Cats in the milk

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.