Cows are gentle, interesting animals. They don't advertise anything unless someone spraypaints a slogan on their sides. The California Milk Processor Board (CMPB) has done almost everything short of that in its increasingly bullish efforts to push consumers in the direction of the dairy case. For the last few years, it has bombarded the airways with frantic attempts to boost sales of cow's milk, even running negative ads against its opponents, à la the race for the presidential nomination. But cow's milk is neither good for the human body nor good for our friends the cows, as consumers are realizing in spite of all the industry's misleading attempts to make them think otherwise.
Despite the factory-farming regimen of drugs and genetic manipulation used to increase milk production -- which have left Betsy looking more like a tractor-trailer than a cow, rendered her lame, and given her an often painfully infected udder -- according to the USDA, per capita consumption of cow's milk has been steadily decreasing since the 1990s. It seems that more and more Americans are becoming aware of the negative health and animal welfare implications of drinking cow's milk and are switching to soy, almond, and rice milks (or other plant-based beverages -- there're even oat and hemp milks now) to enjoy with their cookies and cereal.
In an attempt to stop this healthy new trend, the dairy industry has begun a frontal assault on any milk that didn't come from a cow's udder. One national dairy trade group is so rabid about the situation that it has tried to get the Food and Drug Administration to ban the use of the word "milk" for these increasingly popular products, despite the common use of terms such as "soy milk" and "coconut milk" over many generations.
Now, the CMPB has launched a new campaign asserting that "real milk comes from cows." Besides annoying nursing mothers, this ad blitz -- coming from the same people behind the failed "got milk?" ads -- fudges the facts about dairy products' effects on both humans and cows. So PETA designed an ad of our own to be run near CMPB's headquarters, reading, "'Real Milk' Comes From Real Sick Cows."
Here's why we can say that: Up to half of all cows exploited in milk production suffer from a painful udder infection called "mastitis," which may cause pus to end up in milk, and around the same percentage is believed to possibly be suffering from lameness caused by being kept on hard concrete floors and in filthy conditions.
PETA's most recent dairy-farm investigation -- at Adirondack Farms, LLC, a milk supplier to Massachusetts-based Agri-Mark, Inc., which makes Cabot and McCadam cheeses -- found cows with bloody vaginal prolapses that were covered with pus and feces. The cows were left to endure this sickening condition, untreated, for almost three months. And in order to increase milk production, workers injected cows with bovine growth hormone, which contributes to mastitis (for which cows tested positive virtually daily).
All this is in addition to other findings, such as the fact that a manager thrust his arm deep inside a cow's rectum to "rake" out feces before artificially inseminating her with a "gun," another standard practice on dairy factory farms, and that cows were subjected to the din of blaring music while being beaten for failing to realize that they were not going in the desired direction, which got another cow electro-shocked in the face repeatedly. To produce milk, a cow has to give birth, so cows on most dairy farms are repeatedly artificially inseminated, some on what the farmers themselves call a "rape rack." The cows' calves are torn away from them within hours of birth, causing extreme distress that leaves some mothers bellowing after their lost babies for days.
Considering that dairy products have been linked to heart disease and cancer, it's no surprise that almond milk sales increased by a whopping 79 percent in 2011. Real nutrition comes from soybeans, almonds, rice, and other healthy vegetable sources, not from a cow's udder. Fortified plant-based milks are delicious and contain all the calcium, protein, and vitamin D of dairy products but with none of the cholesterol, lactose, hormones, or cruelty found in cow's milk.
And if anyone is concerned about bone health, studies have shown that consuming cow's milk not only provides no protection against bone fractures but may also even increase one's risk. According to a new study published in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, active adolescent girls who consumed the most calcium, primarily from dairy products, had more than twice the risk of bone fractures of active girls who consumed the least calcium. In other words, rather than gulping down sugary chocolate milk after a workout, as the dairy industry would have you do, drop some almond milk, fruit, and kale into a blender for a delicious calcium-packed power smoothie, then get your vitamin D by exercising outdoors, and you'll be much better off.
So, while the CMPB tries to scare consumers away from healthy and humane plant-based milks, people might just be starting to realize that drinking the breast milk of another species not only hurts animals but also is a rather weird, entirely unnatural, unhealthy habit that we need to break.
Bill Maher: Celebrating 20 Years of Free the Animals
Rabbi Edward Bernstein: Teaching Our Children the Ethics of Eating Meat
posted Apr 6, 2012 at 13:31:38
Well, at least I tried. Thanks for proving my points all over again.
By the way, you've become increasingly boring in these "discussions." Is that deliberate on your part?
I just use water. Yes, water. For anything you might be inclined to add milk to, plain old water can be substituted very easily.
So much anger.
What makes that so particularly hysterical is that as opposed to godswillfirst, everyone on the omnivore side here has conveyed to him that he should eat whatever he wants to eat, and just stop projecting his nonsense onto the rest of us.
Fried chicken.
Porterhouse steak.
Virginia bacon.
Butter.
Coffee with cream.
Roast beef.
Fried oysters.
Turtle soup.
Roast turkey.
Boston bacon and beans.
Southern style bacon and greens.
Buttermilk.
Trout.
Bluepoint crabs.
Broiled chicken.
Moderator(s), please let these through.
In any event, life's also a journey...you never know where you'll be standing at the end. Obviously, you don't have a very clear understanding of that either.
Please, keep going.
It's a shame that so many others were deleted AFTER I explained things to him.
"[A] long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason." ~ Thomas Paine, Common Sense
"The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking." ~ John Kenneth Galbraith
"The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence that it is not utterly absurd; indeed, in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more often likely to be foolish than sensible." ~ Bertrand Russell
"All of us cherish our beliefs. They are, to a degree, self-defining. When someone comes along who challenges our belief system as insufficiently well-based or who, like Socrates, merely asks embarrassing questions that we haven’t thought of, or demonstrates that we’ve swept key underlying assumptions under the rug it becomes much more than a search for knowledge. It feels like a personal assault." ~ Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World
Unfortunately, the entire sequence was posted out of order.
That's pretty amusing, actually.
And it's also important to remember that male calves don't make milk, so they are often sold to veal farms where they're kept in crates so small they can't turn around. In a way, there is a piece of abused baby cow in every glass of milk.
Finally, you don't even need to drink milk (dairy or non) to be healthy. Nor do you need cheese. Avocado=nature's cheese.
Most avocadoes also come from California or Mexico; arid regions relying on intensive irrigation systems that deposit salt and toxic levels of selenium on the land. The latter has caused birth defects such as cyclopism in grazing animals, wild and domesticated.
As for veal calves, they don't have to be raised in crates. I know some farmers who raise veal calves in communal corrals where they have the room to kick up their legs.
People really do need to learn how and where all food is produced.
This says it all.
I also know some farmers who have crops pollinated by local bees and dont use pesticides and toxic.
As for veal and calves, most of them are tortured and killed brutally in the meat industrie.
Hope you can see how stupid your argument was. :)
SanJoaquinValleyGrower,
Although we don't often agree on many things, I truly respect this comment from the front lines, so to speak. Attitude/respect certainly goes a long way in life, no matter where we are.
Good luck
I respect anyone's choice to avoid milk and milk products for whatever reasons, as long as it is not based on misinformation. Dairy farm families generally drink lots of milk and they are generally very, very healthy.
http://www.glutenfreeclub.com/Article.aspx?nid=1625&utm_nooverride=1