And Yahoo Trudges On
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@morbiuswilters said:
That said, I think it's vastly over-bureaucratic and we could cut the health regs in half and implement far-reaching food irradiation and we'd have an even safer food supply.
While food irradiation works really really well when done right, I can understand people being a little nervous about it as screw ups (they would need to be massive problems with the equipment, but possible) when doing gamma irradiation would be highly problematic. It's kinda like if you were nervous about airbags because you figure that someone is going to use such shitty knock offs that you get spike on a spring instead of rapidly inflated bag occasionally. A crazy fear yes, but you also eat a lot more often than use an airbag so the chance of getting hit by a fuck up like that is higher.
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@morbiuswilters said:
@Snooder said:
And that's bullshit.
Look, there are plenty of examples of overregulation in this country. The food safety regulations are not one of them. It's not like it's particularly difficult to sell food or as if anyone really tries to stop you from doing anything beyond "don't sell food that's spoilt" and "please try to label things."
I read this as "I really have no idea what I'm talking about, but my fingers need some exercise so I'm going to bang on the keyboard some. Please ignore my inane ramblings as I am completely ignorant on the subject matter."
Hey, if you have some real evidence of the food overregulation in the US, i'll be glad to hear it. Note, I said food. Alcohol and drugs don't count because those are vices and subject to an entirely different form of overreaction.
@morbiuswilters said:@Snooder said:
The only people who run afoul of food safety regulations in this country are hippies trying to kill their customers with non-pasteurized milk.
Yeah, God forbid people be able to choose to drink non-pasteurized milk. I mean, my God, dozens of people might get tummy aches! Better send in the USDA swat team to murder some more American civilians for the dire crime of "not pasteurizing milk".
Really, are you really on the side of the idiot hippies here?
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@locallunatic said:
@morbiuswilters said:
That said, I think it's vastly over-bureaucratic and we could cut the health regs in half and implement far-reaching food irradiation and we'd have an even safer food supply.
While food irradiation works really really well when done right, I can understand people being a little nervous about it as screw ups (they would need to be massive problems with the equipment, but possible) when doing gamma irradiation would be highly problematic. It's kinda like if you were nervous about airbags because you figure that someone is going to use such shitty knock offs that you get spike on a spring instead of rapidly inflated bag occasionally. A crazy fear yes, but you also eat a lot more often than use an airbag so the chance of getting hit by a fuck up like that is higher.But not irradiating food makes people sick every single day. It's like saying "I don't want to allow people to use seatbelts, because a seatbelt might be badly manufactured and might let a person go through the windshield" all the while people are being ejected through the windshield and into oncoming-traffic due to lack of seatbelts.
Look at spinach and lettuce: the FDA started allowing irradiation of those in 2008 after dozens of people died due to e. coli outbreaks cause by lettuce and spinach. So I guess we'll just have to wait until enough people die from other foods to start irradiating those? Plus, it's a lot easier to check for problems caused by radiation than it is to check for a thousand different parasites.
Not only should it not be banned, it should be mandated for most foods. However: 1) the vast, vast, vast, vast majority Americans are fucking idiots and when they hear "radiation" their tiny, moronic, insect brains start panicking until the nice man on the teevee tells them he will stop the bad, evil radiation by instituting a massive "radiation tax" and banning uses of it; and 2) the massive bureaucracy has one single goal: to propagate and enlarge the massive bureaucracy. They could give a shit if your family dies of food-borne AIDS. Hell, they kind of want that to happen so they have an excuse to expand their disgusting, parasitic presence.
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@Snooder said:
Hey, if you have some real evidence of the food overregulation in the US, i'll be glad to hear it.
shrug Why bother? You clearly don't know what you're talking about and it's not going to convince you anyway.
@Snooder said:
Really, are you really on the side of the idiot hippies here?
I'm on the side of "If people want to drink un-pastuerized milk, who gives a shit?" Also, you could avoid pasteurization and the risks of raw milk if you just allowed irradiating raw milk (not that hippies would go for that, but I'm just pointing out pasteurization is a backwards-ass technology anyway.)
But, seriously, you think we need Federal SWAT teams to keep people from drinking the milk they want to drink? People have been consuming raw dairy for millennia and it's still a widely-followed tradition in many parts of the world. Why does it bother you so much that people be allowed to drink what they want? What kind of sick, twisted fascist piece of shit are you?
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@locallunatic said:
While food irradiation works really really well when done right, I can understand people being a little nervous about it as screw ups (they would need to be massive problems with the equipment, but possible) when doing gamma irradiation would be highly problematic. It's kinda like if you were nervous about airbags because you figure that someone is going to use such shitty knock offs that you get spike on a spring instead of rapidly inflated bag occasionally. A crazy fear yes, but you also eat a lot more often than use an airbag so the chance of getting hit by a fuck up like that is higher.
I think it probably is less due to people being afraid of people being afraid of food spoiling because the irradiation being done improperly than it is to people not understanding radiation. >99% of people don't understand the first thing about radiation – this goes double for any reporter who has ever used either of those words in a news story – and don't know the difference between radiation and radioactivity. These people are afraid irradiating their food will make it radioactive. Some portion of the <1% who know slightly more worry that radiation will ionize atoms in the food, which willmight result in the chemical structure of the proteins, lipids, etc. being modified in unknown and unpredictable ways.
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@morbiuswilters said:
@locallunatic said:
@morbiuswilters said:
That said, I think it's vastly over-bureaucratic and we could cut the health regs in half and implement far-reaching food irradiation and we'd have an even safer food supply.
While food irradiation works really really well when done right, I can understand people being a little nervous about it as screw ups (they would need to be massive problems with the equipment, but possible) when doing gamma irradiation would be highly problematic. It's kinda like if you were nervous about airbags because you figure that someone is going to use such shitty knock offs that you get spike on a spring instead of rapidly inflated bag occasionally. A crazy fear yes, but you also eat a lot more often than use an airbag so the chance of getting hit by a fuck up like that is higher.But not irradiating food makes people sick every single day. It's like saying "I don't want to allow people to use seatbelts, because a seatbelt might be badly manufactured and might let a person go through the windshield" all the while people are being ejected through the windshield and into oncoming-traffic due to lack of seatbelts.
You and I know that it would do lots of good, but I've had to fix enough bad electrical work others have done that ignored proper safety (granted it was more boxing glove on a spring than spike) that I understand people who don't know enough about the systems being nervous that someone will fuck it up in that way. Plus it's more that we currently do seatbelts and irradiation is seatbelt + airbag, far better but if you honestly think someone is gonna do the spike on a spring thing then saying "good enough for government work" is understandable (though wrong).
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@morbiuswilters said:
@Snooder said:
Hey, if you have some real evidence of the food overregulation in the US, i'll be glad to hear it.
shrug Why bother? You clearly don't know what you're talking about and it's not going to convince you anyway.
Like I said, if you have a real example, I'll be glad to hear it. Personally, the only people I've heard complain about it are hippies trying to pass off their bullshit "organic, free-range, artisanal" whatever without doing basic stuff like pasteurization.
@morbiuswilters said:@Snooder said:
Really, are you really on the side of the idiot hippies here?
I'm on the side of "If people want to drink un-pastuerized milk, who gives a shit?" Also, you could avoid pasteurization and the risks of raw milk if you just allowed irradiating raw milk (not that hippies would go for that, but I'm just pointing out pasteurization is a backwards-ass technology anyway.)
Pasteurization works. Maybe there's a new hotness in the area of food prep, but those people wouldn't use that either. They just want to sell raw milk that kills people.
@morbiuswilters said:But, seriously, you think we need Federal SWAT teams to keep people from drinking the milk they want to drink? People have been consuming raw dairy for millennia and it's still a widely-followed tradition in many parts of the world. Why does it bother you so much that people be allowed to drink what they want? What kind of sick, twisted fascist piece of shit are you?
What part of "don't sell raw milk" leads you to SWAT teams? And no, asshole, you don't get to both lambaste people for being afraid of irradiating their food while also saying that people have been consuming raw dairy for millennia as if that means something. Raw milk kills. End of fucking story. I don't want to have dinner with a girlfriend who shops at Whole Foods or some other bullshit organic crap store and end up with a fucking salmonella infection.
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@HardwareGeek said:
>99% of people don't understand the first thing about radiation – this goes double for any reporter who has ever used either of those words in a news story
And the reason all those people are ignorant is precisely because of the media's scaremongering. And while the reporter might not know the difference, the people writing the stories surely do. But since the 60s the New Left's M.O. has been heel-dragging malingering in an attempt to weaken western civilization to the point where Marxism could be forced down people's throats at the barrel of a gun. So the reality is it's very deliberate.
@HardwareGeek said:
Some portion of the <1% who know slightly more worry that radiation will ionize atoms in the food, which willmight result in the chemical structure of the proteins, lipids, etc. being modified in unknown and unpredictable ways.
Just like cooking does. Let's all eat raw food because it's healthier! (Oh wait, there are people who actually think this.)
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@Snooder said:
They just want to sell raw milk that kills people.
Yeah, but so does every other substance in existence. Name a substance that can't kill someone and I'll call you a liar.
@Snooder said:
Raw milk kills. End of fucking story.
Wait, raw milk is the most deadly toxin known to man? As in it has no antidote and has a LD50 of a planck mass?
Two things:
- Why aren't we weaponizing this?
- Why aren't all the mammals in the world dead?
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@Snooder said:
They just want to sell raw milk that kills people.
Bullshit. Like, two people have died from raw milk, and I guarantee-fucking-tee you they were very young, very old or immuno-compromised. How many people have died from pasteurized milk? I also guaran-fucking-tee you it's a hell of a lot more. Amazingly, if you look at the aggregate of hundreds of millions of people, people die of some really stupid shit.
Meanwhile, how many millions have died from obesity? Should we outlaw everything that tastes good to spare those people from themselves, Herr Hitler?
@Snooder said:
What part of "don't sell raw milk" leads you to SWAT teams?
Because that's how the government enforces it's asinine proclamations?
@Snooder said:
And no, asshole, you don't get to both lambaste people for being afraid of irradiating their food while also saying that people have been consuming raw dairy for millennia as if that means something.
Of course I do. If people want to choose to eat raw dairy, who cares? Even if it was killing a million people a year it wouldn't be your fucking business, Stalin. We let people smoke and drink and those kill way more people in a day than raw milk ever will in a century.
Also, people who are anti-irradiation are ignorant, anti-science boobs. Many of the people who are anti-pasteurization are also ignorant, anti-science boobs, but some don't like it because it actually makes dairy taste worse and changes its properties in undesirable ways for cooking with it. Personally, I could care less, but I totally understand why those people are willing to take the abso-fucking-lutely miniscule risk of getting a tummy ache* in exchange for those benefits. And if those people aren't ignorant, anti-science boobs, they should be 100% okay with irradiating their raw milk to make it safer than pasteurized without the undesirable effects.
(*Seriously, it's got to be a million times as risky to drive a car than to drink raw milk. You're just some delusional nitwit who gets a Nazi boner at the thought of being able to use violence against people for not following your stupid preferences. Die in a fire, Mao.)
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@Ben L. said:
@Snooder said:
They just want to sell raw milk that kills people.
Yeah, but so does every other substance in existence. Name a substance that can't kill someone and I'll call you a liar.
@Snooder said:
Raw milk kills. End of fucking story.
Wait, raw milk is the most deadly toxin known to man? As in it has no antidote and has a LD50 of a planck mass?
Two things:
- Why aren't we weaponizing this?
- Why aren't all the mammals in the world dead?
Snooder is a fascist. He learned from some day's Two Minutes Hate that RAW MILK IS TERRORISM and the ignorant piece of shit started rubbing one out at the thought of SWAT teams shooting people in the head for not pasteurizing their milk. Now he has to justify that irrational hatred of other people's rights, so he falls back on a pretext so flimsy even he knows it's bullshit.
It's quite sad.
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@locallunatic said:
like if you were nervous about airbags because you figure that someone is going to use such shitty knock offs that you get a spike on a spring instead of rapidly inflated bag occasionally
*SPROING*
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@morbiuswilters said:
Because that's how the government enforces it's asinine proclamations?
shh
it's time for your medications
here, I brought your tinfoil hat to play with
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@dhromed said:
@morbiuswilters said:
Because that's how the government enforces it's asinine proclamations?
shh
it's time for your medications
here, I brought your tinfoil hat to play with
So, I take it either you don't believe this happens:
Or you think heavily-armed raids by multiple government agencies against organic food stores and the Amish are appropriate responses to the dire, dire threat of people drinking harmless raw milk?
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@Snooder said:
Personally, the only people I've heard complain about it are hippies trying to pass off their bullshit "organic, free-range, artisanal" whatever without doing basic stuff like pasteurization.
I once had a roommate who was into the whole "organic" food thing. He'd go shopping, buy like $200 worth of organic groceries, but without all the preservatives and stuff it started rotting within about three days. Next thing I knew there was slime oozing out the bottom of the refrigerator and I think there was a totally new category of ecosystem living in there. If I cared less about the health of our house, I could have studied it for a Nobel Prize
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@Snooder said:
Pasteurization works.
It also changes the flavor of some milk products; I'm told this is quite a profound change in the case of cheese and much less of an issue with, say, butter.
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@mott555 said:
He'd go shopping, buy like $200 worth of organic groceries, but without all the preservatives and stuff it started rotting within about three days.
Buying more than you (including family/friends/etc.) can eat before the food goes off is TRWTF. As is buying stuff of such low quality that it starts rotting in 3 days; most things ought to last plenty longer than that, even if organic. Unless he's also storing it wrong, which would a different variation on the theme of stupid.
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@morbiuswilters said:
@Ben L. said:
@Snooder said:
They just want to sell raw milk that kills people.
Yeah, but so does every other substance in existence. Name a substance that can't kill someone and I'll call you a liar.
@Snooder said:
Raw milk kills. End of fucking story.
Wait, raw milk is the most deadly toxin known to man? As in it has no antidote and has a LD50 of a planck mass?
Two things:
- Why aren't we weaponizing this?
- Why aren't all the mammals in the world dead?
Snooder is a fascist. He learned from some day's Two Minutes Hate that RAW MILK IS TERRORISM and the ignorant piece of shit started rubbing one out at the thought of SWAT teams shooting people in the head for not pasteurizing their milk. Now he has to justify that irrational hatred of other people's rights, so he falls back on a pretext so flimsy even he knows it's bullshit.
It's quite sad.
Sigh. Do I really have to argue about the fact that raw food spoils? And spoilt food causes illness and death? Have we somehow regressed to the nineteenth century or something? What's the next bone of contention? Maybe you'd like to argue about the efficacy of leeches? Or phrenology? What about the humors? I'm sure you've got a lot to say about how bilious I am and how I need to drink more raw milk to counterbalance my fiery humors.
Look, the reason I'm adamant about this is simple. I was born in a different country. A country that doesn't have even the fairly lenient enforcement of food safety laws that the U.S. does. When I travel back there to visit family, I literally cannot eat the food (unless specially prepared at home) because it will make me sick. And a large part of that is things like unpasteurized milk, untreated water. It has nothing to do with propaganda or "the media" and everything to do with not wanting to have to be super-careful at the supermarket just so I don't get something that can kill me.
If some idiot wants to buy a cow and drink the milk right from the teat, he can go right the fuck ahead. What he can't do, and SHOULDN'T do, is to sell that same milk to unsuspecting and/or gullible customers who think that just because something is "organic" that magically makes it better somehow.
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@Snooder said:
Sigh. Do I really have to argue about the fact that raw food spoils? And spoilt food causes illness and death? Have we somehow regressed to the nineteenth century or something? What's the next bone of contention? Maybe you'd like to argue about the efficacy of leeches? Or phrenology? What about the humors? I'm sure you've got a lot to say about how bilious I am and how I need to drink more raw milk to counterbalance my fiery humors.
Is that an immune deficiency issue you have, or is it entirely down to your no-bacteria-ever diet, and could potentially affect a lot of other people in your country if they ever travel? If so, I'd actually argue that's a bad thing. Similar to the number of children in the UK who developed asthma at a young age went upwards because more mothers were going overboard to make sure their house was as close to sterile as possible. Getting no exposure to these things means you have no chance for your immune system to develop any resistance to them.
Look, the reason I'm adamant about this is simple. I was born in a different country. A country that doesn't have even the fairly lenient enforcement of food safety laws that the U.S. does. When I travel back there to visit family, I literally cannot eat the food (unless specially prepared at home) because it will make me sick. And a large part of that is things like unpasteurized milk, untreated water. It has nothing to do with propaganda or "the media" and everything to do with not wanting to have to be super-careful at the supermarket just so I don't get something that can kill me.
If some idiot wants to buy a cow and drink the milk right from the teat, he can go right the fuck ahead. What he can't do, and SHOULDN'T do, is to sell that same milk to unsuspecting and/or gullible customers who think that just because something is "organic" that magically makes it better somehow.
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@LoremIpsumDolorSitAmet said:
Is that an immune deficiency issue you have, or is it entirely down to your no-bacteria-ever diet, and could potentially affect a lot of other people in your country if they ever travel? If so, I'd actually argue that's a bad thing.
The infant mortality rate (and general mortality rate for that matter) in the country I was born is fucking abysmal. So no, it's not a bad thing that living in a sane first world country with laws that keep me from dying means that when I travel to a third world shithole I can't eat the food there. Just because everyone currently living there can eat the food doesn't mean it's actually good or healthy. It's just means they're the ones who haven't died yet.
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@Snooder said:
Do I really have to argue about the fact that raw food spoils?
Huh? Food spoils, cooked or raw. Cooking kills things like Salmonella that can come from sick cattle, or E. coli that can come from improper handling. This can prevent food-borne illness, which is a good thing. But spoiling is something else, and cooking doesn't stop it (unless the cooking is part of some preservation method like canning). It may not even slow it down; I'm pretty sure that if I buy a bunch of carrots and cook some of them, the raw ones sitting in the bottom of my refrigerator will still be edible when the container of cooked ones have gotten moldy.
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@HardwareGeek said:
@Snooder said:
Do I really have to argue about the fact that raw food spoils?
Huh? Food spoils, cooked or raw. Cooking kills things like Salmonella that can come from sick cattle, or E. coli that can come from improper handling. This can prevent food-borne illness, which is a good thing. But spoiling is something else, and cooking doesn't stop it (unless the cooking is part of some preservation method like canning). It may not even slow it down; I'm pretty sure that if I buy a bunch of carrots and cook some of them, the raw ones sitting in the bottom of my refrigerator will still be edible when the container of cooked ones have gotten moldy.
Don't Starve agrees.
[quote user="Wiki"]
Cooked meats generally spoil slower, while cooked vegetables generally spoil faster.
[/quote]
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@Snooder said:
Do I really have to argue about the fact that raw food spoils? And spoilt food causes illness and death?
Um.. non-raw food also spoils, bro. Eating spoiled pasteurized milk kills people, too. But it has to be really, really spoiled or the person has to be really, really vulnerable. Seriously, you're buying into the propaganda of modern medical statistics. "Ten people died last year while reading alternative news sites. Alternative news sites must be banned!" "But how many people died while watching TV news?" "Shut the fuck up and get your shine box."
@Snooder said:
I was born in a different country.
Fascistville? Nazitown? Hitlerberg??
@Snooder said:
When I travel back there to visit family, I literally cannot eat the food (unless specially prepared at home) because it will make me sick. And a large part of that is things like unpasteurized milk, untreated water. It has nothing to do with propaganda or "the media" and everything to do with not wanting to have to be super-careful at the supermarket just so I don't get something that can kill me.
Dude, everything in the supermarket can kill you. Do you eat meat? Because I hate to break it to you, but you are like 1000x as likely to get sick from eating supermarket meat than from drinking raw milk.
@Snooder said:
If some idiot wants to buy a cow and drink the milk right from the teat, he can go right the fuck ahead. What he can't do, and SHOULDN'T do, is to sell that same milk to unsuspecting and/or gullible customers who think that just because something is "organic" that magically makes it better somehow.
Raw milk is labeled as raw milk. I think pretty much everywhere in the US that it is sold it is required to have labeling indicating it can contain harmful organisms. What the fuck else do you want?
This is what irritates me, because you're being so selective. How many people die from diabetes? Should all fattening or sugary foods be banned? If not, then how can you possibly justify banning raw milk, which has killed like two people in the last 16 years, and not banning junk food, which has killed tens of millions?
There's no logical consistency in your position. Do you think alcohol and cigarettes should be illegal? And cars? All of those things are way more lethal than raw milk. I'm guessing you'd say no, there are risks with everything and banning people from doing what they want when it is a slight risk of their well-being is senseless. The government lets people give themselves lung cancer (hell, it profits off people getting lung cancer) but raw milk is Enemy Number One that justifies spending millions chasing down raw milk bandits and raiding Amish farmers with SWAT-like tactics? Huh?
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@Snooder said:
So no, it's not a bad thing that living in a sane first world country with laws that keep me from dying means that when I travel to a third world shithole I can't eat the food there.
I'm really baffled here. Do you think if raw milk is less restricted then pasteurized milk will go away? People will continue to mostly drink pasteurized milk without any law forcing them to. And as I've pointed out a million times before, raw milk isn't even that dangerous. The risk over pasteurized milk is so tiny.
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@morbiuswilters said:
@Snooder said:
So no, it's not a bad thing that living in a sane first world country with laws that keep me from dying means that when I travel to a third world shithole I can't eat the food there.
I'm really baffled here. Do you think if raw milk is less restricted then pasteurized milk will go away? People will continue to mostly drink pasteurized milk without any law forcing them to. And as I've pointed out a million times before, raw milk isn't even that dangerous. The risk over pasteurized milk is so tiny.
You're baffled because you are consistently (and deliberately) misunderstanding my position. As I stated earlier, I don't give a fuck what someone else chooses to drink. I don't particularly care if someone else drinks raw milk and and I never said I was in favor of forcing people to drink pasteurized milk. Nor have I ever said that I want SWAT teams to roll around shooting anyone who dares to drink raw milk.
What I said was:
@Snooder said:The only people who run afoul of food safety regulations in this country
are hippies trying to kill their customers with non-pasteurized milk.
Admittedly, that was probably more than a little hyperbolic. The general tone on these forums trends that way, but I probably shouldn't have lowered myself to that extent. My point was that personally the only food safety regulation that I've heard of people actually having a problem with are laws that require you to pasteurize your milk before you sell it. Personally, I think anyone dumb enough to drink raw milk deserves whatever happens to him. The only people that stupid are anti-science hippies and organic food freaks, and I don't really have much sympathy for them. My sympathy is with the guy who isn't that dumb, just wants some milk and ends up with the raw stuff. Or, even more likely, eats something that he doesn't know contains raw milk, but raw milk was used in the preparation. This is the part that worries me personally, because I like to occassionally stop at small town restaurants, and I don't really want the risk of having my extra fluffy eggs laced with bacteria because the cook thinks raw milk tastes better than pasteurized milk. Or was just really tired the day he stopped at the grocery.
Sure, adding loopholes and exceptions to the regulations like "you can sell raw milk, but only to a very specific client list, with multiple inspections, clear labelling on the product, e.t.c." would allay those problems. But if your point is that the USDA beauracracy is too large and there are too many regulations, adding more regulations and more inspections isn't exactly helping your cause. The only thing that would, would be to remove the regulation altogether and say that anyone can sell raw milk. And that's not a good thing for any consumer who cares about not inadvertently being fed salmonella.
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@morbiuswilters said:
And as I've pointed out a million times before, raw milk isn't even that dangerous. The risk over pasteurized milk is so tiny.
What's more, such risk as there is can be mitigated by being better at animal welfare and biosafety. Similarly with raw eggs, which are delicious in quite a few different dishes; if they're dangerous, it's because the farm (or the distributor of the eggs) is fucking up and then trying to cover up with antibiotics or something like that.
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@dkf said:
@morbiuswilters said:
And as I've pointed out a million times before, raw milk isn't even that dangerous. The risk over pasteurized milk is so tiny.
What's more, such risk as there is can be mitigated by being better at animal welfare and biosafety. Similarly with raw eggs, which are delicious in quite a few different dishes; if they're dangerous, it's because the farm (or the distributor of the eggs) is fucking up and then trying to cover up with antibiotics or something like that.They can also just irradiate the damn things and effectively kill all parasites without any change to the food itself.
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@morbiuswilters said:
They can also just irradiate the damn things and effectively kill all parasites without any change to the food itself.
I'm trying to figure out what your beef is about the whole irradiated food thing. From what I can tell, the FDA supports it. http://www.fda.gov/Food/ResourcesForYou/Consumers/ucm261680.htm. Personally, I'd never really heard about it, one way or another, but it does seems like a useful way to keep the food supply safe for consumption.
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@Snooder said:
Admittedly, that was probably more than a little hyperbolic. The general tone on these forums trends that way, but I probably shouldn't have lowered myself to that extent. My point was that personally the only food safety regulation that I've heard of people actually having a problem with are laws that require you to pasteurize your milk before you sell it. Personally, I think anyone dumb enough to drink raw milk deserves whatever happens to him. The only people that stupid are anti-science hippies and organic food freaks, and I don't really have much sympathy for them. My sympathy is with the guy who isn't that dumb, just wants some milk and ends up with the raw stuff. Or, even more likely, eats something that he doesn't know contains raw milk, but raw milk was used in the preparation. This is the part that worries me personally, because I like to occassionally stop at small town restaurants, and I don't really want the risk of having my extra fluffy eggs laced with bacteria because the cook thinks raw milk tastes better than pasteurized milk. Or was just really tired the day he stopped at the grocery.
Sure, adding loopholes and exceptions to the regulations like "you can sell raw milk, but only to a very specific client list, with multiple inspections, clear labelling on the product, e.t.c." would allay those problems. But if your point is that the USDA beauracracy is too large and there are too many regulations, adding more regulations and more inspections isn't exactly helping your cause. The only thing that would, would be to remove the regulation altogether and say that anyone can sell raw milk. And that's not a good thing for any consumer who cares about not inadvertently being fed salmonella.Once again, you're just completely, ludicrously over-stating the "danger" of raw milk. You're probably more likely to get salmonella from the eggs than from any milk. And, I don't know, do you not understand how cooking food works? For there to be salmonella in your raw milk scrambled eggs, the eggs would have to be seriously under-cooked, which would be a whole 'nother problem.
I kind of doubt anybody is "accidentally" going to buy raw milk, since it doesn't tend to be sold at general supermarkets and it tends to be more expensive than the cheap stuff.
Also, you seem to be ignorant of the status of raw milk in the United States. Nearly 30 U.S. states allow the sale of raw milk in some form. It's sold retail in several states, including California. The Federal raids are against people who sell across state lines or, for example, the Amish, who selling in states where direct sales are not legal. That makes the heavily-armed raids all the more absurd, because it's not as if raw milk is some outlawed contraband; it's just the government waving its dick because some raw milk made it across the border into another state. Ooooh, scary!
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@Snooder said:
I'm trying to figure out what your beef is about the whole irradiated food thing. From what I can tell, the FDA supports it. http://www.fda.gov/Food/ResourcesForYou/Consumers/ucm261680.htm. Personally, I'd never really heard about it, one way or another, but it does seems like a useful way to keep the food supply safe for consumption.
Yes, they've been slowly dragooned into supporting it as people have been killed by mass outbreaks of food-borne pathogens. However, it's still restricted to certain types of foods (although the list is growing).
It's still not widely-practiced, though, because people are morons and afraid of irradiated food. But my biggest complaint is that it's not mandatory for most mass-produced food. It would eliminate the need for half of the bloated USDA inspection bureaucracy. It would stop the frequent outbreaks of e coli or salmonella which plague the food supply. It would make raw milk completely safe to drink without substantially changing it.
And before you say "OMG, you support mandatory irradiation? Fascist!" I support it in cases where there's already mandatory food inspection, which is for a lot of stuff nowadays. It would be safer and cheaper than a division of USDA inspectors. Personally, I think people should be able to sell any food they want, so long as they label it accurately and include any relevant warnings. The USDA's role would be to enforce that all food labeled as irradiated actually is, all milk labeled as pasteurized is, etc. If people want to eat dog steaks killed in a dank basement with a filthy knife, that's A-OK by me so long as it's accurately labeled if it's being sold.
And with all those resources freed-up, the USDA could focus on its core mission: Muslim outreach.
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@Snooder said:
...food safety stuff...
I like to think God made hundreds of people sick just to illustrate my point.
Thanks, Lord! high-fives Heaven-ward
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