![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Dairy Scientist #1
Aug. 14th, 2007 07:53 amForgive me. I seem to have lost the notes I took for the ACS Keynote address. Oh well, it's not like you guys are paying me for these entries. I'll wing it.
Paul Kindstedt, dairy scientist and author of the best don't-have-to-be-a-scientist-to-enjoy-it technical cheesemaking book American Farmstead Cheese opened up the 24th annual American Cheese Society Conference with a keynote address entitled, "American Artisan Cheese: Is the Sun Setting or Rising."* He's one of my favorite dairy scientists.
Unsurprisingly, given the huge increase in conference attendance and entries in the cheese competition over the last few years, he pretty much found it to be rising.
His basic message, and noteless, I am sure I am not doing it justice, is that as demand for small, handmade cheese goes up, that producers need to keep doing the things that set themselves off from big dairy. Kindstedt is no enemy of big dairy, in fact, he mentioned many ways that both types of cheesemakers need each other, but he pointed out that the huge growth in the market for small-production, hand made cheese is because it's different. He urged hand-made cheese makers to resist the business-dogma of getting bigger at all costs, warning that it could be the downfall of the cheese renaissance in this country.
He is still a dairy scientist, of course, and though I love dairy scientists, most of them love their technology a little more than I do. I don't know if it his message was tailored for a cheesemaking audience, but while he advised artisan cheesemakers to not use rBGH, he advised it because the public doesn't want it. He also warned folks not to align with activists using "bad science".
The back of Bovine Growth Hormone has pretty much been broken now anyways. When large-ish producers such as Tillamook, Belgioso, and Rothkase, and milk suppliers like the California Co-op going rBGH-free, there is less and less of a market for it every day. But I found it a little maddening that "activists" and "bad science" were never explained. Who is he talking about? Greenpeace? Consumers Union? The Cornucopia Institue? It's not like rBGH hasn't been rejected by scientists in every other major milk producing country in the world.
I was a member of a certain environmental organization but don't feel I can support them anymore since their ill-conceived boycott of Horizon organic dairy. I support it in theory, of course. Borne of a study about lack of access to pasture, especially among some Horizon organic mega-dairies, it was done in the name of enforcing the "access to pasture" clause in USDA organic certification. That clause is ill-defined, unenforced and, basically, a joke. Actually, the industry joke goes, "access to pasture? Sure. We walk 'em through the pasture on the way to the slaughterhouse"
But the boycott has no demand that I can figure out except for maybe, "Horizon go out of business". The only thing close to a demand is for "transparent and strict organic standards" but the problem is with the USDA standards themselves. Demands could have been "mandate that farmers you buy milk from keep cows on pasture* for 180 days a year", "put (specific amount of) money behind lobbying to change the overly-vague USDA standard". Boycotts without demands are just not boycotts. I can understand avoiding activist groups like that.
While there is certainly room to criticize environmental groups at times for fear-mongering, it's not like government regulatory agencies don't have a track record of approving dubious products when big money is sponsoring them. (see my next dairy scientist entry on "cold pasteurization")
Still Kindstedt is one of the most passionate resources to small cheesemakers in the country and he was putting these issues to dairy farmers in a way that they could appreciate it. Truthfully, I had a similar conversation the night before in the hotel bar with a dairy farmer from one of the biggest handmade cheese factories in the country. He tried to convey to me how hard it is to take a stand around rBGH. Some family farms that his company has been buying milk from for generations, otherwise clean milk with high protein levels and low somatic cell counts, have used rBGH because with the encroachment on dairy land, they couldn't just go out and buy more cows. Severing a business relationship with a neighbor that goes back 50 or 100 years is not an easy thing to do. I eventually got to the same argument Kindstedt would the next day in the keynote, that customers don't want it and they are asking about it specifically.
If seeing rBGH being eliminated by many dairies is good news, something new is coming right along. Milk from clones is the next big issue. It's already technically legal though not in the production stream yet. One of us will be getting those "Will you refuse to use milk from cloned ruminants and require any suppliers to certify that their milk supply is clone-free?" out to cheesemakers by the end of the year.
*pasture would also be need to be defined so it doesn't end up being concrete slabs.
**![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
oneroom you should know that your uncle's memory lives on at this conference. He is invoked at every opening and closing event.
Paul Kindstedt, dairy scientist and author of the best don't-have-to-be-a-scientist-to-enjoy-it technical cheesemaking book American Farmstead Cheese opened up the 24th annual American Cheese Society Conference with a keynote address entitled, "American Artisan Cheese: Is the Sun Setting or Rising."* He's one of my favorite dairy scientists.
Unsurprisingly, given the huge increase in conference attendance and entries in the cheese competition over the last few years, he pretty much found it to be rising.
His basic message, and noteless, I am sure I am not doing it justice, is that as demand for small, handmade cheese goes up, that producers need to keep doing the things that set themselves off from big dairy. Kindstedt is no enemy of big dairy, in fact, he mentioned many ways that both types of cheesemakers need each other, but he pointed out that the huge growth in the market for small-production, hand made cheese is because it's different. He urged hand-made cheese makers to resist the business-dogma of getting bigger at all costs, warning that it could be the downfall of the cheese renaissance in this country.
He is still a dairy scientist, of course, and though I love dairy scientists, most of them love their technology a little more than I do. I don't know if it his message was tailored for a cheesemaking audience, but while he advised artisan cheesemakers to not use rBGH, he advised it because the public doesn't want it. He also warned folks not to align with activists using "bad science".
The back of Bovine Growth Hormone has pretty much been broken now anyways. When large-ish producers such as Tillamook, Belgioso, and Rothkase, and milk suppliers like the California Co-op going rBGH-free, there is less and less of a market for it every day. But I found it a little maddening that "activists" and "bad science" were never explained. Who is he talking about? Greenpeace? Consumers Union? The Cornucopia Institue? It's not like rBGH hasn't been rejected by scientists in every other major milk producing country in the world.
I was a member of a certain environmental organization but don't feel I can support them anymore since their ill-conceived boycott of Horizon organic dairy. I support it in theory, of course. Borne of a study about lack of access to pasture, especially among some Horizon organic mega-dairies, it was done in the name of enforcing the "access to pasture" clause in USDA organic certification. That clause is ill-defined, unenforced and, basically, a joke. Actually, the industry joke goes, "access to pasture? Sure. We walk 'em through the pasture on the way to the slaughterhouse"
But the boycott has no demand that I can figure out except for maybe, "Horizon go out of business". The only thing close to a demand is for "transparent and strict organic standards" but the problem is with the USDA standards themselves. Demands could have been "mandate that farmers you buy milk from keep cows on pasture* for 180 days a year", "put (specific amount of) money behind lobbying to change the overly-vague USDA standard". Boycotts without demands are just not boycotts. I can understand avoiding activist groups like that.
While there is certainly room to criticize environmental groups at times for fear-mongering, it's not like government regulatory agencies don't have a track record of approving dubious products when big money is sponsoring them. (see my next dairy scientist entry on "cold pasteurization")
Still Kindstedt is one of the most passionate resources to small cheesemakers in the country and he was putting these issues to dairy farmers in a way that they could appreciate it. Truthfully, I had a similar conversation the night before in the hotel bar with a dairy farmer from one of the biggest handmade cheese factories in the country. He tried to convey to me how hard it is to take a stand around rBGH. Some family farms that his company has been buying milk from for generations, otherwise clean milk with high protein levels and low somatic cell counts, have used rBGH because with the encroachment on dairy land, they couldn't just go out and buy more cows. Severing a business relationship with a neighbor that goes back 50 or 100 years is not an easy thing to do. I eventually got to the same argument Kindstedt would the next day in the keynote, that customers don't want it and they are asking about it specifically.
If seeing rBGH being eliminated by many dairies is good news, something new is coming right along. Milk from clones is the next big issue. It's already technically legal though not in the production stream yet. One of us will be getting those "Will you refuse to use milk from cloned ruminants and require any suppliers to certify that their milk supply is clone-free?" out to cheesemakers by the end of the year.
*pasture would also be need to be defined so it doesn't end up being concrete slabs.
**
oneroom you should know that your uncle's memory lives on at this conference. He is invoked at every opening and closing event.
