Milk - It Does A Body Good

I grew up on a tobacco and beef cattle farm so we did not milk. We had several family members that did milk and it is a highly overrated activity involving getting up way too early and having an aching back all the time. We rarely drank fresh milk or made our own butter. My brother and I grew up in thrall with margerine which starting taking over butter when I was a little kid. Then, according to changing customs and tv marketing campaigns, the prevailing wisdom was that only poor uneducated people made their own butter. Just like only poor uneducated people breastfed. My, how things have changed.


For a couple of years now we have been drinking only non rBGH enhanced milk at the Basilica. rBgh is Recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone, a Monsanto invention given to cows to increase milk production. Monsanto is the company that practically owns the rights to seeds the world over and everything other thing that juices up production of either plants or animals. Most of these practices have a high moral, physical and environmental cost, including chemical runoff of pasture land into public water supplies, stressing of animals by overloading them with chemicals for production and rapid growth and depleting their ability to fight disease and illness. Japan, the European Union and Australia have all banned use of this product in cattle raised in their countries due to perceived health risks to both humans and animals.


Milk that is rBGH-free is not usually labelled. There are all kinds of political and lobby issues about whether labels can contain this information since Monsanto feels that labeling milk as rBGH-free gives the message that rBGH is a bad thing. Since the FDA, which we all know has our best interests at heart, has not officially said that it's a bad thing, they claim that there are no recognized issues. There is a ton of good information on rBGH here, here, and here.

Because of the labeling issues, it can be difficult to ascertain what grocers actually offer. Kroger, Wal-Mart and Costco have all officially declared that they will not sell rBGH enhanced milk but you won't see it advertised anywhere in their stores. Starbucks uses only non rBGH products. I recently sent an email to ValuMarket, a local grocery chain here in Louisville. They are fanatics about local products and international food items, making their stock extremely friendly to locavores and the Vietnamese, Hispanic, Korean and Bosnian population surrounding their stores. Even so, they deferred my question to Dean's, a very large milk purveyor here in the South and Midwest. Dean's owns the Horizon organic dairy product line and has come under fire from several food policy watchdog groups that claim they are skirting the rules of organic production by feedlotting their cattle and claiming they are grass-fed.

The milk pictured above is Rebekah Grace, a whole and chocolate milk product that comes from a cooperative of small farmers in Kentucky. It is a natural product but is not certified organic. It comes in the coolest old-school glass bottle which is on a deposit and returned to the store. Local product, recycled packaging, not filled with chemicals and tastes fantastic! A perfect combination. Most communities have at least one milk producer that has gone the route of Rebekah Grace, allowing a consortium of small farmers to package their products for local consumption. They are a little more expensive but I believe they are one of those items that it's worth spending real money to purchase. There are also raw milk options, but that is a whole other series of posts and I've taken enough of your time with this ramble. My hope is that I am slowly but surely making astute decisions about where my money goes and how I vote with my dollar. Who gets my milk money is one of those important decisions.