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Dairy Updates
Posted on Wed, January 23, 2008 by Jerusha Klemperer
5 Comments | Categories: Dairy, Labeling, News, Current Events, Policy,
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Milk can't seem to stay out of the news these past few weeks. The big stories?
Starbucks, after recently agreeing to use only rbGH-free milk, has discontinued offering organic milk. Apparently once there was no more rbGH in the milk, the primary reason for their customers to order organic had been eliminated.
Pennsylvania citizens succeeded in securing that local milk labels can identify the product as "hormone free." After Pennsylvania's October ban on letting consumers know what's what in their milk, the public spoke up. The governor ultimately had this to say: "The public has a right to complete information about how the milk they buy is produced." And based on Starbucks' feedback from customers (rbGH is gross), seems like a good idea.
California raw milk producers are upset about legislation being pushed through that puts strict — and unnecessary, they say– limits on the number of coliform per milleliter in raw milk. Likely an attempt on the part of the legislature, some think, to work towards outlawing raw milk.
Member Comments
From dbird on Thu, January 24, 2008
Speaking of Starbucks, and of good clean and fair, I’d like to mention:
http://www.starbucksunion.org/
From ncarroll on Thu, January 24, 2008
Thanks for mentioning our InjuryBoard article on the subject. Seems fair to us to give dairy farmers the right to tell the public what is or isn’t in the milk they produce.
From Brenda Skidmore on Sat, February 16, 2008
Usually, whenever governmental organizations are involved in controlling fair labeling of food, standardizing production of a certain type of food, or determining nutritional guidelines of foods they are, sadly, not out to protect the consumer.
They seem to be more interested in protecting the food processing, chemical, and disease management (health care) industries. Its not about cleaner, safer, or nutrient dense food.
People are starting to wise up, and food trends are changing. People are wanting to go back to the basics in locally grown, unprocessed, and organic. Unpasteurized, antibiotic free, growth hormone free, and mostly grass fed meat and dairy dairy and meat products. Most people are also learning that raw is healthier than cooked.
Corporate produced and processed food equals toxic, malnutrition, and disease. ‘John Q. Public’ will, eventually, make their food choice purchase preferences be known, and change the way corporate America does business.
Brenda Skidmore
From culanth on Mon, April 07, 2008
Raw Milk Cheese and Microbiopolitics in latest issue of Cultural Anthropology
For the growing number of its U.S. producers and consumers, raw milk cheese is a traditional food processed safely by the action of good microorganisms in milk proteins. For the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), however, it is a potential biohazard riddled with bad germs. Heather Paxson draws out the cultural, economic, and political stakes of artisanal cheeses in the latest issue of Cultural Anthropology in her essay, “Post-Pasteurian Cultures: The Microbiopolitcs of Raw Milk Cheese in the United States.” In it the MIT anthropologist underscores the idea that dissent over how to live with microorganisms reflects disagreements about how humans ought to live with one another.
Paxson’s essay examines the gustatory and nutritional value, safety and political dimensions of raw milk cheese production, regulation and consumption in the United States, extending commodity network analyses in agro-food studies beyond global-local studies into the body and its gastrointestinal system. Drawing on interviews, policy analysis and participant-labor on a Vermont farm where raw milk cheese is made, Paxson describes how raw cheese aficionados think about the microbial agents at the heart of raw milk cheese, and negotiate “Pasteurian (hygienic) and post-Pasteurian (probiotic) attitudes. To support her analysis, Paxson coins the term ‘microbiopolitics’, after Foucault’s ‘biopolitics’, to draw out what microscopic biological agents mean within food ethics and governance in particular as well as for cultural analysis.
In a refreshing style, Paxson interweaves a step-by-step account of cheese production with “exegeses of key microbiopolitical moments” in the coming into being of raw milk cheese. Taking up the case of pregnant women, for example, she extends feminist critiques of the medical moralization of pregnancy to explore how raw milk cheese figures in American risk culture. The framework that Paxson uses for her analysis – revolving around “microbiopolitics” – convincingly demonstrates what cultural analysis misses when it neglects the microbial, and how what it means to be human is worked out alongside companions species on whose interactions we depend.
Paxson’s essay can be accessed at:
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/toc/cuan/23/1
Heather Paxson is an assistant professor of anthropology at MIT “who explores how people grapple with changing socioeconomic conditions and new bioscientific knowledge through everyday ethical practices, especially those having to do with reproduction and food.”
Cultural Anthropology is the quarterly journal of the Society of Cultural Anthropology. Its editors Mike Fortun and Kim Fortun can be reached at editorial offices at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy New York at (518) 276-6171 or culanth@rpi.edu. The journal’s website is http://culanth.org.
From Aditi on Tue, September 23, 2008
Bovine somatotropin (abbreviated bST and BST) is a protein hormone produced in the pituitary glands of cattle. It is also called bovine growth hormone, or BGH.
BST can be produced synthetically, using recombinant DNA technology
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Aditi
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