Here’s the excerpt of a great article by Jackie Avner of the Denver Post.…

Alex

Denver Post
By Jackie Avner
Article Last Updated: 07/27/2007 10:40:10 PM MDT

Excerpt…

I don’t like to buy organic food products, and avoid them at all cost. It is a principled decision reached through careful consideration of effects of organic production practices on animal welfare and the environment. I buy regular food, rather than organic, for the benefit of my family.

I care deeply about food being plentiful, affordable and safe. I grew up on a dairy farm, where my chores included caring for the calves and scrubbing the milking facilities. As a teenager, I was active in Future Farmers of America, and after college I took a job in Washington, D.C., on the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry Committee staff.

But America no longer has an agrarian economy, and now it is rare for people to have firsthand experience with agricultural production and regulation. This makes the general public highly susceptible to rumors and myths about food, and vulnerable to misleading marketing tactics designed not to improve the safety of the food supply, but to increase retail profits. Companies marketing organic products, and your local grocery chain, want you to think organic food is safer and healthier, because their profit margins are vastly higher on organic foods.

The USDA Organic label does not mean that there is any difference between organic and regular food products. Organic farms simply employ different methods of food production. For example, organic dairy farms are not permitted to administer antibiotics to their sick or injured cows, and do not give them milk-stimulating hormone supplements (also known as rbGH or rBST). The end product is exactly the same - all milk, regular and organic, is completely antibiotic-free, and all milk, regular and organic, has the same trace amounts of rbGH (since rbGH is a protein naturally present in all cows, including organic herds). Try as they may, proponents of organic foods have not been able to produce evidence that the food produced by conventional farms is anything but safe.

Do organic production practices benefit animals? Dr. Chuck Guard, professor of veterinary medicine at Cornell University, told me that it pains him that many technological advancements in animal medicine are prohibited for use on organic farms. He described how organic farms don’t use drugs to control parasites, worms, infections and illness in their herds. “Drugs take away pain and suffering,” he said. “Proponents of organic food production have thrown away these medical tools, and the result is unnecessary pain and suffering for the animals.”

In order for milk and meat to qualify as USDA Organic, the animals must never be given antibiotics when they are sick or injured. On organic farms, animals with treatable illnesses such as infections and pneumonia are left to suffer, or given ineffective homeopathic treatments, in the hope that they will eventually get better on their own. If recovery without medication seems unlikely, a dairy cow with a simple respiratory infection will be slaughtered for its meat, or sold to a traditional farm where she can get the medicine she needs. I don’t buy organic milk because this system is cruel to animals, and I know that every load of regular milk is tested for antibiotics to ensure that it is antibiotic-free.

Organic milk certainly is not fresher than regular milk. Regular milk is pasteurized and has a shelf life of about 20 days. Organic milk is ultrapasteurized, a process that is more forgiving of poor quality milk, and that increases the shelf life of milk to about 90 days. Some of the Horizon organic milk boxes I’ve seen at Costco have expiration dates in 2008! There is a powerful incentive for retailers to put the ultrapasteurized organic milk on the shelf just before the expiration date, so consumers will think the organic milk is as fresh as the regular milk. After all, consumers are paying twice as much for the organic product.

Do organic production practices benefit the environment? In many cases, they do the opposite. Recently, Starbucks proudly informed their customers that they would no longer be buying milk from farms that use rbGH, the supplemental hormone administered to cows to increase milk production (even though the extra hormones stay in the cow, and the resulting milk is the same). The problem with this policy is that Starbucks will now be buying milk from farms that are far less efficient at making milk. Without the use of the latest technology for making milk, many more cows must be milked to produce the same number of café lattes for Starbucks’ customers. More cows being milked means more cows to feed, and therefore more land must be cultivated with fossil-fuel-burning tractors. More cows means many more tons of manure produced, and more methane, a greenhouse gas, released into the atmosphere.

I see Starbucks’ policy as environmentally irresponsible. When a farmer gives a cow a shot of rbGH, the only environmental cost is the disposal of the small plastic container it came in. But the environmental benefits of using this technology are enormous.

Attention all shoppers: Safeway is adopting the same misdirected policy as Starbucks, judging from the prominent labeling of milk at my local Safeway store: “Milk from cows not treated with rBST.” When I’m feeling particularly green, I drive past Safeway and shop at another grocery store in protest.

Consumers assume that organic crops are environmentally friendly. However, organic production methods are far less efficient than the modern methods used by conventional farmers, so organic farmers must consume more natural and man-made resources (such as land and fuel) to produce their crops.

Cornell Professor Guard told me about neighboring wheat farms he observed during a visit to Alberta, Canada: one organic and one conventional. The organic farm consumes six times as much diesel fuel per bushel of wheat produced.

Socially conscious consumers have a right to know that “organic” doesn’t mean what it did 20 years ago….

Full article at Denver Post.

Alex Avery

Those of you who regularly read my work know that I believe in conventional milk.  It is perfectly safe, perfectly nutritious, and perfectly refreshing.  So what is with this push from some groups to make raw milk sales in supermarkets legal?  For those of you who don’t know what raw milk is, let me enlighten you.  Raw milk is milk that has not been pasteurized.  That’s right!  Straight from the udder to you!  Groups like the Weston A. Price Foundation and the folks behind Joe Mercola are all for this version of milk and regularly push for its mainstream acceptance.  Their arguments are that raw milk is more nutritious, of a higher quality and has a better taste than its conventional counterpart because it has not been exposed to the extreme heat that pasteurization brings.  Here is my question: Do they not realize that without pasteurization the safety of consuming that milk is seriously questionable?  That cow lives on a farm, not in a sterile facility!  Where has that udder been; what has it touched; what kinds of bacteria has that milk been exposed to that are not removed because it’s not been pasteurized? It’s one thing to drink the freshly drawn, raw milk on the farm, as my father did when he was growing up on my grandfather’s Michigan dairy farm. But it’s another thing entirely to drink raw milk after it’s spent several days being transported, bottled, and shipped to the store. By then the once-few nasty bacteria will have proliferated into hundreds of thousands or millions, ready to make ill the unsuspecting consumer.

The activists claim “raw” milk kills bacteria, but that’s just plain false. Why do they think so many consumers, especially children, get sick after drinking raw milk? (Actually, they always come up with another scape-goat in those cases: “it was beef or lettuce, not raw milk” they say) There is a reason that the FDA has not allowed the mainstream sale of raw milk: It has repeatedly been proven to sicken consumers and there is zero evidence it is healthier or more nutritious.  In fact, recently three Georgia families who consumed raw milk- milk that was only approved for sale as pet food- fell seriously ill with food-borne illnesses as a result.  Sadly, many parents seek out raw milk to give to their children – who are most at risk and least aware of the danger. We need to protect the health of children by barring the sale of raw milk. For now, I’ll stick to my clean, “tasteless,” pasteurized milk.  At least I know I won’t end up with food-borne illnesses.