Maybe its a sign of progress, on this Independence Day weekend, that we are discussing here the possibility of Walmart potentially wanting to stock raw milk. As I read the comments, and think about it some more, Im inclined to agree with those whod avoid doing business in raw milk with the retail giant.
Walmart is the antithesis of everything the struggle for food rights is about. At its most basic, the struggle for food rights is about community….and Walmart is anti-community. Its long been about driving competitor neighboring small businesses out of business, and wrecking communities.
The Walmart business model is really the Big Ag business model–maximize profits by squeezing your suppliers. Isnt that what the big milk and meat processors have done for many years now? That business model is a big part of the reason we have so many problems with our food (antibiotic residues, hormones, GMO ingredients, over processing). The push is always on lowering prices. Of course, for food, you usually cant lower prices without lowering quality.
I think Mark McAfee makes an important point as well–that you cant introduce raw milk to a place like Walmart in isolation. Raw milk is part and parcel of a different view of living, using nutrient-dense foods of all sorts to improve health. People who have no knowledge of this larger picture wouldnt know what to make of raw milk. And, indeed, it might be dangerous for many of them to try it, since all youd need is even one complaint of a slight tummy ache and the whole deal would be off.
Still, Id encourage McAfee to have the discussion with Walmart, with the goal being to introduce the executives there to the value of nutrient-dense foods…and encourage Walmart execs to learn more about this different approach to food and eating. I doubt they could internalize it, since it is basically about restoring community, and that is counter to Walmarts reason for being.
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Maybe its a sign of progress as well that a pending food rights case has nothing to do with raw milk. Im trying to paint the best face possible on the Mark Baker situation.
Baker is the hog farmer who has been providing a one-man opposition show to Michigans genetic purification program for pigs in the state–a program designed to drive small farmers like Baker, who specialize in breeding feral pigs, out of business. The problem for the state, and its corporate controllers, is that the meat from feral pigs is superior to the mass-bred corporate pigs, so the Big Ag types want the competition eliminated. Sounds a little like Walmart.
Baker has been standing strong against the states show of force, which most recently has included a $700,000 fine for violating the Michigan Department of Natural Resources Invasive Species Ordinance designed to prohibit pig breeds that compete with the big boys.
Baker, a twenty-year military veteran, has defied the MI DNR for more than a year, even as the agency clampdown has scared off the high-end restaurants that once ordered his meat. Hes filed suit against the DNR for depriving him of his livelihood, and on July 12, a hearing will be held on competing requests for summary judgment in the case. Baker is also seeking a jury trial in the case, betting that a group of his peers would understand better than any judge what is going on here.
For an excellent recap of the Baker legal case, read Amy Salberg’s report on her Real FoodLaw blog.
The day after the hearing, on July 13, Baker will be having a pig roast at his farm–his way of both celebrating his resistance and thanking the many who have supported his legal battle via donations and other support. Supporters from around the country are attending both events–make your own plans to attend if you’re in the area.
https://www.facebook.com/events/512213118828522/
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Quote of the week, from Mark Karlin, the editor of Buzzflash at Truthout: Although Michelle Obama may be justifiably proud of the organic food garden she planted her first summer at the White House, her husband’s administration continues to wage a war on the small farmer direct-sales-of-healthy-food-to-consumers food movement. This is from an introduction to an interview of me about the direction of Americas food rights movement.
A pretty decent interview, I thought.
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Is it the same-old-same-old in Maine? Legislation liberalizing access to raw milk easily passes both state houses…and awaits the governors signature. Nothing happens. Days stretch into weeks. Finally…well, we know the outcomes of similar situations in Nevada, Wisconsin, and California. A veto.
In Maine, the Republican governor, Paul LePage, has on several occasions expressed his support of small-farm issues, including liberalization of the raw milk licensing laws, allowing the smallest dairies to sell up to 20 gallons of milk a day without needing a license. Back in 2010, he seemed to be in conflict with his own Department of Agriculture, when he wrote a memo questioning the departments sudden decision to crack down on the smallest dairies, which for years had been allowed to sell raw milk privately, without a license–the crackdown coming in the absence of any illnesses.
But as we know from the experiences in other states, once the decision moves to the governor, the anti-food-rights forces mobilize to thwart the liberalization. These forces include the U.S. Food and Drug Administrtion, the various medical association, Big Ag. They threaten a cutoff of campaign contributions, a cutoff of federal grants, a re-directing of campaign support to political opponents. Gov. LePage has just announced he is running for re-election, so he could well be feeling vulnerable.
I hope he appreciates that the food sovereignty supporters in his state have become a political force to be reckoned with, and that hell do the right thing. I worry though–money often talks loudest in these situations.
1882 The first commercial milk pasteurizers produced.
1889 The campaign for universal pasteurization by force of law began in New York City
.
70 years of fresh milk. Can anyone actually believe there was ever a problem with milk in Wisconsin before they started pasteurizing it. http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/wlhba/articleView.asp?pg=1&id=3628
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The certified milk movement was initiated in 1891 by leading physicians of the Harvard Medical School
. Its goal was to control the production and processing of milk from cattle feed to city
distribution. Inspired by the work in Boston, Henry L. Coit
of Newark, New Jersey who coined the term certified milk to describe milk whose production
was supervised by a commission made up of physicians. The doctors inspected not only
the cows, but the land, buildings, and water at the dairy farm and put all collecting and
handling procedures under the severest scrutiny. Dozens of milk commissions were
established around the country in the early 1900s.
http://reysmont.blogspot.com/2008/02/manhattanville-and-new-york-citys-milk.html
1914
pasteurization made compulsory in New York City.
17l6: New York City required licensing of midwives.
Decline of witchcraft.
1760-1850: Doctors were usually not educated.
1760: First licensure law calling for prospective examination of doctors was passed in New York City.
1765: First medical school in Philadelphia was chartered.
At the end of the 18th century, Well-to-do families soon came to believe that physicians could provide better care than female midwives.
1796: Popular medicine included bloodletting and powerful emetics(induces vomiting) and cathartics(laxative).
In Colonial America, women in the home routinely provided most medical care. Women were also prominent as lay practitioners.
After the War of 1812, medical schools began to proliferate.
The shift from using midwives to using doctors started among women in urban middle classes.
1825: German immigrants brought homeopathy to America. Homeopathic medical schools admitted women willingly.
1830s and 1840s: “Popular Health Movement” peaked and remained influential throughout the century.
Between the period 1820 to 1840, many licensing laws were being rescinded or abolished.
One of the most commonly prescribed medicines during this era was calomel(sometimes adulterated with lead) a type of mercury pill that stimulated the bowels.
William A. Rockefeller, who was the father of a certain John D. Rockefeller. It is from these types of people that the term snake oil salesman arose in American parlance.
http://www.americanhistoryusa.com/dangerous-cures-popular-health-movement/
Sometime during the mid-1800s, some doctors went into “contract practice,” which is actually a primitive form of health insurance.
1847: Elizabeth Blackwell was accepted into the Geneva (New York) Medical College. She graduated at the top of her class.
1848: The American Medical Association was founded to enforce standards on medicine.
1850-1890: A variety of more “particularistic” hospitals were formed. These were primarily religious or ethnic institutions and specialized hospitals for certain diseases or categories of patients. They were also owned by medical sects, mainly homeopaths. There were a large number of Catholic immigrants.
1860: The average earnings of physicians put them at lower middle class.
1870s: In a showdown regarding homeopathy, the American Medical Association no longer allowed physicians who were homeopaths to remain in orthodox societies.
1870: Congress approved a charter for a homeopathic medical society in Washington, D.C.
Between the 1870s and 1880s, a common support for the restoration of medical licensing was sought among all the competing groups.
Around the Turn of the Century, as medical education improved, physicians organized to solidify their status and authority.
Physicians were becoming wealthier and being integrated into middle- and upper-class societies.
Doctors were among the first to purchase automobiles.
In the early 1900s, medical societies offered to handle malpractice suits for members. Doctors formed alliances to one another and testified on behalf of one another. If a doctor did not belong to the medical society, he had trouble getting insurance.
As more and more doctors became educated, they began to see midwifery as perpetuating uneducated, indecent ways.
The certified milk movement was initiated in 1891 by leading physicians of the Harvard Medical School
. Its goal was to control the production and processing of milk from cattle feed to city
distribution. Inspired by the work in Boston, Henry L. Coit
of Newark, New Jersey who coined the term certified milk to describe milk whose production
was supervised by a commission made up of physicians. The doctors inspected not only
the cows, but the land, buildings, and water at the dairy farm and put all collecting and
handling procedures under the severest scrutiny. Dozens of milk commissions were
established around the country in the early 1900s.
By 1905, the Department of Health had full control of all milk sold in New York City by requiring all milk traders to be licensed and as a condition of licensure, traders had to allow inspection of his suppliers creameries and farms, even though the sources were outside the citys jurisdiction.
1910: The Flexner Report revealed that 90 percent of doctors were without a college education and that most had attended substandard medical schools.
1914
pasteurization made compulsory in New York City.
2013, medicine is 25% of the GNP.
Our loss if so.
Whatever the rumblings of media and business, there really is only one natural and true form of community, and that form is baked into humanity, inalienable, and impossible to remove by man. It is face-to-face love and responsibility, which cannot be fulfilled over a wireless connection, nor by trucking microbes over asphalt across the country.
In the standard American tradition, all things are supposedly right with the world when Mark grows his corporation. My question is this: How much growth before OPDC becomes dangerous biologically? Or economically, or sociologically? How long before Mark’s well-intentioned efforts make it difficult or even impossible for the truth of community, by now so deeply buried under this money economy that we may never be able to dig it out?
Gordon, I live with and for a local community that established itself without any help from corporate business, indeed because there was no corporate (or government) help. It is very imperfect God knows, but clearly successful, if not measured by money alone. Certainly it is infinitely better than the human services department (or the grocery store).
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-walmartization-of-agriculture/5336449
http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertglatter/2013/07/07/recent-listeria-outbreak-linked-to-cheese/
http://videos.huffingtonpost.com/e-coli-outbreak-prompts-mass-frozen-food-recall-517735899
http://videos.huffingtonpost.com/ground-beef-recalled-following-possible-e-coli-contamination-517830863
Dave, I’m not sure you are being totally fair to Mark McAfee. He has promoted competition–maybe not entirely for all the “right” reasons. He understands that he can’t grow in a vacuum, with a big target on his back. So he is trying his best to grow the entire raw milk market, taking the view that a rising tide floats all boats. No, it’s not the ideal means to an end, but it is a means. And we need all the means we can get, in my view. All those hundreds of small dairies selling raw milk that have sprung up over the last decade in California are, in some measure, attributable to his efforts, both growing the market and encouraging competition.
You seem to have an idealistic approach to community, and it may be that true community can only happen in the way you have observed, independently of corporate influences and economic profit incentives. I have become perhaps more pragmatic about it. If McAfee sparks more farmers to become involved in producing nutrient-dense foods, that is a positive development to me. Those are the circumstances in which positive aspects of community can take hold. As McAfee has stated (and as I said in The Raw Milk Revolution) people don’t just start consuming raw milk in a vacuum–it has to be part of a shifting view about the importance of food and health in the larger picture of one’s life.
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/news/the-farmer-who-wouldnt-cowtow-rather-than-supply-supermarkets-and-face-financial-ruin-steve-hook-has-developed-a-market-for-raw-milks-8692664.html
When he’s controlling the distribution of the majority of milk in CA? When he’s shipping milk nationwide and rivals the size of DFA or Horizon? When he’s bigger than Fontera?
We have a term in biology/medicine/nature for an organism which grows without check or end.
All this talk about expanding consumer access to raw milk without regard to means is short sighted. We need to stop and look ahead a few years and ask ourselves: how could this go wrong, how are we setting ourselves up for failure, what kind of future are we building?
If we are not careful we’ll expand access to raw milk only to find out selves in a generation or two right back where we started today with the centralized control of milk distribution (and its profits) in the hands of a few while everyone else (consumer, farmer, community) suffer.
Those of us who weren’t shy to plunge-in, learned by doing. I know things today about dairying, that I would never have found out by sitting on my rear end, just contemplating the consequences of challenging the absurd law (according to which I was sent to gaol for 90 days).
It irks me that certain individuals keep on faulting Mark McAffee for his method. I met him in person a couple of times … from what I can tell, he’s solution-oriented = the first one to admit a mistake, so it can be corrected. The relentlessness of the criticism, makes me wonder if some of it is motivated by covet-ous-ness at the success of OPD?
Blaine and I spent 10 hours touring his farm, taking pictures, giving copies of PowerPoint educational materials, copies of food safety plans, sharing details about bio films and the secret sauce of how to deliver the best raw milk possible. I even gave him a condensed version of our RAWMI training day session and dumped it all onto a thumb drive to digest later.
Why did we do this? Why did we fly to Mt Shasta two weeks ago and do the same bing for CA Cow Share operations??? For the humanity of it all. People need raw milk!!! Badly. It needs to be low risk and delicious and these ventures need to be successful. How much was charged for this mentoring and partnering…..zero!!! OP and RAWMI paid for this.
I am sick and tired of raw milk being given a black eye. We all need to grow a greater community of farmers that care deeply about safety and quality. We must all stand together and encourage and support each other as we feed the conscious consumers in America. A track record must be documented. And it has with RAWMI already!!!
I must wholeheartedly agree….Walmart shoppers are in the greatest need….but raw milk in Walmart is not the solution. It would be like putting one good beneficial bacteria in a sea of antibiotics, hormones, preservatives, dead food and worse….it makes no sense. Walmart is the greatest sponsor of the great American cheap food market. That cheap food is the most expensive hellish medical disaster ever imagined to be visited on America. If anything…the OP brand would be the ultimate green wash….and we will not green wash any Monsatan worshipers.
There are so many views about raw milk and its place in the market shared on this blog….my vision is a rebirth of farmer connected whole food local markets in America. A place where farmers and consumers thrive. That’s my true north and it comes from my EMS roots and trying my best to save the unsavable lives of Americans sickened by cheap highly processed shelf life foods.
By the way…..production of raw milk in New Mexico is going to be a home run….I am very glad I could do a little to help someone that will take the information and thrive!!!
Landed back home on the dirt strip at 0900 to be greeted by our raw milk drinking super healthy grandkids….life is good…I want farmers all over America to be blessed with the knowledge and the right to feed their local communities with fresh raw milk. It is a blessing for all.
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I just turned on the TV and there was Bush Jr. selling Gardasil the cervical cancer vaccine and AIDS AZT antivirals to Africans, the same guy that sold the 9/11 terrorist theory to America and who’s father protected the Fed by assisting in the Kennedy assassination. Kind of like FDR’s father the snake oil salesman. Raw milk has some powerful enemies doesn’t it?
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Is this true?
Small businesses were bought out and they all became part of the huge Standard Oil Trust in 1882. Decisions were made by an executive committee with Rockefeller as head.
Standard Oil Company was incorporated in New Jersey on August 15, 1882, by the Standard Oil Trust. This oil company really owns all oil companies everywhere and all their subsidiaries. This oil company is owned by a little railroad line in North Carolina and that little railroad line was merged into the 1906 Southern Railway Merger that J. P. Morgan was so famous for.
All of this was owned by one man by the name of Louis Cass Payseur.
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Here are some more government atrocities.
Hidden from History: The Canadian Holocaust
http://canadiangenocide.nativeweb.org/intro2.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPKFk_L7y9g&feature=player_embedded#at=1369
http://www.akha.org/content/humanrightsdocs/thecanadiangenocide.html
http://search.yahoo.com/r/_ylt=A0oG7m6S09lRiXwAaFpXNyoA;_ylu=X3oDMTE1OGxiYXJhBHNlYwNzcgRwb3MDMgRjb2xvA2FjMgR2dGlkA1ZJUDEzMV8xNjU-/SIG=126rmfsh3/EXP=1373258770/**http%3a//canadiangenocide.nativeweb.org/genocide.pdf
OPDC is in this for the long hall. We are in this to make a difference and cause some good change. That means a price point that does not choke consumers.
Those that claim that OP is just another capitalist corporation, think again. An LLC is nearly a requirement with Bill Marler swimming in the turbid waters. Insurance, branding, and efficiencies of scale are required if you want to survive and feed people. If this is capitalism, so be it! But….I think it is not. It is simply reality in this really sick world. Utopia does not exist. We can all try and strive for it, but it does not exist. My dad died searching for utopia, he found pain and a lonesome reality. I will not make that gruesome mistake. Each of us is a voice and each of us add to the chorus that hopefully makes music together.
I’ve made the case, backed by very legitimate biological, sociological, and economic reasons, that our fresh food, including milk, ought to be locally provided–reasons which not incidentally have here been largely ignored, or sometimes, especially by those living inside the corporate model, spit at, schoolyard-style.
Now if I’ve said anything wrong, point it out. I want to hear a response from the other side specifically about those biological and social issues. (NB: I don’t like the word side and use it only because I can’t think of a better word right now. It’s a phony descriptor since we’re all in the same boat. Sides, like corporations, are fictitious creatures, although also like corporations, they have real power.)
It’s painfully obvious that most of us can’t imagine any food alternatives that don’t directly involve centralized, corporate and/or government business. That’s understandable of course, given that corporate business is what we and our parents were raised on–it’s all most of us know. But ours is a perspective tragically uninformed by history. Consumption of non-local fresh food is an extremely new phenomenon–barely a blink in human history. For most all of man’s time on this earth, from Adam until just a few short generations ago, ALL fresh food was local. Then suddenly, triggered by cheap fuel, roads, refrigeration, genetic tinkering, and blind comfort with astronomical debt, we happily turned the whole thing upside down and welcomed in monoculture mania, barely giving a thought to what the long-term effects might be on our health, our economic stability, and our happiness.
Today, where I live in Pennsylvania, traveling to the grocery store in town from the ever dwindling countryside, one passes countless acres of fields overgrown with invasive species, untended orchard land, collapsing barns, and many defunct dairy farms. Then we buy apples from Chile and milk from Wisconsin at a grocery store which would have empty shelves in less than two weeks if diesel fuel supplies were interrupted.
Where, one might wonder, are all those defunct farmers? Just like the rest of us, they are getting up in the morning and leaving their families and neighbors to work all day for corporate or government wages–living the sociological version of monoculture–returning home at the end of the day to spend their evenings trying to scratch out enough money from their land with corn and soybeans to pay the taxes. Notably they are, with almost everybody else, sicker, more tired, busier, less safe from global cultural and economic forces, and dramatically less happy, than their grandparents.
Now let me say what I’ve said before here and elsewhere: If I had no local option I would eat trucked-in produce, and drink OPDC milk, gratefully. But centralized fresh food is to me is a very distant second-place choice–one that in my case, and probably yours too whether you know it or not, is wholly unnecessary.
Building local food communities is easy as pie. That’s because food and community are natural brothers, and require only the recognition of their powerful symbiotic goodness to trigger them into being. They are, in fact, coming into being all over the place, without government or corporate-business help (or, I should say, in spite of it). You could no more halt them than dandelions. (And as Mark has noticed and acknowledged, sometimes the pattern naturally brings raw milk along for the ride, and sometimes the other way around, partly due to Mark’s efforts.)
The natural way, the sustainable way, is bottom up; not top down. We should all be eager for the transition, living as we do every day with the tragic legacy of centralization.
It never ceases to amaze me how people buy expensive toys to save on physical labor like say a riding lawn mower, and then turn around and buy an exercise machine or pay to go to a gym instead. It’s like digging a hole and filling it back up because we have been brainwashed and do not realize it.
Where I grew up we didn’t have any supermarkets or convenience stores at all, we did have a central town farmer’s market for general exchange of various foods, but I don’t think we can ever go back to that here in modern America.
Why do we need lush lawns to show off when we could be growing free food instead I will never understand – to me a cherry, blueberry, apple or pear tree is much more beautiful than any useless “ornamentals” but our culture has lost it’s compass in favor of vanity and artificial beauty.
Bottom line, it’s all about the almighty buck. Don’t buy it.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151726424786181&set=pb.171911861180.-2207520000.1373328891.&type=3&theater
Every year the Dairy Council decides where millions of promotion, education and nutritional dollars from CA Dairies and that includes OPDC gets spent. At this hearing, we are making a case that the Dairy Council should be investing in Raw Milk research, promotion and nutrition ( pretty radical buy why not?? ). I invited UC Davis PhD and internationally expert on raw milk,…Dr. Bruce German to attend. He will be there in support of raw milk research including the investment in development of rapid test pathogen technologies.
Come put a voice to your GUT. We lost 105 CA dairies in 2012 alone. We now know that at about 1000 micro dairies are operating feeding local communities with raw milk in CA (under the radar). This sends a huge message!! Is the dairy industry really listening to the consumer??? We will attempt to build bridges of trust and extend a raw milk peace branch ( little twig but growing ) tomorrow. Come if you can. This is total engagement…the only way to truly change the world is: Show up, Stand Up and Speak Up!!
See you there,
Mark McAfee
When will the FDA lies and false recommendations stop??? Once again a pasteurized dairy product kills an American and causes the death of an unborn baby…listeria is directly associated with thermalized, pasteurized cheeses and pasteurized milk…not raw milk or truly raw cheeses. The Crave Brothers cheese brand was labeled as Pasteurized…not raw. The CDC and EU QMRA’S show that raw milk is safe for pregnant moms and raw milk is a low risk food. What will Wholefoods do now?? Ban all cheeses in their stores. Perhaps they can be ultra safe and empty their stores to assure 100% safety as we all starve. Or perhaps WF can grow some guts and apply some intelligence and read the CDC data and review the EU QMRA’s…?? Pasteurized dairy products are deadly!!!! They are an invitation to listeria to kill. Worst of all, the recommendations after the Crave Brothers outbreak says: do not eat raw products. When do the lies stop??? The deaths came from pasteurized not raw. This is an outrage!!!
No matter how one looks at it, this is necessary. That’s why the main goal is to produce our own food and personally know the producers of the food we must buy, with reliance upon government or NGO certifications being only a secondary, stopgap, insufficient temporary substitute.
Where it comes to everything, not just food but especially food, the criteria for what’s good and what’s bad are clear. Organic, holistic, part of a community context, not the reductive NPK mentality in any form; bottom-up, not top-down; democratic, not hierarchical; decentralized, not centralized; participatory and direct, not “representative”; demand-based, not supply-based; production for use, not for commodification; open-source, not proprietary; the commons, not enclosure;. Apply these imperatives to each and every alleged policy dilemma, and one will never go wrong. They all lead to the same conclusions: We must abolish commodification and abolish globalization through the expedient of abolishing planned-economy corporatism, abolishing corporate welfare, abolishing the corporate form.
They also cut across all the false divisions: Left/right, liberal/conservative, Democrat/Republican (we don’t want or need an “alternative” version of these, but something totally different), public/private, socialism/”free market”, protectionism/”free trade”, and others.
In spite of the fact that our next door neighbor, New Hampshire has had essentially the same bill (sans testing of milk or water) in place for SEVEN YEARS and New Hampshire has a growing micro and local dairy industry, somehow this “Open for Business” governor is gripped by the possible fate of poor uninformed public exposed to a potentially hazardous white liquid substance at a farmers market of all places. OMG that is so scary.
Our dear Governor’s veto excuses letter can be found here: http://www.maine.gov/tools/whatsnew/attach.php?id=559417&an=1
The answer to your questions is that:
1. No, we cannot convince Our Betters that they should dispense Better Policy to we peasant scum, because their policy is working just fine for them. The fact that we continue Looking Up to them is what they’re counting on, part of their calculation.
2. Yes, once we the people being looking only to ourselves, there will be great opportunities to use the system’s weight and dependencies against it.
As for the current moment, and the tactics of seeking energy credits etc., the answer is that we rhetorically demand everything the enemy is getting, and if people like NSAC still insist on working for this, that’s what they’ll do. As for the core Community Food movement, our real position is to convince the people to abolish all those things completely – we’re 100% against all corporate welfare, and 100% against all taxation upon the people. These are powerful wedge issues, and as I said they cut across all the false divisions.
Miscarriage is the loss of a pregnancy in the first 20 weeks. About 10 to 20 percent of known pregnancies end in miscarriage, and more than 80 percent of these losses happen before 12 weeks.
This doesn’t include situations in which you lose a fertilized egg before a pregnancy becomes established. Studies have found that 30 to 50 percent of fertilized eggs are lost before or during the process of implantation often so early that a woman goes on to get her period at about the expected time.
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What causes a miscarriage?
Between 50 and 70 percent of first-trimester miscarriages are thought to be random events caused by chromosomal abnormalities in the fertilized egg. Most often, this means that the egg or sperm had the wrong number of chromosomes, and as a result, the fertilized egg can’t develop normally.
Sometimes a miscarriage is caused by problems that occur during the delicate process of early development. This would include an egg that doesn’t implant properly in the uterus or an embryo with structural defects that prevent it from developing.
Since most healthcare practitioners won’t do a full-scale workup of a healthy woman after a single miscarriage, it’s usually impossible to tell why the pregnancy was lost. And even when a detailed evaluation is performed after you’ve had two or three consecutive miscarriages, for instance the cause still remains unknown half the time.
http://www.babycenter.com/0_understanding-miscarriage_252.bc
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Can you really die from diarrhea or are you more likely to die from the treatment or lack thereof. Isn’t malnutrition the leading cause of diarrhea. If the person doesn’t get food and water they will die and giving them antibiotics, like some doctors do, only makes it worse.
1. The industrial system is unsustainable and won’t last much longer, so our fight is necessary to prevent the worst of future famines, as well as to assert ourselves as human beings and democratic citizens in the here and now. It’s also about maintaining our personal health and that of our families and fellow citizens, since the system’s goal is to physically poison us. (Not necessarily “intentionally”, perhaps that part is “collateral damage”, but it’s a necessary part of their profit and control imperatives, so that’s what they want to do.)
2. In the political here and now, Community Food is rising as an economic sector spontaneously, out of its own natural vigor, so all real innovation and entrepreneurship is on our side, while only decadence, in the form of brute force, brazen lies, sclerotic outdated technology, and general conformism is on theirs. Politically, it offers many opportunities to unite the most active and idealistic people who are finding various false divisions to no longer reflect reality. In these ways it can be the basis for a real democracy movement which can resist, defy, and outlast the system.
—
As for the within-the-system stuff, that can be good as well, if people view it in purely practical, necessary-evil, and getting-back-some-of-what-was-stolen-from-us terms. But it seems like many who work for, say, a better Farm Bill actually believe in the legitimacy of the central government’s prerogative over food. Taking that further, we get the examples of NGOs like the CFS and FWW who basically oppose Monsanto with one hand and help it with the other, and from there to out-and-out front groups like the CSPI.
I say try everything, but try it with the right mindset. Like Shakepeare has his King Harry say, “All things are ready if our minds be so.” The reverse is also true.
But you seem to be saying you agree with the corporate media that these aren’t problems, or that substitutes will soon be found.
Like I said elsewhere, you don’t really want a more specific treatment; what I say is clear enough. You just don’t want to do anything. So I’d say you’re the one “doing it again”. And as for what to do, I just wrote that out again yesterday. Reread that comment since you’ve already forgotten it.
As for democracy and humanity, you’ll have to figure out for yourself what those mean to you, and whether or not they mean anything.
But if you don’t find my comments to be food for thought, then continue pondering the legalities of things. You’ll continue to amuse the food police. And go talk to the DATCP guy again. I’m sure he’ll be happy to be as specific as you like as far as exactly what you ought to do, since I’m so incapable of crossing every t and dotting every i for you.
(Ivory tower versions of what’s “possible” or “utopian” have, of course, never meant a thing throughout history. The one and only thing that’s ever mattered is will against will.)
I couldn’t agree more with this statement.
“Building local food communities is easy as pie.”
It seems a huge wall for many people is the govt and all they entail to block people from doing something as simple as growing foods, whether for themselves or the community. Many believe you can’t beat the govt at their own games, many don’t have the funds to fight.
With the disappearing small farms (they have been disappearing for many reasons) Teaching people to grow their own foods is often met with disdain, excuses of no time-it’s easier to stop at the store on the way home from work. It seems many believe that you NEED all the herbicides/pesticides man-made fertilizers (don’t want to get e-coli) to have a productive farm. They are overwhelmed by what they think they need.
It can be a hard class to teach. Teaching people to grow some of their own foods and to grow local foods on small farms would decrease if not eliminate hunger in our own country. But, as said, the govt makes it extremely difficult if not impossible for most small farms.