Nor are they sheep or goats.  I realize some people may resemble farm animals on occasion, but I can assure you there are some important differences.  And those differences are what makes this so not OK.

Chef Daniel Angerer is letting diners at Klee Brasserie munch on cheese made from his wife’s breast milk.

“It tastes like cow’s-milk cheese, kind of sweet,” he told The Post.

The flavor depends on what the cheese is served with — Angerer recommends a Riesling — and “what the mother eats,” said Angerer, who once bested Bobby Flay on TV’s “Iron Chef.”

Breast milk doesn’t curdle well due to its low protein content, so a little moo juice has to be added to round out the texture, Angerer said.

After blogging about his efforts with the human cheese, customers started demanding a sample, he said.

“The phone was ringing off the hook,” the chef said. “So I prepared a little canapé of breast-milk cheese with figs and Hungarian pepper.”

We don’t allow fellow citizens to sell organs, and we don’t allow them to sell their body for sex.  There’s a very good reason for this - financial incentives for selling or renting your body can induce desperate people to take very dangerous risks with their body.  Imagine if breast milk became a commercial enterprise - women could be coerced into taking hormones or antibiotics or supplements to increase the quantity or quality of milk they produce with potentially negative side effects.

Yes we do allow people to sell blood.  However donations are heavily regulated and the product is used for life saving measures, not as fancy appetizers.

Congrats to Angerer, who obviously is very skilled in garnering PR for himself.  Now let’s hope this doesn’t become a trend.

Yes, they’re coming, and life as we know it will never be the same.  Imagine all the innocent organic veggie sandwiches with avocado and roasted red peppers and NO ALFALFA.  The horrors.

As mentioned earlier, GM corn has now taken over 90% of the market - more than Internet Explorer’s market dominance in its heyday.  And its impossible to stop - GM corn seed can be carried by the wind to land and cross pollinate with organic - no corn is safe in America.

And now it is the poor alfaalfa sprouts’ turn. Harmless, unoffensive, never hurt anyone.  And about to be extinctified. But it’s not just veggie sandwiches that will suffer - organic alfalfa is a major feed source for organic cows.  So goodbye organic alfalfa could mean goodbye (or really, really, REALLY expensive) organic meat and dairy.

The USDA is accepting comments on its impending decision for the next two weeks.  The folks behind the fabulous documentary FRESH has a petition you can sign in solidarity with the Alfalfa.

Nestle announced today that they will halt their buys from Zimbabwe’s dictator, Mugabe. Seems the former owner of a dairy farm in Zimbabwe was strong armed into selling to Mugabe’s wife. After the Telegraph reported the incident, calls for boycotting Nestle quickly spread throughout the Internet.

Those wacky mad genius scientists have figured out a way to splice bull sperm, termed sexed semen,  to get mostly just female calves.  In general, a very useful thing if what you’re looking for is dairy cows, as bulls are not very helpful. Of course with the dairy crisis this year, everything just compound the problem.  However, in general this is a great leap in efficiency.

Now, could we please take this technology and apply it to baby chicks?  Cause my stomach turns a little bit every time I think about the baby chick grinder story. Kthnxbai.

Solutions to the current dairy crisis have failed to materialize so far.  So agricultural secretaries in several New England states are trying a new approach - asking dairy customers to pay what they consider to be a fair price for milk.

Under a new program called Keep Local Farms, consumers will be asked to voluntarily pay more for milk and other dairy products with the surcharge directly returned to farmers.

“This program allows consumers to elect with their dollars to pay farmers more for the milk that they buy in the store and for students to pay more at the college for the milk that they buy for their consumption,” Vermont Agriculture Secretary Roger Allbee told Channel 3 this morning.

The program is being launched through the Keep Local Farms Web site, www.KeepLocalFarms.org. Currently, consumers can opt to pay a premium through the site that will go directly to farmers. However, the program is looking into partnerships with major retailers. Once that happens, the program logo will appear on bottles of local milk. Those bottles will cost more because the premium tacked on will go right back to the farmer.

This approach is reminiscent of Radiohead’s release of their album Rainbow, where they allowed purchasers to pay whatever they liked for the album.  The results were mixed:

Among US residents, about 40 per cent who downloaded the album paid an average of 8.05 dollars.

Outside the US, the average payment of the 36 per cent of fans who opted to pay was 4.64 dollars, Comscore said.

However, that may not sound as drastic as one might think:

Though 60 per cent chose to download the album for free, they probably would never have bought it anyway, and at least Radiohead now has their email address and can market other merchandise to them, one music executive said.

The pay-what-you-will-for-dairy is different in that consumers will not have the option of paying nothing.  They can pay either regular price or a higher premium price.  In that way it may be more similar to Starbucks’ Ethos Water, which sells bottled water at a higher price than competitors with the promise that some of the proceeds go to water security in undeveloped countries. So far they have raised more than $6.2 million.

At the end of the day, this doesn’t fix any of the price discrepencies between what dairy farmers produce and what dairy distributors charge. Do we really want dairy as a cause, rather than an industry?

Really detailed analysis of the dairy sector across the world by Via Campesina Europe, plus some recommendations. Here’s the key part:

Everywhere in the world, the current price is far too low for producers to make a living. This does not benefit consumers, however - the price of dairy products in supermarkets has remained high since the food price crisis of 2007/08. The milk industry and big retailers are making huge profits at the cost of farmers and consumers.

The European Union has decided to liberalise further the milk market by putting an end in 2015 to its supply management system (quotas), and by increasing quotas by one percent per year until 2015. This policy has led milk producers, women and men, to an unprecedented state of crisis and could end in social and environmental disaster.

In the United States, free traders and dairy processors continue to demand further deregulation of milk markets and emphasise the need to be “globally competitive” and export oriented. Milk pricing is largely determined by the price of cheese at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, which is easily prone to manipulation by a few corporate entities. In December 2008, Dairy Farmers of America (DFA), the nation’s largest dairy cooperative, was fined $12 million for price manipulation at the CME. DFA was also under investigation for two years by the US government for antitrust abuses in monopolising markets and forcing dairy farmers to become part of their cooperative. In many parts of the country, dairy farmers have few alternatives than to sell their milk to DFA.

The supposedly organic mega-dairy just won’t play by the rules.  It’s hard for small dairies to compete when they’re not even competing on the same level playing ground.

Aurora is not playing nice. That’s why its a good idea to steer clear of Horizon milk.

Yes, dairy farmers are still in crisis.  Yes, the USDA keeps buying up surplus milk to no avail.  No, a floor price for dairy has not been set.  That’s why this is such a big opportunity to get something done on the dairy crisis:

USDA established the Dairy Industry Advisory Committee in August 2009. The purpose of the Committee is to review the issues of farm milk price volatility and dairy farmer profitability and provide suggestions and ideas to the Secretary on how USDA can best address these issues to meet the dairy industry’s needs. USDA also seeks nominations of individuals to be considered for selection as Committee members.

Here is a hige chance to get small family dairy farmers and cooperatives inside the door to actually have a say.  Now we just need some folks to nominate.  Who would you recommend?

Nominations should be sent to Judith Lindsay , secretary to Brandon Willis, Deputy Administrator, Farm Programs, Farm Service Agency, USDA, 1400 Independence Avenue SW, Room 3612-S, Stop 0510, Washington, D.C. 20250-0510; Facsimile: (202) 720-4726; E-mail: judith.lindsay@wdc.usda.gov.

Big Dairy already announced the openings to their friends.  The question is whether we can get advocates for consumers and farmers on the board as well.

Advisory committee members will elect the chair and vice-chair, who will each serve a two-year term. As Deputy Administrator of the FSA Farm Programs, Brandon Willis will serve as the committee’s executive secretary.

Using a futuristic laser guidance system, we now have a new way to MILK COWS. Cows and laser beams, gotta love it.

Laser Guided Cow Milking Robot

It’s the daity system of THE FUTURE.

Most mammals produce milk, yet we only milk a few species in the world.  Now I can count one more milk producing animal that I had no idea about. The stoic camel. And if you’re lucky camel milk may be coming to a store near you.

photo courtesy of flickr user clav

Turns out they is a healthy market for camel milk in some parts of the US:

A traditional drink in much of Africa, the Middle East and points east, camel milk is not available in the United States right now. But Millie Hinkle, a North Carolina homeopathic physician who is leading the camel milk cause in this country, is fielding hundreds of requests — including regular queries from a potential distributor in Minnesota.

Camel milk is whiter and sweeter than cow milk, but it is not quite as easy to produce as cow’s:

Camel milking is notoriously difficult. It’s done mostly by hand, on large, often uncooperative animals that can deliver a killer kick sideways. Output per camel is about half that of a traditional dairy cow, and what a camel gives has to be shared.

Camels won’t give milk unless their young are near them. “The baby has to latch on and start sucking,” said Hinkle. With the calf on one teat, milk is taken from the other three.

Assuming that the product makes it into the MN market, you know where going to have to send Robin out as the site guinea pig to let us know what it tastes like.

Heartbreaking.

I’m not sure how dry mlk gets contaminated with salmonella, but it turns out that there isn’t a food product in existence that can’t be tainted.  The product description was kept rather vague.

The recalled prepackaged meals were not available for sale to consumers, but were sent to nutrition service providers and distributors across the U.S.

What do you think?  Was the contaminated meals destined for poor people, the sick, or the elderly?

It’s true - more recall is never as good as MORE COWBELL.  But there it is, in dry milk.  How the heck does salmonella get in dry milk?