License
Some of the roots of this disinformation effort about milk reach into the board rooms of major corporate players in the food industry. Huge corporate interests can increase their profits if people fear conventional milk. They can make more money selling "rbST-free" milk at $4.00 per gallon or organic milk at $6.00 per gallon (or more) than by selling conventional milk at $3.00 per gallon, and the majority of that profit differential stays in the corporation's hands. It doesn't matter that the milk inside the carton is the same, organic, "rbST-free", or not. Dean Foods, for example, is the nation's largest fluid milk marketer and had over $10 billion in sales last year. Dean Foods is the parent company for Horizon Organic Milk and White Wave soy "milk". Whole Foods, the nation's largest organic grocery corporation, earned $5 billion last year. Both of these corporations make large donations to "public interest" advocacy groups, such as the Organic Center. Probably not coincidentally, the President and Chief Operating Officer of Whole Foods and the General Counsel of Dean Foods sit on the Board of Directors of the Organic Center. The Organic Center, under the guise of serving the public, spreads fear and disinformation about conventional milk and other products of conventional agriculture, and then neatly refers visitors from its web site to other web resources supporting Horizon Organic and Whole Foods.
Imagine a coordinated effort over a more than a decade designed to convince people that reading newspapers causes cancer
because the ink can wear off on your fingers and contains dye that bears some chemical similarities that in some obscure
reference was associated with the possibility of maybe causing chemical changes in proteins that might also happen in
proteins involved in the transcription of RNA that was derived from DNA and DNA is the stuff of your genetic code and your
genes control everything and in particular help the body resist cancer so reading newspapers might cause cancer so you should
only read materials printed on expensive high gloss paper and you should do so sparingly and only when wearing gloves made of
organic cotton.
Meanwhile you have been working hard for years to produce newspapers that inform the public, help people in their lives, and
improve society and make that information readily and cheaply available to as many people as possible. (as in: produce
wholesome food cheaply and abundantly while taking care of cows and the environment.)
Example of another Article
Here's where the vets are right, and where they are missing a bigger picture: "organic" doesn't mean that something isn't factory farmed, and if you're going to raise milk cows the way we typically do in this country - which means basically overmilking them - they will be very prone to diseases like mastitis. So they will need drugs. Trying to be organic while still using those methods is basically like fighting with one hand tied behind your back. (In addition, corn-feeding cattle makes them prone to disease - they are not designed to eat corn, and by the time they die, they tend to be on the verge of liver failure.) Now, if you're raising your herd in a sustainable way, the cows are healthier and you don't need to be pumping them full of drugs. But "organic" doesn't mean that's happening (and it's probably not). So the big picture is this: if you are going to raise cattle the way we do in the US - feeding them the wrong food and overusing them so that they spend their whole lives sick - trying to go organic is a problem. Now, if you designed the system so you weren't raising sick animals, that would be another story.