Ruminating on Organic Milk

Every penny we spend has multiple and often contradictory real-world repercussions, and it can make you crazy trying to sort out whether your buying habits are screwing up the world or helping to make it a better place.

It was milk that got me thinking the other day. There was an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer about local organic dairy farmers. They work hard to adhere to strict organic guidelines requiring cows to graze on open organic pasture. The official organic guidelines, however, are not so strict: large corporate dairies in the western states get away with calling their milk ‘organic’ just by giving their herd organic feed, even though the cows live a miserable life, penned up in close quarters and rarely if ever actually put to pasture. The local farmers see this as cheating, and as damaging the reputation of the organic label for milk.

Funny thing is, the DebtorsPrison household probably buys less milk than ordinary households. Although Mrs. DebtorsPrison has a glass now and then, I can’t drink the stuff straight—don’t like the taste or texture and it makes me gag. I do use it on the cold cereal I breakfast on a few times each week, use it in cooking, have some hot chocolate occasionally. So far, I have not paid the premium price for organic milk.

Still, I try and take these things into consideration in everything I buy. I do most of my food shopping at Whole Foods Supermarket. It costs somewhat more, but I like knowing that I am minimizing the amount of chemically-enhanced fake food I put into my body, and I like that my buying habits show these ‘Foodenstein’ multinationals that I reject their products.

The milk I buy at Whole Foods is not organic, but it is at least free of recombinant Bovine Growth Hormones (rBGH). Now, the corporate food industry is spending plenty of bucks to convince you that this stuff is harmless—see, for example, the Milk is Milk website put up by the agribusiness-funded Center for Global Food Issues (there’s even a blog!), but don’t you believe it. The European Union bans the import of US meat containing rBGH, given the ample evidence that it is not only highly carcinogenic, but that due to the environmental contamination produced by industrial farming, low levels of rBGH show up in our drinking water and may be a factor in both the increasing early onset of puberty in girls and in the slowly falling sperm level counts in men.

Whole Foods does offer organic milk, but it costs about twice as much as the non-organic stuff, which so far has kept me from buying it. As much as I’d love to buy only the best and the purest, the sad fact is in DebtorsPrison America, shitty food often costs less, and when you have low income and large debts, you have to choose your battles carefully. But perhaps organic milk is one more modest step I can take.

And even there you have to make choices. Is there really a difference between organic milk from cows grazed in open pasture versus penned cows fed organic grain? Here’s the scoop according to Organic Valley Farms: grass-fed, open-pastured cows are healthier, the farming practices are more environmentally sustainable, and the milk is healthier too, richer in such heart-healthy and cancer-fighting compounds as Vitamin E, Beta-Carotene, Omega-3 fats and Conjugated Linoleic Acid (sounds awful, but it’s all good for you).

So maybe the extra buck or two per week for pasture-fed organic milk is a worthwhile addition to my rage-against-the-machine shopping basket. As I said at the outset: every penny we spend has real-world repercussions.