Tom Naughton has a good post today about raw milk.  He looked up the regulations for raw milk in a bunch of different states, and had some fun with how stupid they are.  My favorite is Nevada:

Raw milk sales are legal but, in practice, there are no raw milk sales in the state. In order for a farmer to obtain a permit from the state dairy commission to produce and distribute raw milk, the county milk commission must first certify the farm for the production of raw milk or a raw milk product. There has never been a county milk commission in existence at any time, so to this point, there has been a de facto prohibition of raw milk sales.

Most of us who saw “Brazil” took it as a warning.  Apparently some government folks took it as an inspiration.

And here’s a very good article from a raw milk drinker, telling the story of how they had to work their way through a chain of confidences to contact the raw milk “underground” so they could start getting some.  It also covers the evidence that raw milk is safe and healthy, and why that’s the case.  As the author says, it’s amazing that milk is the only food that you can’t buy unprocessed in most states.  You can buy everything else raw—meat, vegetables, fruit, grain, etc.—and decide for yourself how much you want to cook or process it, but not milk.  Once upon a time, it was sort of about safety, but that’s not what it’s about now at all.  It’s inertia and corporate protectionism, plain and simple.

We drink raw milk and cream and make yogurt from it, but unfortunately we mostly still eat pasteurized cheese.  Hard cheeses like cheddar are just a lot of work, but one of these days I’ll give cheesemaking another shot.

So far back on the low-carb wagon, it’s going well.  For the first two weeks, I did a liver cleansing thing from the Eadeses’ latest book that consisted of a lot of protein shakes.  That was more about detoxifying the liver than weight loss, so I didn’t lose any weight until last week when I went back to strict low-carb.  It was a busy week, so it meant lots of quick stuff like eggs and burgers.  Nothing fancy, but it gets the job done: 2.4 pounds down, 42.6 to go!

I haven’t talked much about diet lately, because I was doing kind of a half-hearted job of it.  I didn’t have any real high-carb days (except one Christmas party), because I finally got it through my head that I really don’t want to go into a seizure from falling blood sugar after the peak.  But I was getting a few too many carbs here and there—eating a few of the fries I forgot to tell them to leave out when I ordered a burger, taking a vegetable dish at a potluck that turned out to have rice in it, and things like that.  It was probably only a couple times a week, but if it takes 3-4 days for your metabolism to get fully into a solid fat-burning groove, twice a week is often enough to keep knocking it out of the groove before it gets started. Read more »

Two years ago, we started a leaf pile.  I staked down a circle of chicken wire at the far end of the back yard, and we’ve piled all our leaves in it ever since.  The reasoning behind it is that, if you put your leaves in your compost pile with other stuff, the leaves will mat together and take forever to break down, especially the big flat leaves like maples.  So you compost your leaves separately, and after a few years you get this really great leaf compost.  It just takes a long time. Read more »

One of the cornerstones of faith in the low-fat diet for a long time has been the low prevalence of heart disease among Japanese people.  Way back when Ancel Keys did his famous Seven Countries study, and picked seven countries out of a bunch more that supported his thesis, one that stuck out was Japan.  Traditional Japanese at the time ate a high-carb, fairly low-fat diet based on a ton of rice and some fish, and they didn’t have much heart disease, and they got more of it when they moved to America.  Keys jumped on this as proof that fat causes heart disease, and we’ve been repeating it ever since.  You’ve probably heard it many times, maybe even repeated it yourself: if you want to be healthy and thin, eat broiled fish and rice like the Japanese.  (The reasoning behind the Mediterranean diet is much the same.) Read more »

No, this isn’t a post about a German communist.  We grew some red cabbage this year, just for fun, and then we had to figure out what to do with it.  I read somewhere that it’s not good for sauerkraut, but I couldn’t remember why, so I started looking for it online.  It turns out lots of people make kraut with it and claim it works just fine, so that’s what we did after all. Read more »

I’ve wanted to put wheels on our chicken house for a while, to make it easier to move around.  It’s about all I can do to shove it from one spot to another, and I need to be able to move it every day to give them fresh grass and keep them from digging holes in the yard.  It should make for about a two-week rotation.

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Last week we got seven eggs in one day for the first time!  So now we know for sure that they’re all laying.  (For those who don’t know, chickens lay one egg a day at most, and usually skip every third or fourth day.)  One of the last ones to lay was the Ameraucana, and they sometimes lay a pinkish-brown egg, so we couldn’t be sure she wasn’t laying some of the brown ones until we finally got a green one.

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I’ve been meaning to do a garden update for a long time, but I never seemed to have pictures of everything handy when I could sit down and do it.  So let’s see if I can remember everything that’s changed since the last time.  Comments after the pictures.

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I haven’t posted much about the garden lately. I guess it hasn’t seemed that interesting—just harvesting things and wishing it would dry out a little—but I’ll try to catch up on that soon.  We did finish our garlic harvest, though, so here are some pictures of that.

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