in feeding” (232-234).  

Schmid, after his exhaustive search through the archives of milk-related data, concludes that the dangers of drinking raw milk from healthy cows and from clean milking systems have been grossly exaggerated by public health officials,  by medical literature, and by, therefore, doctors.  This banning, Schmid argues, has been based on junk science, outright distortions of data, and invented stories:  raw milk is a nutrient dense whole food with a long history of supporting human health.  In the past 40 years, there have been no milk-borne cases of typhoid fever, scarlet fever, or diphtheria despite the fact that raw milk is legally sold in some 35 states and that “millions of farm families” have consumed raw milk (310-311).

So, Schmid charges, warnings about raw milk derive from another motive than the protection of human health (310-311).  And the banning of raw milk by our private and public institutions is a betrayal of our trust (149).     

 Schmid critiques the USDA’s “Official Statement on Raw Milk.”  He argues, with the weight of his research behind him, that “honest investigators have demonstrated that the risk from raw milk is very low”; that “raw milk from healthy cows raised on fresh pasture, produced under sanitary conditions, simply does not contain pathogenic bacteria”; that raw milk can be and is routinely tested for bacteria; that the system of unhealthy cows in confinement dairies produces dangerous pathogens that pasteurization does not kill; that the “cases” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) uses to support the banning of raw milk are biased and flawed; that our government is operating a double food standard as many other industrial, processed foods are much more lethal than raw milk; that the scientific evidence supporting the nutritional benefits of raw milk are being ignored willfully; and that government rulings have nothing to do with the safety of raw milk and everything to do with benefiting the commercial dairy industry (433-442).  I would add that this situation is an effect of the power of corporatism.   

Most importantly, Schmid charges that mandatory pasteurization is a fascist tactic that cannot be said to be supported by our constitution which embodies concepts of freedom of choice.  He asks whether “our constitutional government…[has] the right to make laws outlawing a food that has sustained much of humanity throughout recorded history” (264). 

It’s a good question.

Tipping Points 6: The Untold Story of Milk

(You may want to read my essays in order.)

April 26, 2010

Tipping Points 6

The Untold Story of Milk

 Ron Schmid, in his recently updated book THE UNTOLD STORY OF MILK (2009), explores the history of the commercial milk industry.  The pattern Schmid describes is the same pattern described by Will Allen in THE WAR ON BUGS (2008), discussed in Tipping Points 4.  Both men show that industry demonizes competitive practices (organic farming, raw milk), creates and uses junk science, purchases massive amounts of advertising, and acquires government support to legalize industry practices and to police industry domination of the desired market. 

Schmid shows how little freedom of choice we actually have with regard to milk.  Most Americans have lost the ability to purchase nutrient dense raw milk, and too many dairy farmers have been driven from their farms due to relentless industry pressures to produce large quantities of milk cheaply. 

Schmid demonstrates that all commercial dairy cows, including organic cows, are production units in an industrial system.  The cowness of these cows is being violated.  Commercial cows are neither grazed on pasture nor milked for a reasonable amount of milk.  Thus, the commercial milk system is a garbage in/garbage out system. The milk from these factory cows is not the same as the nutrient dense milk from a pasture-fed cow.  And, industry-processed milk is highly processed.   

Today’s commercial milk industry, as Schmid’s research shows, has not changed philosophically and, in many ways, physically since the early 1800s at the dawn of this industry.  Then, cows were located next to and fed with the swill from whiskey distilleries.  In the late 1830s, Schmid relates, Robert Hartley wrote graphically about the conditions in these dairies.  These cows stood constantly in filth and foul air (55).  They produced cheap slop milk that was so thin and blue that dealers added “starch, sugar, flour, plaster of Paris, and chalk” to give it substance and color (36).  Hartley believed slop milk to be dangerous because when he drank it unknowingly while traveling, it made him sick (33-38).  Unbelievably, the last distillery dairy did not close until 1930. 

Today, Schmid writes, many industrial cows are fed such things as pellets made from the chemically tainted sludge from ethanol plants; chicken manure, which is a known source of salmonella; grain, which increases milk production but causes acidosis and which permits the cow’s stomach to harbor acid-resistant E. coli pathogens; soybeans; bakery waste (bread, cakes, pastries, and candy bars); and “citrus peel cake loaded with pesticides” (39, 223, 358, 298, 324).  Today, most commercial cows are kept in environmentally controlled dairy barns where they stand constantly on concrete floors, which causes painful, laming infections of their feet (210-211).  Normally, cows spend about 50 percent of their time lying down (212). 

Schmid shows that commercial cows are either sickening or sick.  The average life span of a commercial dairy cow is only 3½ years, rather than the normal 12 to 15 years (206).  The national Mastitis Council estimates that some 40 percent of “all dairy cows have some form of mastitis,” an infection of the udder—which means that a lot of commercial milk is coming from sick cows who are being given antibiotics and other drugs.  Medicating sick cows, in turn, “kills off beneficial bacteria in the cows’ intestinal tracts and allows pathogens to proliferate.” 

Thus, Schmidt concludes, both the industry and our industry-corrupted government accept “a substantial amount of disease in confinement cows as part and parcel of the operation” (215).  And, Schmidt adds that “for over fifty years, the federal government has done everything in its power to encourage the production of large quantities of cheap milk and cheap food in general—at the expense of quality and at the price of driving millions of small, quality-conscious farmers off the land” (164).

Cooking milk, or pasteurization, supposedly kills pathogens (210-214).  But commercial milk contains pathogens that even ultrapasteurization cannot kill:  Johne’s disease bacteria, known as Mycobacterium avium paratuberculosis and thought to cause Crohn’s disease; Listeria monocytogenes; and E. coli O157:H7, a deadly strain of this particular E. coli strain (437, 358-359, 238-239).  [Schmid cautions, however, that many forms of E.coli do not cause human illness and, in fact, “play a beneficial role in the digestive track.”  Even with E. coli O157:H7, “Schmid writes, “only a few…strains are pathogenic” (311).]  Additionally, cows eating moldy grain can excrete into their milk aflatoxins, which are liver carcinogens and which pasteurization does not kill.  And, commercial pasteurized milk has harbored antimicrobial-resistant Salmonella strains that have caused widespread illness and, even, death (231).

Many pathogens today have recently emerged.  The industrialized, centralized food system is producing these new pathogens.  They are the blowback from the breakdown of holistic farming practices that respect the cowness of cows and the levels of use the soil can support.  Using technological solutions, such as moving from pasteurization to ultrapasteurization to irradiation, is only creating further problems for humans as these solutions are altering food components. 

Schmid writes that Robert Tauxe, from the Center for Disease Control (CDC), reported in 2002 that 13 recently emerged pathogens annually cause the 76 million individual cases of food-borne illnesses, 300,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths.  Tauxe estimated that one in four Americans experience a food-borne illness every year.  Additionally, Schmid argues, it is becoming clearer that much human illness is being caused by the “reduced human immunity due to poor nutrition” caused by consuming products from the centralized food system (274-277). 

Nevertheless, Schmid writes, “milk in general—both pasteurized and raw—is a particularly safe food” when compared to the amount of food-borne illnesses created by the food industry.  In 1997, “milk and milk products accounted for only two tenths of one percent of all reported cases of food-borne illness.”  But, when an outbreak occurs, Schmid cautions, it “usually involves many individuals” (274). 

The more important question—and the subject of Tipping Points 8—is not whether commercial milk is safe, but whether, as processed as it is, it supports human health.  Schmid argues that commercial milk is, from the beginning, a compromised product that can and does produce allergic reactions and chronic illness.  In my terms, commercial milk is a fake food since the cows are not fed what cows eat, which is grass; are not treated properly, which means they are diseased and pumped full of drugs; and as the milk is heavily processed and adulterated with additives—some of which, like the addition of dried nonfat milk to skim milk, are not listed on the label as they are deemed to be industry standard practices.  

We can help our remaining dairy farmers to survive by helping them to escape the commercial system.  Unless you’ve been on chemotherapy, you can help develop a regional milk market by buying local real milk, cream, and value-added milk products, like butter, cheese, kefir, and yogurt.  The web site, Real Milk is one place that lists where to find local milk:  www.realmilk.com.  And, The Weston A. Price Foundation web site is another place where the benefits of real milk are discussed:  www.westonapricefoundation.org.  Real milk may cost a bit more, but as it is a whole, nutrient dense food, you’ll benefit more.  And, likely, you’ll spend less on treating illness.

Tipping Points 5: I Believe

(You may want to read my essays in order.)

Tipping Points 5

April 9, 2010

I Believe

The movie Food, Inc. came to Rockland, Maine, this past July (2009), and I missed it.  My husband heard an interview with Michael Pollan, who is in the movie.  Pollan discussed how commercial potato fields are sprayed with a chemical fungicide so toxic that workers do not go into the fields afterwards for a full five days.  I confirmed Pollan’s statement and discovered he also says that once grown, the potatoes have to sit for up to six months before the toxins they contain dissipate. 

In August, while chatting with two other people in a windjammer galley, I said that I was looking forward to seeing Food, Inc. when the DVD is released.  A nearby crew member, a high school student, said, “I saw the preview, and I thought it was trying to scare me.”

Setting aside my sudden memory of a recent preview I had seen of a summer blockbuster which involved robots killing everything in sight and a soundtrack that blew me out of my seat, I asked the young man if he had seen the whole movie.  “No,” he said, and followed with what was a heartfelt and emotionally delivered statement:  “I know that the food in the supermarket is ok.  I know that my food is safe and is good for me.”

Belief systems are notoriously powerful.  People will shed blood and, even, life for them.  Belief systems are laden with “facts” that are easy to disprove, but which the heart embraces.  The mystery to me is what this young man’s heart was embracing.  What lay beneath the belief that the great majority of our national food system is producing food that is safe and nourishing when it is demonstrably neither? 

Another reaction I experience often is anger.  One young mother did not like hearing about food issues because “they make me feel like a bad mother.”  What emerged next was “I do not know what to do.”  And, she’s right.  With all the industry-produced junk science claims circulating, how does anyone know what or whom to believe?  Plus, it is time consuming to do the research necessary to figure out who is attached to industry claims and who is not.   

The current, awesome cultural power of our modern food industry represents a development span of over 150 years.  This industry has acquired massive political clout–our government supports and promotes cheap, dangerous, and fake foods and oversees an irresponsible regulatory system.  This industry has successfully managed the legal system; has driven out or co-opted competitors, like organic foods or real milk; has bought scientists who create and promote junk science; has gained control of unregulated media advertising; and has placed this fake, tainted food in one-stop, convenient outlets.  Together with the drug industry, the food industry has manipulated the academic and medical industries so that they create, promote, and teach their junk science and promote their products.

But, if one takes seriously that the safety of our food system has been co-opted by unregulated industry acting rationally in its own interests, one has to begin making personal changes if one wants to be healthy.  Our personal changes can create a new paradigm, one that supports belief with facts that can be investigated and substantiated.

Change always involves first changing the stories we tell ourselves.  There is, thus, a role for emotional belief when it supports the ethic that human and societal health have to trump industry profit.  Have hope, for there are at least three powerful philosophical concepts emerging:  the Precautionary Principle, the rights of all to “the commons,” and the rights of all against toxic trespass. 

The Precautionary Principle states that no chemical can be used unless it has been thoroughly demonstrated not to be harmful for human life.  This concept animates recent regulatory and legal changes in Europe and Canada.  The EU’s Regulation, Evaluation, Authorization, and Restriction of Chemicals Act (REACH) went into effect in June 2007.  Though considerably mitigated in the political process, especially by efforts of the US State Department under Colin Powell, which acted as agents for the US chemical industry, REACH represents a big crack in the dike. 

In Canada, activists trying to ban ChemLawn chemicals used the Precautionary Principle as a legal strategy rather than pitting their experts against ChemLawn’s experts.  ChemLawn lost.  This story is told in the film A Chemical Reaction, shown this fall at the Camden (Maine) International Film Festival (CIFF).  Portland’s Paul Tukey (Safe Lawns) became ill after applying lawn chemicals, primarily 2, 4-D–a synthetic chemical in the phenoxy class (which includes Agent Orange) and which has a strong association with the rise of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.  Also, Tukey’s son was born with severe ADHD which doctors think was caused by Tukey’s exposure to lawn chemicals as they affect reproduction.  After losing this particular case in Canada, ChemLawn changed its Canadian name to GreenLawn and its American name to TruGreen. 

“The Commons” concept is taken from the lost use of peasant-farmed common land in Europe in the 1400-1500s.  Today, “the commons” concept supports the ability of local areas to stop industrial dumping of Class A sewage sludge into a local environment.  Or, the extraction of local water for bottled water sales.  Or, in the case of our Port Clyde, Maine, fisherman, as detailed in the local movie recently shown at CIFF, The Fish Are For The People, the unsustainable harvesting of too many fish from our local waters by nonlocal industrial boats.  Certainly, clean air and water can be seen as “the commons.”

Toxic Trespass covers both the spread of unwanted chemicals and of Genetically Modified (GM) seeds.  In 1997, Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser noticed that Monsanto’s Roundup Ready GM seeds had taken root at the edges of his fields next to public roads.  He collected his own seed, as usual, but by 1998, 95 percent of his 1030 acres were contaminated with Monsanto’s GM canola.  Monsanto tried to charge Schmeiser $400,000 for this seed, but he refused to pay or to settle since settlement included a legal “gag” provision.  Under patent law, Schmeiser lost his trial, his appeal, and, later, in the Supreme Court. 

Schmeiser quit planting.  The work of his life, the development of his own seed, was destroyed.  The movie The Future of Food (2004) suggested the idea that Schmeiser’s situation involved a trespass concept.  Monsanto seeds either blew into Schmeiser’s fields from truck beds or spread there on their own.  In 2005, Schmeiser found more Roundup Ready Canola in his fields.  He had the fields cleaned ($660) and sent the bill to Monsanto, but they refused to pay.  Schmeiser sued, and this time, Monsanto lost.    

To date, no one is holding chemical applicators responsible for chemical drift into the soil, water, or air in any meaningful way.  But, the idea of toxic trespass linked to the Precautionary Principle and our right to a clean “commons” holds promise for those willing to insist on a different, safer world.

Turkey Tracks: Book Club, Lane Cake

April 9, 2010

Book Club, Lane Cake

Yesterday our Book Club met to discuss A. S. Byatt’s THE CHILDREN’S BOOK–a dense, amazing, informative, complicated, wonderful novel.  In may ways, this novel is as much history as it is fiction.  Set in Britain, Germany, and France, but primarily in Britain, in the years before World War I erupts, the novel explores so many themes we got dizzy trying to identify all of them.  Certainly class conflict, art, artisans, theater, puppets, philosophical and political groups, gender issues, connections to nature and the loss thereof, the power of national groups when war looms, the power of geography to form culture, the production of fairy tales in this era by many authors, and on and on. 

Byatt sees this period as a Silver Age that degenerates into a Lead Age with the war and its aftermath.  The Golden Age preceding the Silver Age has already passed.  It’s clear that she sees that the fermentation of politics and culture change drastically with the war.  All the energy, especially the energy of young people across Europe, pours into nationalism.  The result is that cultural changes that could have taken place in lieu of war don’t.  It’s not so much that the slate is wiped clean, but that all the energy for change is dissipated for those who survive the war. 

In this way, the characters in the novel are not unlike the puppet theaters Byatt reproduces throughout the novel.  We perform inside scripts created by forces that drive us, and while mankind created those forces, we have lost touch with how they do drive us.   Plus, we have lost touch with nature, which is a primary ingredient of the Golden Age.  Thus, the descent into an Age of Lead begins.  And, I think, Byatt is saying that, by extension, that is how we have arrived where we are now, where more than ever before, the hidden scripts of economics drives us, where we are detached from nature, and where we are at a crossroads where life will change drastically in some direction. 

The Lane Cake

My grandmother used to bake two cakes around the winter holidays:  a Lane Cake and a Japanese Fruit Cake.  The Lane Cake was always my favorite.  It was a minimum of three layers, filled with a raisin, coconut, pecan, wine or whiskey filling, and iced with a cooked white icing. 

I’ve never been a good cake baker.   Maybe I avoided them since they are exacting, and I’m more of a handful of this and a pinch of that kind of cook.  And, since my 30’s, I’ve struggled with weight issues, so baking didn’t seem a good idea.   Anyway, baking some of Julia Child’s cakes this winter made me see they are full of eggs and butter and not a lot of sugar.  Making those cakes gave me a bit of courage.  So, I thought to try the Lane Cake recipe of my grandmother’s, especially since I have all the fresh eggs now from the chickens.  I figured I could bake it for the Book Club meeting since it is way too special to have for everyday use.

You must start it three days ahead, as it needs to season with the filling.  It called for “pastry” flour, which I had my doubts about.  I think that term might not have translated across time and space.  But, against my better judgment, I used it anyway.  The layers rose amazingly tall.  It may be ok, I thought.  The filling was tedious, but easy, and tasted divine.  I filled the cake and left it to sit for three days.  On the day of the book club, I iced it, and that went fine as well.

But, the cake layers were not light and wonderful, but heavy and coarse.  So, next time, I’ll use cake flour.  I’m sure it will be quite wonderful then. 

I researched the recipe, which is very old.  Here’s some history from a web site on food history:  http://www.foodtimeline.org/foodcakes.html#lane

            “The Lane cake, one of Alabama’s more famous culinary specialties, was created by Emma Rylander Lane of Clayton, Barbour County. It is a type of white sponge cake made with egg whites and consists of four layers that are filled with a mixture of the egg yolks, butter, sugar, raisins, and whiskey. The cake is frosted with a boiled, fluffy white confection of water, sugar, and whipped egg whites. The cake is typically served in the South at birthdays, wedding anniversaries, and other special occasions. The recipe was first printed in Lane’s cookbook Some Good Things to Eat, which she self-published in 1898. According to chef and culinary scholar Neil Ravenna, Lane first brought her cake recipe to public attention at a county fair in Columbus, Georgia, when she entered her cake in a baking competition there and took first prize. She originally named the cake the Prize cake, but an acquaintance convinced her to lend her own name to the dessert.”

Here is my cake:

And, here is a recipe I think will work:

Cake:

Preheat oven to 375

8 egg whites, stiffly beaten; 1 cup of butter (two sticks); 2 cups sugar; 1 cup sweet milk; 3 1/2 cups CAKE FLOUR; 2 teaspoons baking powder; pinch of salt for egg whites; 1 teaspoon vanilla.

Sift flour and baking powder 4 or 5 times.  The more the flour is sifted, the lighter the cake.  Cream butter and sugar together until foamy.  (Sift sugar for a lighter cake.)  Add flour and milk alternately to butter/sugar mixture.  Begin and end with adding flour.  Add vanilla.  Fold in stiffly beaten egg whites.  Bake in four 8-inch cake pans that have been greased with butter and floured.  Or, three larger cake pans.  Bake at 375 for 30 to 35 minutes.  Keep a sharp eye, as doneness depends upon the size of the pans.  Allow cake to sit in pans for a few minutes, then turn them out onto wire racks to THOROUGHLY COOL.

Filling:

8 egg yolks; 2 cups sugar; 1/2 cup butter (1 stick); 1 cup raisins chopped; 1 cup fresh coconut or good quality freeze dried; 1 cup chopped pecans (soak these first in salted water and dry in the oven or a dehydrator to remove the phytates); pinch salt, 1 cup brandy or 3/4 cup wine or 1/2 cup whiskey; 1 teaspoon vanilla.  (I added grated lemon peel and that was nice–1 or 2 tsps.)

Beat egg yolks until lemon colored.  Add sugar, salt, and continue beating until mixture is light.  Melt butter in top of a double boiler and add egg-sugar mixture; stir constantly until thickens (up to 20 minutes).  Add other ingredients.  Let cool, spread between cake layers.  Let cake sit for up to 3 days before icing.

White Icing:

4 egg whites, 1 1/2 cups sugar, 1/4 cup water, 1 tsp. cream of tartar, pinch of salt, 1 tsp. vanilla.

Put everything BUT the vanilla into a double boiler and cook for about 5 minutes, beating with a hand electric mixer.  Remove from heat when mixture forms good peaks and is shiny.  Add vanilla.  Continue beating until spreading consistency is good. 

Make it for a special event and ENJOY!!!!