Green Options

Conventional dairy production is a lot different from the idyllic farms you see in those Happy Cow commercials on TV. Real dairy production forces cows to live in close quarters, involves nasty growth hormones, and is just a pretty cruel business overall.

Milk’s quite easy to cut out of your diet, whether you’re using it to cook or drinking it straight out of the glass. If you’re thinking about avoiding dairy for animal rights or for health reasons, there are a slough of delicious options out there for you!

Probably 80% of the time, when I tell someone that I’m vegan, the first words out of that person’s mouth are, “I could not live without cheese!” The other 20% are usually a comments about steak or bacon, sometimes in a mean-spirited way and sometimes not. Today, though, I wanted to talk a little about the cheese thing, since it seems to be what gets folks the most.

The large-scale Organic dairy cooperative, “Organic Valley” has just sunk to a new low in the practice of “I will market against my farmer neighbors by stoking consumer’s fears.” They announced that they have launched an on-line calculator that is supposed to show you how much pesticide and fertilizer use is avoided when you buy their products.  The news release essentially boils down to the message, “buy our products or you will probably die!”  It also essentially accuses the 97.5% of us who don’t buy Organic of destroying the planet.

When talking about pesticides the press report says: “For adults, exposure through diet has been linked to infertility, Parkinson’s, testicular cancer, birth defects and much more. More than one million children in America age five and under ingest at least 15 pesticides daily. Early exposures are suspected in the sharp rise in health problems including autism, obesity, asthma, brain cancer and other childhood cancers.”  This broad-brush assertion is misleading on so many levels that it is hard to know where to start.  I’m not saying that there have never been any health issues with any pesticide anywhere, but we also have sufficient food in part because of pesticides.  Though many people don’t know it, there are pesticides used on organic crops as well.  Actually, the EPA has done a very good job of regulating pesticide use over the years so that people don’t need to be frightened about their food.

Have you noticed how all sorts of high end resorts and hotels have started converting their chlorine pools to salt water? And it’s not just the health and hospitality industry that wants to figure out a way to purify their water without resorting to chemicals. Other industries, including the food and beverage, dairy, aquaculture and municipal drinking water providers need to ensure that the water they use contain no micro-organisms or pathogens of any kind. A company based in Israel, Atlantium has developed what may be one of the first industrial-grade solutions to water micro-organism purification without chemicals.

[Creative Commons photo by nicubunu]
From the land involved to the waste produced, conventional dairy production has a huge environmental impact. Not only is conventional dairy not great for the planet, it’s not so great for you. You can do yourself and your body a favor but cutting back on or cutting out the dairy in your diet.

Whenever folks learn that I don’t eat dairy products, there are certain questions they seem to always ask. One of the most common is:

But don’t you miss chocolate?

The assumption is that chocolate has to contain milk, and that’s just not true at all. What makes chocolate….chocolate…is cocoa butter which despite its name is a plant ingredient. There are tons of companies making great dark chocolate that is 100% vegan and 100% delicious! Finding vegan chocolate is as easy as taking the time to do a bit of label-reading. While you might not be able to just grab a Hershey bar, you don’t have to live a chocolate-free existence, either. Here are just a few tasty options:

“Old-fashioned dairy, the new-fashioned way!  CyClone is the first major dairy to raise a herd of clones and clone offspring.  You could say cloning is our passion - where we combine DNA with TLC.”

That is what Cyclone dairy says on their website’s mission page.

Thank goodness it’s not for real…not yet anyway.

I am obsessed with farms and farmers markets. People that read my work probably know that by now. Did I mention that I sometimes go to three different farmers markets in a single week? One of the things I love is that in addition to fruits and veggies, my local farmers markets have vendors selling milk and cheese, whole chickens, eggs of various types and sizes, pork and beef. I don’t eat most of that stuff, but I love that it is there and that it comes from local farms.

Soon, however, there may not be meat at farmers markets, or meat raised by small farmers, at all. That’s because of the roll out of the National Animal ID System (NAIS), requiring farmers to attach radio frequency identification ear tags on cattle, dairy cows, pigs and chickens.

A German study found that cows are major contributors to global warming, and it doesn’t matter if they’re raised on a conventional or an organic farm.

[Creative Commons photo by Jelle]

I’m with Stephanie Ernst over at change.org on this one, though: let’s not blame the poor cows. The culprit here is humans’ taste for meat and dairy and the sheer number of cows we have to raise to put beef on all of those plates.

Most people are aware of at least a few of the problems associated with factory farming.

Anyone who has ever had the unfortunate experience of even being near one will tell you the smell alone is enough to make you instantly nauseated.

Aside from that, what are some of the other hazards of raising animals this way?

Here is a interesting list I’ve compiled of various pieces of information about this vile practice, and the impact it has on us and the environment:

With milk prices plummeting and dairy farmers facing increased feeding costs, many are culling their herds in record numbers. It seems that the value of a dairy cow is not what it once was in the industry. Other dairy farmers are not buying. Selling cows that have become too expensive to feed to the beef industry has become the only viable option for the struggling dairy farmer trying to raise cash.

In a further effort to reduce costs, male calves are being subjected to even more callous treatment and cruelty as evidenced by the recent dumping of 30 dead calves at the side of the road in San Joaquin County, California.

Gooey melted cheese on pizza, a glass of cold milk with freshly baked cookies, ice cream on a hot summer day… who hasn’t at one time or another enjoyed something made from milk?

Dairy products are part of most American diets on a daily basis, but what is the health and environmental impact of this high demand for milk?

The production of much of the milk in this country is done in large scale-operations, some having thousands of cows.

That’s a lot of manure to be dealt with, this reduces the air quality (especially for people living near the dairy operation), and consistently finds its way into our rivers, streams, and groundwater.