(4-minute read)
Bee healthy
For sure I’m going to upset some health food fanatics here but I need to talk about the latest Batshit Crazy (BC) stance that Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (MTG) has taken. Now granted it isn’t as crazy her claim about Jewish space lasers or the weather being controlled by “they” as in they’re controlling the weather and starting hurricanes for no earthly reason. But her encouragement to drink raw milk has the distinct possibility of causing harm to people.[1] And I say this as a person that LOVEs milk and that had raw milk a LOT growing up. My Aunt and Uncle had dairy cows and people bought milk from them.
I spent a lot of time with my grandparents growing up. My Aunt and Uncle provided them with raw milk. (I also spent time with them.) For breakfast I would have a huge bowl of corn flakes and pour that top cream on the cereal. OMG! It was so good!
Later in life when my folks moved to a bigger city my dad ran a milk route for a Mennonite that had several trucks. He did it for the extra income. Mom stayed at home to watch over the kids. (I’m here to tell you we were a full-time job.) It wasn’t a delivery route but a pick-up route.
I would often go with him on weekends. While he was unloading his truck I would wait for him in the drivers’ room. It was NOT a lounge. Know what they had in there? A chest freezer loaded with ice-cream bars. ALL kinds of ice cream bars. They were free to the drivers! So when I went with Dad I could count on having an ice cream cone in the end. I would have one. One! Because … Dad.
Anyway.
Farmers would set their milk cans in wash tubs in front of their barn or house. Dad would pick them up, load them in the truck and take them to the dairy. It was a hard job. He would lift and stack those cans of milk clear to the ceiling of the truck front to back. He was short but strong. He had worked loading coal onto trucks when he was young using a big steel scoop shovel. Dad was used to hard work. He had got out of the army when WW2 was over and was diagnosed with heart problems then. He died at the age of 57 from a heart attack. Might have been from the stress of spending 6 months under fire during the Battle of the Bulge. I’m the current keeper of the bronze star he was awarded and the flag that draped his coffin. I have wandered again.
Back to MTG and raw milk.
Later on the trucks were upgraded to tanker trucks. Loading them was a lot easier for Dad. Here’s the thing. Dad had to test those loads of milk while still in the farmers refrigerated tank, before putting it in the tanker truck. He had to check for a variety of things. Blood (Yes blood). Odor. Appearance. And such. If any of it was bad Dad couldn’t load it because it would contaminate the entire load in the truck. The milk in the truck was tested again before he could unload the truck.
Do you know why all of this testing was done? If you are one of those folks that struggles with the obvious it’s because RAW MILK kept making people fucking sick! Some folks don’t like doing business with a product that comes from a business that makes them fucking sick! In the case of raw milk, thanks to Louis Pasteur,[2] business responded. At least the businesses that cared did, especially once the government made them care.
Occasionally Dad had to reject loads. He hated it when he had to do that. He was a factory worker and understood that the farmers needed the money. There were some rather intense conversations with them at times but Dad had to think of all those that were involved, including his boss. The community of people had to come first over the needs of the individual.
Here’s the part that I don’t understand. Why would people want to go back to a time when that’s all that people had available in their diet, people got sick from food-borne illnesses more often and life expectancy was lower? Like a small child’s age lower.
Well, it’s because MAGA doesn’t believe in science and progress. They reject history and live in a mythical world where people like MAGA Marjorie believe that Democrats control the weather and cause hurricanes.[3] And they seriously believe this kind of outrageous garbage and much much worse.
Sadly there are many other MAGA members of the House and Senate that are like MTG or even more extreme. And they joined in with right-wing social media, Russia and Iran in pumping out lies during a hurricane disaster to make things worse.
Chaos is what MAGA does best.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please avoid name calling, personal and/or abusive language. In other words be civil. We need a lot more of that these days. Try and confine your comments to the topic of the post.