The Ride For Farmers www.rideforfarmers.org (wishes to extend its full support and strong encouragement to all those in California fighting a ban on Raw Milk.
For information on Raw Milk, go to http://www.realmilk.com/...
The Ride for Farmers sees the push to ban Raw Milk, as part of a larger corporate push to control all milk sales in the country and to destroy family farming communities.
The Ride for Farmers believes the bans and the threat of bans are a corporate mean (via its corruption of agricultural departments across the country and at the federal level) effort to break the link between farmer and his neighbors and customers, a natural link independent of government/corporate intervention. Using "raw milk scares" and "food safety" as the argument, the state departments of agriculture are destroying farming communities' well-being financially, as well as the interconnection between neighbors with their customer base.
The ban on Raw Milk as well as the threat of a ban has created palpable fear in farming communities.
Those communities have consumed Raw Milk for generations and the exchange of such wholesome dairy products have gone on between neighbors and customers for as long. The sales are not just financially important but are essential in the web of relations within farming communities, milk being a basic food.
Raw Milk is considered not only safe but especially wholesome, not only wholesome but UNIQUELY rich in pro-biotics that help keep people healthy. http://www.realmilk.com/...
"There are three things which build and maintain civilization throughout time: pure air, pure water, and pure food. And as an eternal truth I say unto you, that there are three things which bring the end of civilization, even the mightiest that have ever been and shall ever be, from the beginningless beginning to the endless end of all time: impure air, impure water, and impure food." - Zenda Avesta, c. 3000 BC.
"...the right of the individual to elect freely the manner of his care in illness must be preserved." - Dwight D. Eisenhower.
"The degree to which patients desire to control their own fate is continually underestimated by physicians. For the most people, diet is the easiest health measure to manipulate." - Jan van Eys, MD, PhD, in ACS, Nutrition and Cancer, 1978.
The Ride for Farmers sees the attack on Raw Milk sales as draconian control over farming communities. It also sees the concern for "food safety" as an empty and, in fact, malicious argument given that the the states have done nothing to stop sale of rBGH milk which is associated with a 7-fold increased risk in breast cancer, as well as increased risk in colon, lung and prostate cancer. http://www.sustdev.org/...
The Ride for Farmers urges journalists to investigate who is behind the nationwide push to ban Raw Milk, concerned that it might be Monsanto, which is behind a state to state effort to ban labeling of milk with its own product - rBGH - used to produce it, and which is suing farmers who honestly declare their milk as rBGH-free. The two efforts to crush dairy farmers for selling "plain milk" seem related but only an investigation will determine if that is the case. Please do not take at face value that the effort to ban Raw Milk is about "food safety."
"The most solid...piece of scientific truth that I know of,...is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature. Indeed, I regard this as the major discovery of the past 100 years of biology." - Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer President, Dr. Lewis Thomas, "Hubris in Science?", American Assoc. for the Advancement of Science, June 30, 1978.
"...The system of influence and control..is highly skewed in favor of the corporate and financial system." - Vincente Navarro, (Professor of Health and Social Policy, John Hopkins U.).
http://www.ahealedplanet.net/...
The FDA and USDA, in fact, care so little for the public safety, that they have allowed or supported banning of labeling of all milk, while leaving the public trapped into not knowing which milk is from rBGH-injected cows and which is not. And those departments have not protected honest dairy farmers who have attempted to tell the public their milk is rBGH-free.
"The problem with 'prevention' is that it does not produce revenues. No health plan reimburses a physician or a hospital for preventing a disease." - NCI Deputy Director, Division of Cancer Cause and Prevention; and of Diet, Nutrition and Cancer Program.
Raw Milk has been associated with very little disease of any kind. It is full of pro-biotics increasingly missing in our pasteurized, sterilized, degraded, overprocessed diets. Informed customers should have the right to decide for themselves whether the milk is safe for their families.
"Four distinct groups of bacteria survive pasteurization....the strep of pasteurized milk are the most frequent cause of rheumatic fever --the most deadly disease of childhood.'" - USDA
"...Cartels...(drove) independent (milk) distributors out of business....The small (milk) producer couldn't afford the excessive cost of pasteurization machinery,...manufactured by the (cartel)." - American Capsule News, Jan. 19 & Feb. 9, 1957.
"Animals fed on raw milk and raw meat reproduce homogeneous litters and the usual causes of death are old age and injuries....The cats fed pasteurized milk...show skeletal changes, lessened reproductive efficiency, and their kittens present progressive constitutional and respiratory problems. ...Cooked meat (fed) cats commonly (have) heart problems,...infections of the (organs), inflammation ...parasites...abortions..." - Francis M. Pottenger, Jr, MD, author of 55 articles, Pottenger's Cats: a Study in Nutrition, c. 1983.
"From about 1850 until the late 1930's, one of the standing jokes in the medical profession, was about a few idiots who called themselves doctors, who claimed they could cure pneumonia by feeding their patients moldy bread. ...Until...they discovered penicillin...in moldy bread!" - P.E. Binzel, MD, in Thomas Mansell, Cancer Simplified, 1977.
http://www.ahealedplanet.net/...
The state agriculture departments, the USDA and the FDA, to provide food safety, MUST institute an immediate labeling of all milk, informing customers whether the product is rBGH (or BST) free or not.
In NOT yet doing so, the departments are going against the Nuremberg Code on human experimentation - in this case, in genetic engineering - exposing millions of people against their will to a known and deadly risk of a variety of cancers. They are doing so not only without the public's knowledge but thus, obviously, without the public's "informed" consent, and with every indication of resistance where there is information (compared to putting a skull and crossbones on the product, in terms of public's strong avoidance if they even know it is genetically engineered).
http://ohsr.od.nih.gov/...
NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH
Regulations and Ethical Guidelines: Directives for Human Experimentation
NUREMBERG CODE
The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision. This latter element requires that before the acceptance of an affirmative decision by the experimental subject there should be made known to him the nature, duration, and purpose of the experiment; the method and means by which it is to be conducted; all inconveniences and hazards reasonable to be expected; and the effects upon his health or person which may possibly come from his participation in the experiment.
The duty and responsibility for ascertaining the quality of the consent rests upon each individual who initiates, directs or engages in the experiment. It is a personal duty and responsibility which may not be delegated to another with impunity.
The experiment should be such as to yield fruitful results for the good of society, unprocurable by other methods or means of study, and not random and unnecessary in nature.
The experiment should be so designed and based on the results of animal experimentation and a knowledge of the natural history of the disease or other problem under study that the anticipated results will justify the performance of the experiment.
The experiment should be so conducted as to avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury.
No experiment should be conducted where there is an a priori reason to believe that death or disabling injury will occur; except, perhaps, in those experiments where the experimental physicians also serve as subjects.
The degree of risk to be taken should never exceed that determined by the humanitarian importance of the problem to be solved by the experiment.
Proper preparations should be made and adequate facilities provided to protect the experimental subject against even remote possibilities of injury, disability, or death.
The experiment should be conducted only by scientifically qualified persons. The highest degree of skill and care should be required through all stages of the experiment of those who conduct or engage in the experiment.
During the course of the experiment the human subject should be at liberty to bring the experiment to an end if he has reached the physical or mental state where continuation of the experiment seems to him to be impossible.
During the course of the experiment the scientist in charge must be prepared to terminate the experiment at any stage, if he has probable cause to believe, in the exercise of the good faith, superior skill and careful judgment required of him that a continuation of the experiment is likely to result in injury, disability, or death to the experimental subject.
Reprinted from Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, Vol. 2, pp. 181-182.. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949.
The Ride for Farmers urges readers to support the people fighting for Raw Milk in California by writing and calling. It is before the legistlature on April 15th,.
We also urge you to support family dairy farmers under immense threat right now by corporate interests. Get informed. Farmers are living in real fear and could use help from progressives who begin to know even not to misled by raw milk "scares" which are the usual prelude to imposing laws against raw milk. Food scares are frequently used to wipe out farmers or their stocks of animals, to corporate advantage.
Please, become informed and don't let Monsanto and government agencies use food scares as they use terrorism, to impose totalitarian controls in their own interest.