how can I ensure food is safe - just watched Food Inc. and I can't stop crying

[Anonymous]

The best first step for me was to stop eating meat. Once I began to delve into where my food comes from (about 10 years ago), the first thing I did was stop eating meat.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Where can I Watch this movie? cable, theather? thank you

We ended up buying it - but I'm sure you can rent it - should be on netflix, in stores, etc. soon if not already.

definitely on netflix. buy it only if you intend to pass it around. it's not something i'd care to see twice, although it has changed me profoundly.

[Anonymous]

I have not had a chance to read through all the posts, but after reading a lot of Michael Pollen, we completely went off the industrial farm grid, in terms of meat. I have a huge deep freezer and get ALL of the meat we eat from local farms that I have visited who are PROUD to show you their practices and who use a local butcher. I buy my meat in bulk and you can get ANTHING you want within a 3hrs radius from DC.

When we go out to restaurants, we only eat vegetarian or fish. From local farms I source all food in bulk including pork, lamb, chicken, turkey, and beef. It is wonderful buying in bulk, not only is it cheaper, but I only stock up on meat once a year.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:When you look at why farmer switch to organic production, it is almost exclusively in order to increase their margins. There has been enough news coverage on that to see a pattern. Farmer sees income drying up, farmer switches to organic.

That does not make them bad, but in what other area do we act so trusting of someone who wants to sell us something?. Anywhere else we are so skeptical, which is why we have a saying about it.

In this case, the industry is trying to claim that the milk is not "organic" as they see it, even though it complies with the regulations and fits the standard definition of organic. If they or you want it to be a wider movement, that's fine. Lobby to get the definition of organic changed. But while I trust your motives, I bet you dollars to donuts that the industry is complaining because of the price pressure.

As for the profit margins, Walmart as a retailer makes very thin profit margins. And they are perfectly willing to provide some high profile goods at their own cost in order to get people in their stores. That is how they became the largest music retailer, because they would rather sell the CD's at cost to get you in the door. And that is why they give fantastic deals on generic prescription drugs. And that is almost certainly why they were willing to price a high profile item like organic milk at a discount.

That's one possibility, certainly. Another is that it's cheaper because it's poorly sourced.

The sourcing is on the table for everyone to see. The producer and their process have been laid out in plenty of news articles.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If you want to be safe, the most important things you can do are to eat pasteurized milk products and avoid unpasteurized products,

Totally disagree with this. Unpasteurized dairy products, if produced at a small clean local organic farm, are far healthier and safer than any commercially produced product.

My advice to OP was to seek out a local source for raw dairy and grass-fed organic meats and eggs. Join a CSA and use farmers markets (and of course your parents garden) for fresh local organic produce. Find a relatively local source for organically produced grains, and cook them whole or grind them yourself. Buy the cookbook "Nourishing Traditions" and start a revolution in your own home regarding how you eat. You can live almost 100% outside the commercial, mass-produced food system, even right here in Washington DC.

The safest thing you can do is to continue buying food regulated by FDA safety protocols. There are much, much higher incidents of food contamination from food purchased outside the system.

Riiiiiiiiiiight. Yeah, right. There are literally hundreds of thousands of incidences of food poisoning occurring in FDA-regulated food every year. Their answer is to just pasteurize everything. Great - heat everything until nothing healthy - no nutrients, minerals, enzymes, probiotics - exist in any of our food, and then it will be safe. At least the bad stuff is dead, too - we hope!

Remember that every every snickers bar, every twinkie, every potato chip, every pepsi, every burger and french fry that was ever sold at any fast food restaurant, etc. etc. etc., is FDA regulated. Personally, I am not convinced that the FDA or our government should be the sole voice on health and food safety.

This part about raw milk is absolutely untrue.

I looked up the disease outbreak statistics. Unpasteurized milk products are consumed by a small portion of our population, and yet they are the cause of as many food poisoning outbreaks as all the lunch meat consumed by the entire nation. If the entire nation consumed unpasteurized milk, it would be our #1 source of foodborne illness.

Don't be suckered by someone wants to sell you high priced milk with quaint stories about their organic, back to natural farm with pretty pictures that warm your heart. Raw milk is dangerous. Farms have bacteria, plain and simple, and it gets into the milk. Pasteurization kills it. Raw milk won't sicken you every time, but if enough people drink it, someone is going to be sick.

This is so silly it is laughable. You clearly know nothing at all about raw milk, and obviously have not looked at any real data. Fresh milk from healthy organic cows, from small clean farms, is an extremely safe and healthy product. Not to mention usually less expensive than Horizon, Organic Valley, etc.

Obviously milk from large scale commercial dairies is an entirely different - and yes, dangerous - product. Thankfully no one who drinks raw milk would ever consider drinking it from that kind of dairy.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If you want to be safe, the most important things you can do are to eat pasteurized milk products and avoid unpasteurized products,

Totally disagree with this. Unpasteurized dairy products, if produced at a small clean local organic farm, are far healthier and safer than any commercially produced product.

My advice to OP was to seek out a local source for raw dairy and grass-fed organic meats and eggs. Join a CSA and use farmers markets (and of course your parents garden) for fresh local organic produce. Find a relatively local source for organically produced grains, and cook them whole or grind them yourself. Buy the cookbook "Nourishing Traditions" and start a revolution in your own home regarding how you eat. You can live almost 100% outside the commercial, mass-produced food system, even right here in Washington DC.

The safest thing you can do is to continue buying food regulated by FDA safety protocols. There are much, much higher incidents of food contamination from food purchased outside the system.

Riiiiiiiiiiight. Yeah, right. There are literally hundreds of thousands of incidences of food poisoning occurring in FDA-regulated food every year. Their answer is to just pasteurize everything. Great - heat everything until nothing healthy - no nutrients, minerals, enzymes, probiotics - exist in any of our food, and then it will be safe. At least the bad stuff is dead, too - we hope!

Remember that every every snickers bar, every twinkie, every potato chip, every pepsi, every burger and french fry that was ever sold at any fast food restaurant, etc. etc. etc., is FDA regulated. Personally, I am not convinced that the FDA or our government should be the sole voice on health and food safety.

This part about raw milk is absolutely untrue.

I looked up the disease outbreak statistics. Unpasteurized milk products are consumed by a small portion of our population, and yet they are the cause of as many food poisoning outbreaks as all the lunch meat consumed by the entire nation. If the entire nation consumed unpasteurized milk, it would be our #1 source of foodborne illness.

Don't be suckered by someone wants to sell you high priced milk with quaint stories about their organic, back to natural farm with pretty pictures that warm your heart. Raw milk is dangerous. Farms have bacteria, plain and simple, and it gets into the milk. Pasteurization kills it. Raw milk won't sicken you every time, but if enough people drink it, someone is going to be sick.

This is so silly it is laughable. You clearly know nothing at all about raw milk, and obviously have not looked at any real data. Fresh milk from healthy organic cows, from small clean farms, is an extremely safe and healthy product. Not to mention usually less expensive than Horizon, Organic Valley, etc.

Obviously milk from large scale commercial dairies is an entirely different - and yes, dangerous - product. Thankfully no one who drinks raw milk would ever consider drinking it from that kind of dairy.

Oh, yes I do. We have a small family farm, in Vermont, no less, and we don't drink the cow's milk unpasteurized. I also know that raw milk is a tiny portion of the market, and yet 80% of disease outbreaks due to milk are from unpasteurized milk. Who told you that there is such a thing as a clean farm? There are better or worse farms, but that's about it. If you had any idea what gets on a cow's teats.

I know the raw milk web sites all sound so wonderful, but no one is accountable for the information on them. They talk a good game about the good bacteria outcompeting the bad bacteria, throw in a little lactic acid talk, and do some creative reinterpretation of the history of milk in the U.S. And the producers can paint a great picture about how sanitary things are at their little farm and what values they use to manage their business. But the bottom line is how raw milk sales are regulated for safety.

Here is a guide for Vermont farmers who want to start selling raw milk (law passed this year), and you will find that it doesn't paint quite the same picture. Not that it's particularly bad. In fact many parts look like traditional dairy regulation, except that the usual safety net of pasteurization is gone. Things I would be concerned about: the frequency of bacterial testing (2x per month or not at all depending on which tier you are in), the amount of fecal coliform they are legally allowed to have in your milk, the number of tests they can fail before they get so much as a warning letter, the limits on civil penalties, the fact that Tier 1 producers don't even have to do bacteria testing, annual inspections for Tier 2 producers and no required inspections for Tier 1 producers, among others. You won't see a word of making test results publicly available.

http://www.ruralvermont.org/issues/milk/2009/sellersguide.pdf

So do you know the bacterial counts in the milk you buy? Have you bothered to read the regulations in the state you buy from? Do you know what's in your producer's inspection and testing history?