It's Not Cheap For Your Benefit

This is what God intended. Go with God, not Global Capitalism, Inc.


A crucial lesson lost on most Americans...

Current industrial farming practices rely heavily on grain. Under current US agriculture policy, the government provides substantial subsidies to farmers who produce grains, particularly corn and soybeans. Livestock producers often use corn and soy as a base for their animal feed because these protein-rich grains help bring animals to market weight faster, and because they are cheaper than other feed options as a result of government subsidies. It has been estimated that the operating costs of factory farms would be 7-10% higher without these subsidies. As a result, a large percentage of grains grown in the US are used in animal feed, with 47% of soy and 60% of corn produced in the US being consumed by livestock.

Government welfare? Yes. Cheaper? Yes. Better? A resounding NO:

The overreliance on grain-based animal feeds in industrial food animal production has negative consequences for animal health, the environment, and even human health. Considering the natural eating habits of livestock animals when formulating animal feeds would be beneficial to both animals and consumers, and will result in healthier herds and flocks, less reliance on antibiotics to control disease, as well as a lower chance of introducing certain pathogens into society via contaminated meat.

In short, you get what you pay for. The notion that something is cheap for the consumers' benefit is the number one thing that has to be stamped out of modern American brains. Mass-produced goods such as what passes for modern food are cheap for the benefit of massive multinational corporations. Period.

If it was more profitable for them to sell a quality product at a quality price, they would do so. It is not. In this Potemkin mirage of convenience and plenty, the money is made by selling cheap garbage at a small markup over and over and over again.

You pay $3 for a crappy gallon of filth that costs them 20 cents to produce. I pay $5 for a quality gallon of pure, nutrient-dense, real milk from healthy, pastured cows. The larger price is factored in from the cost of maintaining the land, keeping the cows healthy and happy and all the other little things that make for the superior living food product I immensely enjoy with every glorious glass of joy.

In the past I never felt the remotest need to give thanks to God for my store-bought milk. The idea seemed silly. I truly in my heart thank God for the life-giving bounty that nourishes me now.

Pay more for real food and pay less for your pointless distractions, such as the wasteland that is cable television today. You need food to live. You don't need reality television at all.

This Man is a Traitor to His People

The push to give open amnesty to illegal aliens has reached a new level of absurdity with this New York Times article about the plight of one poor American farmer:

A federal audit had found that 12 of his 14 workers were immigrants who had provided [Jeff] True with false work documents, the letter said. The immigration authorities ordered him to dismiss those workers.

Mr. True, whose family has been dairy farming for two centuries, scrambled around the clock with his relatives to milk their 1,100 cows, hire and train new workers and keep the farm in business.

Most of his workers are immigrants from Latin America, and he now dreads that he could receive another letter at any moment.

“My biggest fear is my labor is not going to be here tomorrow,” he said. “Most of us live in fear of that every day.” 

What a tearjerker! This American farmer is going to go under if he is not allowed to hire illegals to work his farm. Tragedy! Pathos! Whoa, wait a minute. 

1,100 cows! That's not a farm, that's a factory. So we're supposed to get all swollen-eyed over a CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation) "farmer" who is hiring the cheapest labor he can find at depressed wages so he can cut even more corners on his operation? Imagine how he's treating the cows you all drink your milk from?

Let's take a look at how this factory man operates his "farm":

They milk in a double-10 parallel parlor and cows lie on sand-bedded free stalls with bedding added twice each week. Farm 2 has rubber belting in the entire feed alley and pushes up feed 12 times per day. Donna Walker, nominator from Dairylea Cooperative, says, "True Farms does an exceptional job balancing the production of high-quality milk. They thoughtfully create protocols and follow them for consistent results."

Rubber belting for the entire feed alley! Isn't that wonderful? Kind of demolishes the quaint notion of happy cows munching grass on a sunny day, huh? Farmers don't "create protocols," they raise animals for food and milk. If you want to read more about what people like Mr. True and the folks at the Dairylea Cooperative, Inc. are doing to the quality of life in their Upstate New York communities, check this out:

Karen Strecker is bracing. She's about to turn on the faucet, and there's a chance liquid manure is going to stream from the spout. "I've been taking a bath and actually had cow shit pour into the tub,'' Strecker says, matter-of-factly. She uses well water. "It's nasty." Yet the threat of a sewage bath pales in comparison to a more dangerous problem: Breathing poisonous fumes. After years living next to Willet Dairy, the largest industrial farm in the state, Strecker and her neighbors in Genoa are reporting the kinds of health problems eco-watchdogs lose sleep over, from blistering eyelids to brain damage. Manure is known to release gases that, in high concentrations, are linked to those scary symptoms.

But, then again, did you really expect this man to be practicing rotational grazing for his 1,100 assets, er, living animals, moving them from one parcel of pasture to another to ensure maximum nutritional health?

This is the flip side to the "jobs ordinary Americans won't do" argument: This kind of "farm labor" is demeaning and quite dangerous to the workers involved. Demeaning for obvious reasons (lagoons of manure) and dangerous because cows are meant to graze on pasture, not "feed alleys." This kind of operation guarantees sickness:

Working conditions at confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) are unhealthy, dangerous and extreme. Because the animals are often housed directly above the giant pits that store their manure, harmful gases such as hydrogen sulfide, ammonia, carbon dioxide, and methane that are produced by the decomposing manure can contaminate the air that the animals and farm laborers breathe. In addition to these gases, dust and other irritants known as endotoxins—which come from the cell walls of the bacteria in the manure—are often found in very high concentrations on CAFOs. These substances can be hazardous to farm workers either through chronic (or long-term) exposure at low levels, or acute (concentrated) exposure at higher levels.

This man is hiring desperate people who are in this country illegally to perform dangerous and dreary labor instead of running a smaller operation that would give American citizens an opportunity to perform meaningful work. He is also providing you his fellow citizen with an unhealthy product, as a sick animal is not going to provide healthy milk. And he is doing all of this for the sake of increased profit for himself.

But you have to love the insinuation in the Times' article that a rich, two-centuries-old tradition is facing cruel extinction if this SOB isn't allowed his exploitative labor.

It takes a special kind of gall to make yourself the victim in a situation like this.

Amazing times we are living in.

They've Been Watering Down Our Catholic Beer For Centuries

No surprise that another large multi-national corporation is accused of cheating its customers:

“Our information comes from former employees at Anheuser-Busch, who have informed us that as a matter of corporate practice, all of their products [mentioned in the lawsuit] are watered down,” [attorney Josh] Boxer said, according to the Associated Press. “It's a simple cost-saving measure, and it's very significant.”

The excess water is added just before bottling and cuts the stated alcohol content by 3% to 8%, he said.

Now when I think of watered-down beer I immediately think of one brand: Miller Lite. How anyone could drink a bottle of that liquid nothingness was always beyond me and I'm one of the great lightweights of all time. The fact is, Lite tastes like a glass of water with a slight hint of beer. Hell, Aquafina holds more of a kick.

And so THAT got me to thinking about the whole Lite Beer from Miller ad campaign, going back to the '70s and '80s, when they used ultra-macho pro sports athletes: 

to talk skeptical American males into believing that they weren't the following if they drank light beer:

Of course, the notion that drinking light beer can make you feminine is long gone in our modern American society. So far gone that contemporary Lite beer campaigns make drinking their dainty swill a test of manhood in and of itself:

The ridiculousness of that last ad isn't just in the claim that drinking Lite beer makes you more manly. It's in the very fact that they are bragging about the so-called "triple-hops brewed" quality of their beer. What makes that so outrageous is the simple fact that hops is estrogenic, so adding "triple hops" to the process means they are giving you manly macho men THREE TIMES the estrogen you would normally be consuming.

Triple the estrogen makes you more of a man! Only in our modern American corporate wasteland could something like that fly.

And so THAT got me to thinking about this post I came across one day:

Prior to the German Beer Purity Act of 1516, beer almost never contained hops. In fact, more than one hundred different plants were used in brewing beer for at least ten thousand years prior to the introduction of hops in the middle ages. For the last thousand years of that period, the most dominant form of “beer” was called gruit, which contained a mixture of yarrow, bog myrtle, and marsh rosemary. These herbs, especially in beer, are sexually and mentally stimulating. (It is rare to become sleepy when drinking un-hopped beers.)

The Catholic Church had a monopoly on the production of gruit, but competing merchants and the Protestants worked together to break their monopoly and force the removal of all sexually stimulating herbs from beer. They replaced them with an herb that puts the drinker to sleep and dulls sexual drive in the male. The legislative arguments of the day all hinged on the issue of the stimulating effects of other herbs that were used in beer. A pilsner, for example, was originally a henbane beer (pilsen means “henbane”), which is an incredibly strong, psychoactive beer, used earlier in history by German berserkers before battle. The German Beer Purity Act was, in effect, the first drug control law ever enacted.

And then THAT got me to thinking about the extra research I did into this fascinating topic:

One of the arguments of the Protestants against the Catholic clergy (and indeed of Catholicism) was Catholic self-indulgence: in food, drink, and lavish life style. And it was this Protestant outrage that was the genesis of the temperance movement. (It would not stop, of course, with the assault on gruit ales but would continue on to include ale itself and any kind of psychotropic or inebriating plants and drinks by the twentieth century.)

The Protestant reformists were joined by merchants and competing royals desiring to break the brewing monopoly of the church. The result was, ultimately, the end of a many-thousand-year tradition of herbal beer making in Europe and the narrowing of beer and ale into one limited expression of beer production, that of hopped ales or what we today call beer.

The fact of the matter is, the potency of your beer had been weakened immensely a long time before Anheuser-Busch got bought by a soulless Belgian multinational. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Protestant Reformation - the original buzzkill.