Green Options

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The Organic Consumers Association announced Friday it was “expanding its boycott of Horizon and Aurora organic dairy products to include five national ‘private label’ organic milk brands supplied by Aurora, as well as two leading organic soy products, Silk and White Wave.” Aurora, who supplies “organic” milk for Costco, Safeway’s ‘O” brand, Publix, Nature’s Promise, and Wild Oat’s “organic” dairy line was found to be violating animal welfare law. In truth, Aurora operates like a factory farm, milking 2,000 to 10,000 cows, confining cattle to feedlots, ordering replacement cows, and potentially using antibiotics.

A farmer the OCA spoke with said “real organic dairy farms don’t need to buy replacement heifers.” The new cattle are brought in only on industrial scale farms where cows are pushed to high levels of milk production, sometimes slaughtered after only a year or two after they stop milking often due to stress. Check out the report to read more on how Bush kept Aurora rolling under the mask of the “organic” label.

Milk is big in our house. We eat ice cream, butter, cheese, and yogurt. I love my morning coffee with just enough half-and-half to turn it a lovely shade of caramel. My daughter drinks milk with lunch and dinner. When you factor in the pizza with mozzarella and the breakfast cereal, hardly a meal goes by that is dairy-free.

Haunting all this milk, filled with calcium, protein, and fat, has been a single question: what is the real story behind recombinant bovine growth hormone?

If you read about food in general, or genetically engineered organisms specifically, it can’t have escaped your notice that there is a battle raging in this country about the use of rBGH in dairy cows. It’s a battle being fought in grocery stores, state legislatures, the corporate offices of Monsanto Corporation and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

More than 70 groups and individuals have asked Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland to kill an emergency rule that would restrict the use of labels saying “rbGH-free” on milk from cows not treated with Monsanto’s synthetic recombinant bovine-growth hormone (rbGH).

In a letter sent to Strickland today, the petitioners warned that, “If the emergency rule remains unchanged, it will negatively impact Ohioans’ ability to make an informed decision about the dairy products they buy. It interferes with farmers and dairies’ rights to free speech, and with consumer right-to-know. In this era of increased concern about what’s in our food and how it is produced, Ohio should be making more information available not less.”

It comes as rather a shock to see New Zealanders in the news, arguing amongst themselves about the missing chapter of a report - questioning their very own green credentials. The chapter in question is unfortunately number 13.

(Not overly unfortunate that it was chapter 13, granted, but it allows me to clumsily shoehorn the word triskaidekaphobia into a piece of writing for the first - and hopefully - last time.)

Included in a statement by the country’s Green Party is the following:

“Chapter 13 states some inconvenient truths about the causes of environmental decline in New Zealand – causes such as dairy intensification, increased car use, and consumption. And it makes some inconvenient recommendations for action such as national environmental regulation and more public transport. Moreover it warns our economy is threatened by our poor environmental performance.”

The Green Party’s reaction has been thorough as the accompanying YouTube video shows.

But I’d like to just concentrate for now on dairy farming. It isn’t perhaps at the forefront of many people’s minds when we think of environmental decline. Conjure up the word “cattle” and more often, it is intensively reared beef rather than milk production that causes a reaction.

The Swedes are an inventive lot, but this article in The Local really takes the cake, or milk, if you will.

They milk 1000 cows at Wapnö castle outside Halmstad, Sweden, and during the process of cooling the milk from 37 to 3 degrees C, they have devised a way to capture that heat and use it to warm up the castle and workshop buildings.

The versatile little soy bean is used to make such delicious foods as tofu, tempeh, miso, and soy milk, and yet it’s misunderstood, especially here in the West. Tofu is derided, scoffed at, and even feared by some, and I’m here to set things right. Our little lesson may seem technical at first, but once you read it, I think you’ll come away with a much better understanding of our high-protein friend and

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Mexican Horchata

Horchata is a traditional rice drink first developed in Spain and modified in Mexico. This is a delicious, sweet drink that has been around for thousands of years and is best served cold. Plan ahead when making it, as it requires some advanced preparation (the rice needs to soak overnight).

Ingredients

1 cup long-grain rice

Hot water

4 cups non-dairy milk

1/4-1/2 cup granulated sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

Ice for serving

People often refer to non-dairy milks, such as soy and rice, as "alternatives to" or "substitutes for" cow’s milk, and the dairy industry scathingly calls them "imitation milks." By definition, the words "alternative" and "substitute" imply that the thing they are being measured against is the superior choice; that is, you choose the "substitute" when you can’t get the real thing, and so on.

However, I don’t like the use of these terms

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In my 15+ years of animal and vegetarian/vegan advocacy, I have answered countless questions – some smart, some thoughtful, some antagonistic, some ridiculous, and some over and over and over. Some people seem to think that by virtue of being vegan you hold degrees in nutrition, philosophy, anthropology, animal husbandry, ecology, and the culinary arts and often proceed to cross-examine you on each of these topics. Every vegan or vegetarian has been on the

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