[pf] Dairy Foods

· At 14:42 21/6/2001 +1200, I (David Mac) wrote about cattle, in that case
mainly about meat. Here's my post to GreenViews-NZ this (Sunday) morning,
now about milk and cheese.

At 07:44 23/6/2001 +1200, Ron wrote:
>I am in favour of higher dairy prices as I am of higher petrol and tobacco
prices.
>
· I see high prices as intended (in a "free-market" system) to indicate
high value, or at least high demand.

· Ron sees high prices as one way to reduce consumption.
   Think about it:
1. a few cents increase - nobody stops buying, the suppliers get more money
2. 5%-10% increase - some people especially the poorest, buy less,
otherwise little effect.
3. 15%-50% increase - the poor stop buying, and try to find an alternative.
Middle-income buy a little less, or at least they start thinking about its
"high price". The richest-20%-income people never look at the price.
4. Double to five times the price (what should happen to petrol and
manufactured tobacco products like cigarettes, IMO) - finally a noticeable
reduction in damand, but still the richest pay no attention. It's the
poorer half that are affected.

[Mike: ]
>  .. telling people that you are delighted that their grocery bill is
likely to increase is unlikely to win us a lot of votes so it might be just
as well if we kept such views to ourselves ...
>
· I count on having at least one "mole" on this GV-NZ list, forwarding
"interesting" GV e-mails to other political parties.
  I personally have very little interest in garnering votes for The Greens
by what I say here; I work very hard during an election campaign, but
self-censorship on GV so that ordinary folk are "sucked-in" to vote for The
Greens thinking they are nice middle-of-the-road people?
  If that's what the majority on GV want, then I'm-outa-here.


[Ron: ]
>Dairy products are about the most unhealthy part of the average diet.
>
At 13:33 23/6/2001 +1200, Caroline Glass wrote:
>I agree that drinking milk sounds weird ... However, we evolved the
ability to digest cows' milk over thousands of years, so milk is a historic
and natural part of the human diet.
>Now that we can go down to the dairy and buy as much milk as we want, we
have to be careful not to consume too much milk, which wasn't an issue to
our ancestors who had a limited supply.
>
At 00:43 24/6/2001 +1200, Alistair {in France} wrote:
>I would like to point out that humans, like rats and pigs, are omnivores.
We'll eat darn near anything, and thrive on it (as long as we get enough
variety). There is nothing that is 'unnatural' for people to eat. 
>
[David Mac: ]
· Admittedly there are some people who have allergic (or similar) reactions
to certain components in milk (e.g. proteins and sugars before they're
modified by being turned into yoghurt), and others hear statements like
"milk is a mucus-producing food" and decide to stay away from it.
  For such people, Caroline's advice: "we have to be careful not to consume
too much milk" fits very well.

· But IMO cows milk is one of the few sustainable, easily-obtainable, ways
to get a balanced protein intake. It's far too valuable a food-source to
suffer put-downs like Ron's and those from some others.

· In my:
http://csf.colorado.edu/mail/pfvs/2001II/msg02165.html ,
 I talk about how you can "walk over to the house-cow (bred only once a
year) out in the paddock with your stool and bucket, sit down and milk it".
Pointing out that there's no ethical reason not to drink cows milk.

· I see sustainable milk supply as having all dairy herds living on organic
farms, calving only once a year (so for any one cow, there are many
non-milk-producing months), and the milk/cheese "factory" pasteurises the
milk and skims off much of the cream from most of it (only some of us can
drink {with relish}, full-cream milk, unfortunately), and makes: 
(i)  skim and full-cream milk powder, for use in the "lean" months, and
(ii) sterilised milk, also for those months (I think winter) when virtually
all cows are dry.

· Yes having liquid milk in the fridge would take a little more effort, but
this "increased cost" is little compared with the high value of milk.

· My wife and I did this cost-vs-benefit balance in the late 1960s while
teaching in Ghana, West Africa. _Every_ food we brought into the house cost
us at least some effort (even if it was just cutting the nkontomere
"greens" from wasteland), and we were glad that 1.5 kg sealed tins of milk
powder were available; _very_ glad. See my Greens Northern News article:
http://davd.tripod.ca/NthnNews00-06.html#link6


[Caroline: ]
>(cheese is even stranger - I mean, adding enzymes from the gut of a cow
and leaving it until it turns hard and yellow; who was the ning-nong who
thought of that?).
>
· There are clearly other ways of making cheese, just as there are other
types of cheese than cheddar. Last night I was revelling in the taste of
some salty feta cheese - it reminded me of going into a village shop in
Greece in 1963-4, asking the shopkeeper for some cheese, he turned around
and reached into a kerosine-tin on the floor behind him, lifted up a lump
of white cheese dripping with salt water, cut off a lump the size I wanted,
wrapped in newspaper and gave it to me.

· I see nothing strange in traditional ways of perserving one of the best
foods there are (like milk) in a form that takes you through the lean
months of the year.

· Expecting our current extraordinarily wide _range_ of foods to be
available right through the year on into the indefinite future is quite
unreasonable, if humans are to dramatically reduce their impact on the
earth. As is, I think, The Greens' goal.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
David.
(David MacClement) davd@ihug.co.nz 
http://www.geocities.com/davd.geo/index.html#top
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