More Illegal Milk

Another great piece out today about the growing demand for "real" milk:

Once a Fringe Item, Demand Grows for Raw Milk - AOL News

Meeting shady characters in Brooklyn back alleys does not immediately suggest "milk." But that's exactly what Hannah Springer and group of unpasteurized "raw" milk devotees are doing to get their daily dairy fix, Gothamist reported this week. It's their way of getting around New York state's restrictions on the sale of raw milk -- and they aren't the only ones bending laws to get closer to the cow.In recent years, the consumption of unpasteurized milk has been rapidly expanding along with the market for organic, local foods.

When the Weston A. Price Foundation began its Real Milk campaign in 1999, there were only a handful of people selling raw milk – now there are hundreds, and president Sally Fallon Morell believes that is expanding.

Speaking of raw milk, I wanted to add something to a comment that one of my readers posted yesterday. She noted (correctly) that goat milk is about as close to human milk as we can get from livestock, and said that when in a pinch she has fed raw goat milk directly to her babies. With the adoption of Yeoman Farm Baby, Mrs. Yeoman Farmer and I had to do a lot of new thinking and research about how to feed babies; all of the other YFCs had been exclusively breast-fed. (The one time I'd had to purchase baby formula, I'd felt a little like I was buying cigarettes or something.) We eventually settled on one particular forumla that will work for YFB, and he's done very well on it.

All that is a lead-up to my main point: MYF and I would be comfortable giving raw goat milk to YFB if there was a snowstorm and we could not get out to the Whole Foods 45 minutes away that sells our usual formula. HOWEVER, we would only do so in a pinch, and not on a regular basis. Goat milk, as good as it is, lacks some essential nutrients that babies need. But if you're interested in making your own baby formula, using goat milk as the base, the Weston A. Price Foundation has some excellent recipes. We eventually decided against using these because of the "time and hassle" factor, and because our goats were not in milk with YFB arrived.

That said, if the Whole Foods formula hadn't worked out, I'm sure we'd have pursued the WAPF formula more seriously.