Pass that long spoon, would you?
Over at Daily Kos, a behemoth that I have only lately started to attend to, there’s a post from someone called lapolitichick about the milk-boosting hormone rBST and labeling, about which I wrote a few days ago. lapolitichick is smiling because a large California dairy will no longer accept milk from rBST-treated cows, thus enabling her to choose wisely. “Who wants puss with their milk,” she asks, rhetorically. And she ends her story thus: “So there you have it. Healthier milk, coming to a grocery store near you.”
In between readers are treated to a miscellany of unsupported “facts” that rather support my contention that consumers don’t have much of an appetite for certain flavours of truth. (Thank heavens for some of the comments at Kos.) They want to make some choices, and that’s why they need some labels. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think truthiness is all that important either. I’m happy for hearts and minds to win the day. But I am concerned about the immense imbalances of power in the food industry (and elsewhere), which means that most “information” has to be fought for, and not all fights are clean and fair. Which I think is what Gary has been saying over in our discussion at Muck and Mystery.
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Well that, and in this specific case the silliness of the issue. Mastitis isn’t from bst, it is from high milk production which is hard on teats. All cows are exposed to it since the pathogens are everywhere and a very slightly higher percentage of high producers get it than lower producers.
Still, all milk is tested before it is mingled with that from other sources, and it doesn’t reach the consumer.
That the story is muddled is one part of my objection. The other part is that this muddled story masks an interesting one. To be highly productive cows must be fed a very rich diet. This is one reason why grass dairies don’t often use bst. It doesn’t pay well since the cow ration isn’t rich enough to support much higher production. You need sugary foods such as maize for that.
From an environmental and human health perspective bst is irrelevant, but cow diet is immensely significant. Grass dairies have far less impact and their products are superior for several reasons. If a grass dairy used bst this would still be true.
The bst label hoax is of the same sort as the organic label hoax. Industrial organic growers, including dairies, have shown the error of this idea. The new mistaken idea is local: local is the new organic. But this too is nonsense. There simply is no way to usefully reduce the issue to a small number of factors that can appear as a label. The incentive is for the label to be subverted since the rewards can be high, so it will be subverted.
There are no simple answers, just simplisitic answers that in the end amplify the problems they were supposed to solve.
I think I agree. It’s just that rather than ignoring or banning all such simplistic labelling schemes, I’d rather let a thousand labels blossom and then let a few smart or single-minded people provide additional information about labels that maybe an even few number of consumers, or shoppers, as we used to call them, will use.