OK, so milk price are rising due to the cost of grain for feed, corn prices are up because of fuel demands, etc., poor soil is blamed for flooding..... It all goes back to the government and big business controlling the world's food. Get a clue- feed the cattle GRASS! Feed the grain and corn to people. Conserve the fuel we have and utilize our own resources. The fact that farmers are getting top dollar for soy and corn and growing little else is going to kill us. These foods are finding their way into every processed food in the store. So is milk. Don't believe it, go read some labels. There are chemicals in food that are so far removed from corn that you cannot even call it corn, yet it is there. You absolutely cannot avoid it. Soy is almost as bad, and dairy is right behind it. Why? you ask. Well, it all goes back to the government. After WW2 it was decided that it would be a good idea to pay farmers for certain crops (soy, corn). SO the very lessons I learned back in the 4th grade about soil conservation and crop rotation were forgotten. In fact, many "new" farmers don't even understand how to do it. You grow certain crops on certain fields and ROTATE them. You put cows out to pasture. Any five year old knows that. They eat grass, they have babies, they make milk. Which gets me off on another tangent. WHO decided that all this milk was required? Oh, that would be the National Dairy Council. So, really we are ruining our land and food supply to feed the wrong food to an animal that we put on a cement lot and artificially impregnate so it will continue to make milk for us humans instead of the calf it births, which is subsequently taken from her and fed by a bottle until it is sold for food or can make its own milk, continuing the bizarro world cycle we have created. Now a substitute a human female into that scenario and see how very odd it is. We are the only species that continues to drink/eat milk after early childhood AND we take that from another species. Sounds f'd up when you think about it.
Here is my fix- stop buying processed foods. Buy as much locally grown food as you can. Stop consuming dairy, be picky about how your meat lived and died. Farmers- stop looking for the fast buck. Think in the long term. Man has cultivated crops for centuries. It is what domesticated us (David says it was beer, but man still had to grow grain and hops). For centuries it has been known that you cannot keep growing the same thing over and over. You must grow crops seasonally and mix it up. Don't put all your soy beans in one basket. This "new" method of farming has only been around since the 1940's. See what it has already done. It hasn't even been one hundred years. The damage can be repaired, but it will require change. Everyone has complained that organic costs more, grass fed beef costs more (which actually the cost is reflective of the SLAUGHTER, not the growing, fyi), yadda yadda. But I spent $72 at the grocery store this afternoon. What did I get? My "splurge" was some deli ham. The rest- fruit, bread, veggies. It didn't go far. I plan to frequent the farmer's markets in the coming weeks and I will not be buying a lot of things that I normally buy. I am guilty as the next gal with the dairy life without cheese isn't the same.
I remember as a child we didn't drink milk and juice constantly. We lived on water and, of course, iced tea. Meat wasn't the huge portion we think of today, and sometimes in the summer, nonexistent. We ate a lot of things that came from the garden. We ate beans and rice. My mom "put up" countless cans and jars of produce and preserves. My kids need to get over their food issues and eat what is given to them. Period. I will let you all know how it goes. It starts on Monday, dang it.
