I absolutely refuse to buy any dairy that hasn’t been grass fed. I’d rather drive for 20 minutes to buy my milk grass fed than grab a pint at the bottom of the road. This wasn’t always the case, in fact it was something I never even thought about. Sometimes I would pick up an organic milk, because I thought it might be healthier but I didn’t really know what made it healthier or why. However this all changed after a school trip where I volunteered as a parent helper.
The trip was for a class of Year 1 students who had all been invited to The Duke Of Westminsters Dairy Farm down the road. This is a state of the art farm producing a large volume of dairy which supplied many of the big chain supermarkets. The kids got to see some cows and machinery and will probably have forgotten all about it by the time they are ten but for me it has left a lasting memory which will be permanently etched on my mind.
I admit I hadn’t given much thought to where milk came from. Only an impression of cows ambling into a cosy shed once a day to be milked before going back out to graze on lush pastures. After all, this is the UK, famous for green and pleasant lands! How wrong was I. The process I witnessed made me angry and sad and concerned for our health. This herd had never even seen the light of day, let alone a pasture. They lived out their entire lives on concrete, shoulder to shoulder jostling along until they were crammed into a single pen and joined the conveyor belt where they were milked by machines before being deposited back on the concrete in a non existent space. Their diet, medication and lack of movement was all instrumented in order to make them produce as much milk as possible. As I watched these poor gloomy looking creatures I wondered what effect this process had on the quality of the milk they were producing. I mean, here they were standing on concrete, and therefore in each others feaces and they were so packed in, surely this was a breeding ground for bacteria? So, what kind of medication is being pumped into all these animals to stop them getting sick and how much of that medication is then being passed to us when we consume the milk? Also, when I was a kid the milk would separate and form a creamy top. My siblings and I would all fight about who was going to get that first creamy splash on their cornflakes, but this was no longer the case. My kids had never even seen a creamy top.
The more I looked into this the worse it all became. The cruelty of the animals was one thing but the milk itself was starting to look more and more alarming. One article I read said the following:
“CAFO animals are given large quantities of antibiotics, vaccines, vitamins, and other potentially toxic drugs to prevent the diseases that would normally overtake them as a result of living in such filthy, overcrowded conditions. Those chemicals get passed along to you in the milk you consume. In fact, using a highly sensitive test, scientists have detected as man as 20 painkillers, antibiotics and growth hormones in samples of cow’s milk “
If you want more information the web address is below but I must warn you that it is not a pretty read and there are some fairly graphic images on there:
This is what we feed our children in the morning. Surely there are long term health repercussions? And if you could just see the misery of these poor animals you would never touch the stuff again.
So I went on a mission to find healthy grass fed milk for me and my family which would significantly increase our intake of Omega 3 and other healthy vitamins and minerals and also help with animal welfare. Again, I have no letters after my name and can’t make any scientific claims but the information is all there on the health benefits of grass fed milk. One resource I found helpful was from the Eat Wild website where they clearly outline the advantages:
http://www.eatwild.com/articles/superhealthy.html
I even went a step further and started ordering in Raw Milk (hello creamy tops!) but that is a subject for another day!
This doesn’t just equate to milk by the way. Grass fed butter is easy to come by and offers you the same health benefits, in fact, all your diary can be modified in this way to make for a healthier you and a healthier family.
It gets you thinking, if I hadn’t gone on that school trip my family and I would still be consuming those hormones, antibiotics and other toxic drugs whilst contributing to the poor standards of animal welfare and knock on negative effects to our environment. It’s a no brainer to me! Grass fed all the way!
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