To Pasteurize or not to Pasteurize, that is the question.

So, I watched an interesting movie last night...in fact, I was helping host it as part of the Fall Series being put on by the Environmental Film Network. It was the National Film Board's film The Fight for True Farming. What was almost more interesting than the film...and the film was very interesting...was the conversation and discussion afterwards. Fortunately we had a couple of local farmers in the audience who could speak from experience about the situation in Ontario. The film focuses more on the agricultural practices and issues related to Quebec, Europe and a few American states. Apparently there is wide range of diverse practices that may be more or less acceptable to various people and organizations.

It has returned me to the consideration of buying organic food for my family. The largest hurdle in implementing this is of course the added expense. It seems that the cost of organic food products is almost prohibitively expensive. It's already a challenge to eat 'mostly' vegetarian meals at home, never mind trying to make all those meals from only organically grown foods. At the same time I value the principles behind organically grown foods. The testimonies of some farmers reveals that they feel that they are healthier, their soils are healthier and their produce is better after choosing to embrace organic practices. I want to be able to affirm this trend because at so many levels it appears to be a good thing, but I am not sure how to do it?

However, there was one interesting topic of conversation...the Milk Marketing Board. Apparently, there is a board that takes care of all the milk produced in Canada. The milk is collected from farms according to the quota the farmer has purchased. Then it is tested for safety, particularly the presence or absence of bacteria and antibiotics. Interestingly, Canada does not allow for any antibiotics in it's milk and prohibits the use of bovine growth hormone to increase a cow's milk production. But what piqued my interest was the prohibition of farmers selling any of their milk privately. This means that if anyone purchases raw milk, or buys directly from a local farmer they are breaking the law. Even the local cheese factory has to buy back it's milk from the marketing board. In fact in Canada, it is even illegal for a farmer to give away raw milk. This is another example of, what I perceive as, over-regulation by the Canadian government. There is no space to make an informed decision to do otherwise... this is the way it's done, no negotiation.

Now, while we were living on the hillside for a number of years I bought milk from a dhood-walla (milkman). His son would come to the house every evening with milk. I always pasteurized it myself...even though it was fresh and warm... The reason I pasteurized it was that I could not be sure that the milkman did not add a little bit of water to stretch his milk a little farther. Well, if the water was clean, I would have less worries, but the water, as all the water on the hillside, was badly contamination...typhoid, hepatitis, amoeba, giardia are all endemic on the hillside. So in reality we would not be just dealing with whatever would be naturally occurring in the milk, but all the other 'contaminants' in the water system. This was not a risk I was willing to take with our health, as it was in our time there we dealt with two family members contracting typhoid...not fun!

With this in mind, I can honestly say that I understand the purpose for which a standardizing system was set in place ...and why it was important to ensure that farmers could sell the milk they produced at a fair price... However, maybe it is time to open the market up a little. Allow farmers to continue with their quotas being delivered to the market board, whereupon the milk is tested, pasteurized and distributed for a fair market price. But let's not be afraid of diversifying a little, we all know the truth is most people will continue to buy their dairy products as they have always done. Those who are interested in buying local, buying raw, buying organic, constitute just a small portion of the market and their demands could be easily supplied.

I find it interesting that a couple in Southern Ontario have been fighting the issue of selling raw milk and other dairy products outside the control of the Milk Marketing Board. Michael and Dorthea Schmidt have been rebuilding their business since charges from the mid-1990s, revolving around the sale of these unregulated dairy products nearly decimated his livelihood. They had been running a cow leasing scheme to try to circumvent the Marketing Board regulations that you could only drink raw milk produced by your own cow. Currently, they are trying an avenue where there is joint-ownership over cows to allow their clientele to continue enjoying what they believe are the benefits of drinking raw milk from cows that are grass-fed.

What are the real issues according to the Schmidts?
"People are waking up to the fact," says Michael, "that the issue of raw milk has nothing to do with protecting the public and everything to do with protecting those who control the food supply."

This leads me back to my original thoughts...I am not really against pasteurization, but I think that in a society that claims so many freedoms we should have the freedom to buy the milk we want from the farmer we want...

And the truth is those of us who are left behind, are not the resistant or necessarily keepers of the status-quo, but often times the poor, who have no choice but to take what we can get. Maybe the issues reflect as much on the state of market controls, as issues of health and social justice.

Where does our food come from? Are we free to make food choices according to conscience and preference? How far does the influence of those who control our access to food really reach?

Chase the blues away and the autumn hues come in.

I realize that I have been a bit negative in the past few posts...sorry about that. It's a bit indicative of my state of mind...not exactly negative, but drifting towards to tragic rather than the comic in life.

For example I was walking in the yard last week, enjoying the crisp air of the beginning of fall. As the leaves crunched beneath my feet I inhaled the sweet aroma, I thought about how delightful the atmosphere is...crisp, clean, fresh and yet full of the smell of the earth... As I reflected, my thoughts turned to the fact that the smell that filled my nostrils was essentially the odor of decay... Of course, it reminded me of a Philip Yancey anecdote...he wrote in one of his books (my paraphrase): Even as I try to think about life and birth my thoughts drift to the tragic. Take mayflies, I might begin reflecting on the delicacy of the translencent wings...but I then find myself musing on the fact that they live for simply one day...which leads me to the thoughts of my own mortality and the brief moment we live on this earth...

I guess as we explore a new life, we are looking for a new 'normal'. A pace and pattern of life that feels good for all of us...right now, most days it's still alot like life just "happens to us."

The DVD Player...a metaphor for life at the moment

So...as many of you know I have recently returned to Canada. One of the things we brought along was a DVD player that we bought. The reason we brought it with us was that it played all the DVDs that we owned.

It was an interesting revelation to us, when our laptop DVD player stopped working while we were in England, to learn that a device intended to be carried with one around the world had a version code restriction. That meant that the DVDs we had purchased in Canada and the UK and Asia could not be played on the same machine.

Think about the logic of that...a laptop...a computer made for the express purpose of being able to be carried with you wherever you roam...had geographic restrictions. Although, the manufacturers cottoned on the fact that different continents have different voltages so most laptops are made to accept from 110 to 220 V. The thought process did not extend to dealing with version codes on DVDs.

That all leads up to our DVD player. We have one that plays all the DVDs that we bought. And we have legitimately bought DVDs on three continents...let's not even get into the fact that in many places it would have been easier and cheaper to buy pirated DVDs. These are not pirated DVDs, just DVDs bought in several different geographic locations...and they all work on this one player. So we packed it up and brought it here only to discover that it wasn't as simple as connecting it to a television and popping in one of our DVDS. Apparently there is some issue with the signal sent from a DVD Player from one continent being received by a television from another.

I guess that's a little illustration on the hurdles of cross-cultural communication. When we say one thing we don't really know if the 'signal' is being 'received'. It's only with interaction...verbal responses, body language, facial expressions...that we then 'get' whether the signal has been understood. I think that I am seeing that when you modify your signal...it's not so simple as to return to the previous wavelength you were operating on...

So our DVD player is a useful tool...however in this context currently unusable... In someways that's what we feel like here...the life we lived overseas has been useful for growth and maturity...but it doesn't feel all that usable here. What is the next step for moving forward?

...time...maybe? Someone recently thought that since we took seven years to get to where we are, maybe we need to give ourselves seven years to get back to where we were. A simple answer and yet comforting to be afforded that much grace to work through our transition.

However, I think both B and I agree that we don't want to go back to who we were. We are hopefully older and wiser than we were a decade ago. We have benefited from input of a wide range of friends...with their worldviews, perspectives and experiences impinging on ours and each of us shifting the others 'signal'.

In all this I am looking for an easy way to make my 'signal' readable by all the people I come in contact with. Not just for my own sake, but for the sake of building community and understanding. There is an approach to differences that is tantamount to putting one's head in the sand...it's not working, toss it and buy a new one... Which is a plausible solution to our current DVD/TV compatibility problem, but not such a gracious attitude when the 'signal' being sent is coming from another living, breathing, feeling human being. I want to advocate for a sincere way to be a global citizen, where we forget to call our life experience normal, but simply and uniquely our experience and in that place remember that the other before us has a life experience that is simply different than ours.

In the end I guess this is part of why I continue to try to let go of expectations. I have found them to be a burden that leads me to disappointment and then discontentment. When the frequency is not communicating what it should I need to adjust the signal and try again...or maybe I am still at the place of looking for how to make that adjustment?

In the midst of trying to communicate with the outside there is a struggle to reconcile on the inside. Of course, the DVD player doesn't know that it is useless here...but maybe we are feeling like we are... Not towards our friends and family, but in the place of looking for a space that we fit, that place that we know we are walking out our vocation, that place where the day's work is satisfying, not overwhelming, not draining...oh, for life to be flowing from a place of bounty instead of deficit.