I've read in your posts before that you consume raw dairy. I'd like to find a source for it although around here all the cattle ranches are for meat. I'll do some looking, other than that maybe we can get a few goats...

I JUST read this yesterday, in "Empty Harvest"..

"From dairy products, we may potentially have a greater source of calcium, but it's in a less available form. It's pasteurized, heat -sterilized, and it has become a cooked food at that point. When you cook natures perfect raw food, chemically altering it, it becomes difficult to digest & assimilate."

Is commercially available organic yogurt made from pasteurized milk? It would have to be, in this country...

You've inspired me, Grz, surely there's someone around here who has more milk than they can use. I can imagine going without cheese, but I LOVE yogurt & kefir. I don't care for plain milk but then again I've never had raw milk... :)

you can thank louis pasteur for the problems. heat breaks up the molecules in the milk and destroys the natural enzymes. real raw milk will not cause a problem. organic raw milk from grass fed cows would be as near perfect as can be. a little wild honey and youre in the promised land!

btw, the significance of milk and honey for food - nothing has to give its life to eat it. but dig deeper and its not about food at all - they are signs that life is abundant; milk for babies and bees for pollenating fruit!!!! we are fruit eaters before anything else.

grzbear, your comments remind me of something I've been thinking about milk/dairy for quite a while, and wonder what your thoughts are.

My first thoughts have to do with how a lot of things - including even the very words we use to describe things, have a habit of evolving. As it applies to words, I don't think this is necessarily a natural evolving but do think it is more of a contrived, controlled and manipulated method of evolving/changing..... and for the worse, in many cases, in my view. In this respect, they still, today, call it milk, but from my point of view, it's not milk, or at least, it's not milk with respect to what we called milk say 25 to 35 years ago. I was raised in a milk/meat/potatoes family that lived in a milk/meat/potatoes rural, small town culture (pardon the pun). 35 years ago I guzzled milk, daily, and preferred it ice cold, and took in many other dair-related products, cheese, eggs, butter, and at the time did not seem to be suffering in any obvious ways.... was a mostly healthy kid, active, thin, strong kid, and this remained the case well into my twenties. Back then mom, dad or one of the kids made a 5 mile car rid two or three times a week to bring back 4 half-gallon glass jugs of chillled milk; today it comes in a plastic jug or cardboard box.... great for cutting operating expenses, but, does anyone even care what the impact has been to the actual quality of the product? In recent years I availed myself of opportunity to actually work on a dairy farm, family run, guys I went to school with, dirt farmers - forkin manure, pullin teats... the whole nine yards. I also got to see how they regularly use things like Oxytosin. I don't think this family has any evil intents with such practice, I see it more a matter where the government has long taxed the small farmers hard and repeatedly as part of the privilege of being hard working farmers, and the same government has since fostered and promoted the use of things like steroids and hormones - bad for your average star athlete, especially baseball, or cyclist, but apparently the greatest thing since slice bread for things like dairy, beef, chickens, hogs, so as to get higher yields from fewer cows, fewer farmers.......and of recent it seems many fewer consumers....cause they now have a habit of dieing young..... but is it really fair to call the result milk.... or meat..... or chicken? My tastebuds are not as young as they use to be, so maybe this helps explain why, but to me milk does not even taste nor look nor smell the same as it did 35 years ago. Same thing goes for cream and cream products.

Yeah, I agree with you. It's probably mostly the pasteurization's fault. And fermentation can definitely kick the health benefits up to the next level.

However, the only thing raw I can find are some cheeses.
There's some raw gruyere I can get from whole foods, it is GOOD. I only eat that occasionally, though.
And I'm young so I missed out on the whole "when I grew up we had real milk" thing.

It's really arrogant of the USA government to make it so that you can't buy something you want to buy, like raw dairy. "It's for your own good." Yeah, right.

I've just gotta find the raw milk... It's the cooking that turns it to poison...