I just met Jonathan Bailor in person for the first time on the cruise, but several weeks ago we recorded an interview for his Smarter Science of Slim podcast show.

You can listen to the interview on his podcast page, or on his iTunes podcast channel.

I noticed our podcast on iTunes is rated “Clean,” so I guess Jonathan didn’t ask my opinion of the USDA.

As I sit here writing, my house is gently rocking on the waves.  At least that’s how it feels, which is what a week on a cruise ship will do to you.  I once worked a five-week standup comedy gig on a Norwegian Cruise Lines ship, and when I walked ashore, I wanted to get back on the ship so the sidewalk would stop swaying under my feet.

Anyway, it’s good to be home.  The cruise was a blast (more on that shortly) and Chareva and I certainly enjoyed taking a break from parenthood and hanging out with other adults, but I really miss the girls when I’m gone for more than a few days – which is the reason I stopped doing comedy on cruise ships in the first place.  (When you call home and find out your daughter has been crying and asking when Daddy’s coming back, it sort of takes the fun out of the job.)

Before I get to the cruise report, I want to give a shout-out and a big thanks to The Older Brother for once again taking over the Fat Head chair while I was gone.  I enjoyed reading his posts and your comments.  He turns 56 on Thursday, so wish him a good one and 56 more.

The Sixth Annual Low-Carb Cruise festivities began on Saturday night with the pre-cruise dinner and roast at the Doubletree hotel in Houston.  This was Chareva’s third low-carb cruise and my fourth, so running into so many people we’ve gotten to know over the years felt very much like a class reunion.  I also enjoyed meeting people I “know” (Dr. Jay Wortman, Jonathan Bailor, Rocky Angelucci) but have never previously met in person.

I haven’t checked the audio and video on the roast yet.  If all is well, I’ll upload it later.  This year’s group was significantly smaller than last year’s, so there was less of that comedy-club-crowd energy in the room, but it was still fun.

We set sail on Sunday, which means we met our dinner-table companions for the week that night.  The gentleman in the upper left and the woman in the lower right are a married couple from Finland.  The cruise was a total surprise to her.  She only knew they were visiting New York City (which they did) until they boarded a plane for Houston instead of heading home.

He developed an interest in diet when he was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and was told nothing could be done about it besides taking medication.  Guess what?  He doesn’t take medication now.  He avoids grains and eats plenty of meat, eggs, seafood, butter and vegetables.  (Amy Dungan and her family were also at our table, but ate at the buffet on several nights because the kids – not surprisingly – weren’t especially interested in having dinner with a bunch of us old fogies.)

I have no idea what Chareva was saying to amuse our friend from Finland in this picture.  She may have been describing how she plans to kill her first chicken.

Monday and Tuesday were at-sea days, so that’s when we attended lectures by the speakers.  All the speeches were recorded and will be available online later, so I won’t bother trying to describe them.  The only disappointment was that Robb Wolf had to cancel because his mother became very ill shortly before the cruise.

I enjoyed the lectures as always, but the real appeal of the low-carb cruise for me is the socializing.

The extremely tall man on the left in the picture above is Dr. Andreas Eenfeldt from Sweden.  If you don’t already read his Diet Doctor blog, you should.  To the right is Dr. Jay Wortman, the driving force behind the excellent documentary My Big Fat Diet. The adorable child with the huge blue eyes is Dr. Wortman’s daughter Isabel, who quickly became a celebrity on the cruise.  She’s articulate, extremely bright, and perhaps the most even-tempered three-year-old I’ve ever met.  She happily sat through all the lectures and the two-hour dinners with adults … never complained, never whined, just kept herself amused the whole time.  Dr. Wortman attributes her good nature to a high-fat /whole foods diet, and I’m sure that figures into it, but I suspect the fact that he’s a patient and doting father plays a part as well.

The happy couple above is Jonathan Bailor, author of The Smarter Science of Slim, and his lovely wife Angela.  Based on our email exchanges, I already suspected Jonathan is blessed with a great sense of humor, and I was right.  He’s quick-witted and fun to be around.

As on previous cruises, our group mostly hung around the piano bar at night.

Now, when you hear “piano bar,” you probably imagine a nice, quiet place to enjoy a drink and some conversation, right?  Nope.  Someone at Carnival seems to believe that if you’re not in your room, you want to be subjected to loud music.  Every single bar on the Carnival Magic has a loud guitar player, loud piano player, a DJ, or a band.  We all crowded into an area of the piano bar that extends out into the hallway, as far from the (not especially talented) piano player/singer as we could get, only to find that Carnival also had speakers in the ceiling above us – just to make sure we wouldn’t miss Hotel California played on a piano.

I went to the bar and explained that we were all sitting way over there specifically to avoid the noise.  I had to talk to two different people, but finally got them to shut off the speakers above us.  That meant we could talk without actually yelling into each other’s ears. Fortunately, we’ll be on a different ship next year – perhaps one run by a cruise director with the good sense to provide at least one lounge where people can talk without shouting at each other.

On Wednesday, we docked at an island off the coast of Honduras and attended a wedding.  Yup, a wedding.  On last year’s cruise, two of our British friends, Chris and Ailsa, became engaged.  (She was genuinely shocked when he popped the question at dinner.)  They were officially married in a civil ceremony in England just before this year’s cruise, but had the “celebration wedding” on Wednesday at a beach resort.

I’m sure you recognize the guy with Chareva in the photo above.  Since last year’s cruise, Jimmy has lost close to 80 pounds while putting on 16 pounds of muscle, which means he’s dropped nearly 100 pounds of fat.  He looks like a new man.

After the wedding brunch, a large group of us went zip-lining in the jungle.  That’s the bride and groom in the second picture below with Chareva and me, about to have an interesting wedding day.

If you’ve never been zip-lining, here’s how it works:  the guides strap you into gear that looks like it belongs in a bondage flick.  Then you hike up to a platform suspended high above the jungle.  Then the guides clip the bondage gear onto cables above your head.  Then you ignore every instinct for self-preservation bred into you by millions of years of evolution and jump off the platform.  Then you trust the bondage gear to hold your weight while you slide ridiculously fast down the cable to another platform that’s suspended from a tree by cables and sways when you stand on it.  This is, you understand, intended to be fun.

I’m afraid of heights but went zip-lining anyway because Chareva told me I was going zip-lining anyway.  I wasn’t actually afraid I’d fall and die.  People go zip-lining all the time and live to tell about it.  I was mostly concerned that I’d go zipping off a platform and end up treating the rest of the wedding party to my third Scream Like A Girl incident.  (You can read about my first two Scream Like A Girl incidents here.)

My nerves were jumping and my palms were sweating, but I knew I couldn’t back out when I saw this:  Mary-Clare, who happens to be sixty-seven years old, went zipping out there with no apparent fear.  (She zipped solo a few times before the guides decided to start accompanying her.)

We zipped down 12 lines altogether, and I actually started to enjoy myself after the first four.  That’s because it took me four trips down the lines to figure out how to stop turning in the air and ending up zipping backwards.  There I am, afraid of heights to begin with, sailing high above the jungle at what feels like 60 mph, facing the platform I just left, having no idea where the next platform is or when I’m scheduled to collide with it, just hoping and trusting that the guide responsible for catching me isn’t about to make what baseball scorers call “an unforced error” … or merely thinking to himself, “I wonder what would happen if I let one of these funny-looking foreigners crash into the tree?”

On Thursday, the ship was docked at Belize City.  I’ve seen it before and had no desire to see it again, so we stayed on the ship and mostly hung around with other low-carb cruisers.  On Friday, Chareva and I wandered into Cozumel, where she bought souvenirs for the girls while I pretended to be interested in the souvenirs she bought for the girls.  (I’m not an enthusiastic shopper, to put it mildly.)

Jimmy Moore and I continued our cruise tradition of singing Elvira in the karaoke bar one night, and on another night we added Margaritaville to our repertoire.  That was pretty much it for karaoke.  The Carnival Magic, unlike other ships we’ve been on, tends to have karaoke at odd times – like during dinner.

Saturday was another at-sea day.  Robb Wolf was scheduled to speak, but since he had to cancel, we had two Q&A sessions with the speakers instead of one.  As always, I was impressed by the both the questions and the answers.  People in this group read a lot, listen to a lot of podcasts, and ask sophisticated questions.

Before the last night’s dinner, there was a cocktail party for our group.  The pictures below are from the party.

The woman with Chareva and me above is Laurie Rosen, one of the friends we look forward to seeing every year, even though she says “aboot” instead of “about.”  (Those wacky Canadians all seem to do that.)

The gentleman with me above is Rocky Angelucci, author of the excellent book Don’t Die Early.

That’s me with Dr. Jay Wortman, Dr. Dwight Lundell, and some goofball behind us.

For the record, the hat wasn’t my idea.

The woman farthest to the right is Dietitian Cassie, one of the speakers for the week, and probably one of the few dietitians in the country who tells her clients to skip the grains and eat plenty of good quality fat.

After the party, we had our last dinner on board, then headed up to the piano bar for a last evening hanging out with old and new friends.  Speaking of which, one new friend deserves special mention — because by the end of the week, we’d concluded she may be Chareva’s separated-at-birth, long-lost sister.

Denise Cripps (both pictures above) and Chareva were born three days apart.  They’re both bright, pretty, dark-curly-haired, talented women who had the good sense to marry old guys they met while working temp jobs.  (Both old guys also couldn’t believe their luck and were therefore slow to pick up on hints of romantic interest.)  They’ve both worked as substitute teachers.  They have the same laugh.  They share many of the same interests.  As they were sitting together in the piano bar one night, chatting like BFFs, Dr. Andreas Eenfeldt looked at them and said, “You two are like …uh … not triplets.  The other word.”

“Twins?”

“Yes, twins.”

Denise was also responsible for the perhaps the best line of the cruise.  I’m a night-owl and Chareva isn’t, so on some nights she went to sleep while I continued socializing with our fellow cruisers.  Denise and I ended up leaving the piano bar together late one night and walked to the elevators, where we ran into a handful of people from our group.  They told us they were on their way to some other late-night activity.

“Well, we’re heading off to bed,” Denise answered.

And just as it struck me how that reply could be interpreted, she whirled around and said, “Not together!”

Good times.

Hope to see you all on next year’s cruise.

Howdy, pardners.

Well, this has been awhile in the making, but some friends, relatives (including Tom and Chareva), and I finally went all in on grass-fed beef. As in, not just buying grass-fed beef, not just knowing where your food is coming from, but in your grass-fed beef coming from your own beeves. “Beeves” is what us rancher types call more than one cow.

By ranch, I mean we’ve got two head. Meet Tartare and Royale:
 

 
This all started well over a year ago. In talking to Linda, who has the farm where I get my raw milk, I had talked up Joel Salatin and the whole intensive grazing/high density/rotational grazing approach. She has a few dairy cows on several acres, with part of her pastures segregated and rented out to a traditional rancher who brings cows in the Spring to pasture during the year, then takes them back and puts them on grain in the Fall for market.

She said if I found a grass-fed calf or two, I could pasture them with her cows. In the meantime, she’d started to put fences in to accommodate a rotational system.

As I said, that was over a year ago. It turns out you can’t just go down to the mega-mart and find a pasture-fed calf. I asked anybody selling grass-fed beef if they sold calves, but nobody had “extras.” Between demand increasing, the seasonality of calving, and last year’s drought preventing herd growth, there just weren’t any to be found.

A couple of months ago, one of the people I’d been talking to since last Fall suggested I contact Jerry Pierson, who raises some grass-fed cows in addition to his “day job.” Jerry turned out to be as nice and eager to help a “newbie” as everyone else I’ve talked to, and did think he might sell a couple. It took a couple of weeks to coordinate a visit (he’s about 45 miles away), figure out pricing, etc. then another month waiting for the rain and Jerry’s schedule to clear up enough to deliver them.

I went down to “help” — which pretty much meant staying out of the way. Cows are pretty easy to herd if you’re patient and know what you’re doing. Here’s Jerry making it look easy:
 

 
We stopped at a scale on the way to Linda’s so we could figure the weight, then took a slow 60 mile ride through the country to deliver next year’s steaks to their new home:
 

 
Cows are herd animals, and they and Linda’s cows immediately headed towards each other to make each others’ acquaintance.
 

 
When Jerry stopped on the way back to weigh the empty rig, I got a bit of sticker-shock. Neither one of us, especially me, had much experience, but the guy at the scale had looked in the trailer when we stopped and he guessed them at around 600 or 650 pounds each. It turned out they were actually around 870 pounds each.

That meant writing a bigger check today, but it also likely moved the anticipated date to put them in the freezer up from Fall 2014 to Spring 2014 or maybe even late this Fall.

It’s a learning experience, and I’m looking forward to that as much as our very own grass-fed beef. I’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, remember — never approach a Bull from the front, a Horse from the rear, or a Fool from any direction.

Cheers!

the Older Brother

Hiya Fat Heads!

I meant to get this out yesterday, but spent a good chunk of the day in my basement with the shop-vac and floor squeegee keeping water moving towards the drain. Just one of those things when you live in the Midwest and have 7 or 8 inches above average rainfall for the year.

Anyway, I figured I’d share my notes from last week’s IDPH meeting before heading back downstairs to do battle with Mother Nature. (Note: as one of my buddies from the Power Squadron says — “water always wins — that’s why there’s a Grand Canyon.”)

Angel Smith, who originally tipped me off to the Illinois Department of Public Health being on the move to “regulate” raw milk out of existence, has already posted her notes from the meeting here.  She also links to a three-part series in The Prairie Advocate – here — that has more detail and history.

Here are my observations:

Firstly, and most encouraging, was how many people showed up.  I mentioned that in the last post, but I don’t recall ever being in a room where almost everyone in the audience (probably 120-140) seemed to be thinking the same way as I was.  Weird, really.  Good weird.  It couldn’t have felt very comfortable for the 10 or 15 members of the Raw Milk Steering Committee who thought they were just going to have a couple of meetings on the regulations that the FDA was paying them to “write,” then move on.

Which brings up one of the first exchanges; this one between Molly Lamb, Chief, Division of Food, Drugs, and Dairy (the person in charge of this circus, whose salary is around $77,000 a year) and Donna O’Shaughnessy, the raw milk producer who primarily instigated this revolt among the serfs:

Lamb (after Donna refers to the Raw Milk Steering Committee):  …I don’t know why you keep referring to this as the Raw Milk Steering Committee.  There’s no such thing.  This is the Dairy Subcommittee of the Food Safety Advisory Committee.

O’Shaughnessy:  Because that was the title of the two emails you sent me when I asked about these meetings.

<insert cricket chirping sound here!>

… The meeting  started with the obligatory “rules of order” and agenda, which is of course all done via Power Point Presentation and delivered by the person who was probably really responsible for actually doing all of the work, Steve DiVicenzo, Public Service Administrator.  Such service to the public being remunerated at a salary of over $100,000 per year.  This included the ground rules, making specific note that although the meeting was being conducted in public, the only people who could/would be speaking during the meeting — outside the 30 minutes set aside for public comment — were  the committee members.

[I mention the salaries in case anyone is wondering how to get $9 billion behind on your bills, $70 billion on your pension liabilities, and an even bigger number no one will say out loud on your unfunded health care obligations.]

After a couple of slides on the origin and history of the committee, Ms. Lamb asked if everyone knew how a regulation comes into existence and then clicked to a flow chart slide with about forty boxes titled something like “How a Regulation is Made.”  This is like the old “How an Idea Becomes Law” from your old civics class, which is complete b.s. because there’s no boxes for “lobbyists”, “vested interests”, “campaign donors”, or “tragedy stampede.”

The first one was “determine that a change or new regulation is needed” and went on from there.  She jumped to the box about meetings and hearings and blah, blah, blah, and was five minutes and about 1 & 1/2 rows into the five or six rows on the slide, which she assured everyone was actually kind of a condensed version.

I was looking at the pen I’d brought thinking “if I turn this around and jamb it into my eye socket really fast, maybe I’ll die before I feel anything.”  But I was also thinking, “why in the hell doesn’t anyone ask how they got past the first box — who decided they even NEED a new regulation?!?”

Then, one of the raw milk producers who had been added after Donna started inquiring raised his hand and said “you didn’t explain why or how the decision was made that we even need a new regulation — how did that happen?”

Then, the whole room erupted in cheers.  I slowly put my pen down and decided that it was going to be a good day.

Ms. Lamb: Um, well we decided.

Producer: How?

Ms. Lamb: Well, let’s move on…

At some point either right before or after this, Ms. Lamb helpfully pointed out (again, backed up with an authoritative Power Point slide) that since the Department had been statutorily given the authority to regulate dairies, and since there were currently no rules regulating raw milk, that meant that raw milk was really illegal. The slide literally had “no rule = illegal” on it.

This is the bureaucratic mindset at its very base: until a bureaucrat passes a rule that says you have their permission to do something, it’s illegal.  She said this with a smile like that was going to clear things up, and let people know they were just trying to be helpful by passing some rules.  She seemed to be a bit surprised by the (politely contained) expressions of outrage and incredulity from the crowd.

There was also this:

Producer: So, your directive is to regulate dairies?

Ms. Lamb: Yes

Producer: But the regulations define a “dairy” as an operation that collects milk from farming operations for processing and wholesale and retail sales.

Ms. Lamb: Yes

Producer: So, since that definition means none of us are dairies, you shouldn’t be regulating us.

(audience: applause)

And this:

Producer (addressing Larry Terando from the FDA): Why are you on this committee?  The FDA has a position that all raw milk is always bad and has made it illegal to sell across state lines.  Therefore, all raw milk transactions are intrastate and there is no federal issue here.

(Audience: applause)

Ms. Lamb: He’s here as an expert…

Terando:  Because all raw milk is hazardous, so since it can occur in multiple states we have a federal interest.

The correct answer is that the FDA is financing this whole thing, so they get to call the shots.  Mr. Terando apparently had a busy schedule as he did not return to the meeting after the lunch break.

Another question — I can’t recall if it was from Donna or one of the other new folks on the committee:

Producer: Why did you send a memo to the state legislative committee with these proposed rules in it before we even had this meeting?

Ms. Lamb: Oh, those aren’t really proposed rules.  That’s just like a status report of what we’ve been discussing.

Producer: Well, since you sent that before any raw milk producers or consumers were put on the committee, and since many of the statements are incorrect, can we send a new memo with correct information and let them know there is disagreement on the proposed rules?

Ms. Lamb: Well, since that’s just a status report we really don’t need to do that.

When they got to the part of the agenda labeled “Epidemiology,” another IDPH expert got up.  She introduced herself (forgot her name, so I don’t know how much that pays) and started with her section of Power Point slides.  She was promptly interrupted:

Producer: How long have you been with IDPH?

Epidemiologist: I’ve been here twelve years (I may be a bit off on this –jn)

Producer: What is your degree in?

Epidemiologist: I have a Masters degree in Public Health Administration

Producer: So, you’ve studied a lot of food-born illnesses and outbreaks?

Epidemiologist: Yes.

Producer: How many raw milk outbreaks or illnesses have you studied?

Epidemiologist: Well, I’m not sure specifically raw milk related.

Producer: Is that because there haven’t been any in Illinois while you’ve worked here?

<insert cricket chirping sound here!>

I’m not sure what a Masters degree in Public Health Administration really prepares you for, but apparently it’s not the evaluation of epidemiological data.  It seemed to be maybe a G.E.D. level in “Google,” because her presentation consisted of a few slides of “studies” showing — wait for it — correlation! — between food born illnesses and states with raw milk; and one with a recap of dairy related outbreaks where “raw dairy” accounted for a majority of the “All Dairy” category.  This probably would’ve played well for the average audience, but it was the equivalent of trying to lecture a room full of Fat Heads (which this kind of was) on the evils of Saturated Fat while citing the Seven Countries Study and then doubling down with the China Study.

Even one of the Big Dairy folks couldn’t let these go, and stepped up to the plate:

Dairy rep: That study has already been challenged. Two-thirds of the illnesses — including the only two deaths –attributed to raw dairy  in that report  were directly attributed to “bathtub cheese,” where Hispanic people have made their traditional queso cheese using raw milk [probably illegally from dairies before the pasteurization process -- not actual raw milk producers -- jn].  It was undoubtedly contaminated in the cheese making process or subsequent handling.

Epidemiologist: Um, well, yes, some people do have different opinions.  My next slide relates to cheese!….

That may have been my personal favorite.

Once they got to the part where they were supposed to discuss actual rules — now just “suggestions for discussion,” mind you — it was exactly what you’d expect.  A bunch of rules related to massive, highly automated, feedlot-style operations that may have value in that environment, but completely non-scalable down to the level of someone or a family personally running a pastured cow dairy operation.  Even things like chill tanks would cost thousands and thousands of dollars.  And lord help the person who takes that fresh milk into their own kitchen and puts it in the fridge until their customer stops by.  No sir, separate milking parlors, chill rooms, etc. etc.  With the further caveat that no more than 100 gallons of raw milk could be sold a month.  When the producers hoo-haa-ed that one especially, one of the bureaucrats said — I swear to God, months in and ready to pass  rules on this that would put most of the producers in the room out of business –   “well, we weren’t really sure how many gallons a month you folks usually produce.”

The answer, in case you get asked, is that 100 gallons is about maybe  1/2 down to about 1 full cow’s production for a month.  So if you have one healthy dairy cow, during the productive season, you’ll be throwing half of Bessie’s milk away!

That’s mostly what I recall from the official meeting, somewhat in that order.  After lunch and moving to a room big enough to hold all the folks there to defend their rights to healthy food, they did allow over a half hour for public comments.  They used as a list the folks who’d submitted written comments.  Several spoke, all of whom I pretty much agreed with.  Angel actually got the last word, and did a great job relating how poor health impacted her military career and that raw milk was a key component of rebuilding her health.

The real standout was a women named Penny Gioja (again, thanks to Angel for taking way better notes than me!), who recounted having run an in-home day care for several years before the regulatory cost and paperwork led her to move on, then her family being talked into selling eggs at a local farmers’ market until they were told of a couple more licenses they’d need to purchase that made it economically unviable, and now looking at having to decide whether they should just leave the state.

Then she got wonderfully animated and told the panel that if the IDPH’s mission was really — as they had asserted — to protect the health and nutrition of Illinois citizens, she wanted them to enforce the same rules for people who sold Coke, Pepsi, Mountain Dew, and Monster Drink, which have well-documented poor health impacts — they could only sell 100 gallons a month, they couldn’t advertise, they could only put it in the customers’ own containers, and it could only be purchased on the vendors’ premises.  That rocked the house.

That pretty much wrapped the day.  The committee had a few more housekeeping items, like setting the next meeting and such.  Everyone broke up and started heading for the doors to return home.

I’ve heard from a couple of folks who think the regulators got an education on raw milk.  A lot of informed, passionate, motivated people showed up to stand up for things people just took for granted a generation ago.  The bureaucrats also accidentally put over 120 of those people in contact with each other, many of whom (like me) didn’t know there were so many more of us out there, not alone. Maybe the bureaucrats would change things up substantially.  Maybe even remove impediments to raw milk while setting a few common-sense protocols, as it fits in with the buy local/real foods programs the state and others talk up.

I’m guessing they’ll lay low for a few months or more, and then pass pretty much all of those rules as is, maybe without the 100 gallon limit.  Or maybe they’ll bump the limit to 500 gallons.  But they didn’t learn anything, and they’re there to pass those rules.

It’s what they do.

Still, it was a pretty good day in the sausage factory.

Cheers!

the Older Brother

Greetings, fellow Fat Heads.

I’m guessing Tom had his whole routine for this year’s Low Carb Cruise down cold by Monday.  I’m also guessing he’s still going over it again and again.  That’s how he rolls.  I, on the other hand, don’t tend to burden myself with such preparation.  So here we go!

The sausage factory is a reference to the observation generally attributed to Otto Von Bismark — that people who like politics or sausage shouldn’t watch either being made.

Actually, making sausage isn’t that bad.  I’ve made a few batches since “converting” from the conventional nutritional wisdom, and it’s been pretty good. But watching law being made is every bit as revolting as the quote implies.   I’ve been there in the belly of the beast, and it’s pretty much always ugly.  I did get a state legislator to curse at me once while I was testifying against some insanity.  Other than that, though, there’s nothing redeeming about it.

There’s actually something even worse than lawmaking.  That would be “rulemaking.”  That’s where the regulatory agencies are given charge to “interpret” the sundry laws and directives passed through the legislative process.  The more vague the law, the more the regulators get to decide.  So the actual rules you have to live by are determined by unelected bureaucrats.  They can be (and are) arbitrary, contradictory, and unevenly enforced.  The idea of even being in the same room with one of these people irritates me.  Watching them at work infuriates me.

So, there I was yesterday, in the same room, watching a bunch of them work.

And it’s all your fault.

See, since you all keep getting Tom invited to speak hither and yon, and then I get invited to sit in the Big Chair while he’s gone, some of you have gotten to know a bit about me.  One such person, Angel S — who also lives in Illinois — sent me a heads up that the Illinois Department of Public Health was getting ready to regulate raw milk producers out of business.

I read Angel’s blog post, and then started looking for more information.  The IL Dept of Health, with funds from the US FDA (“official position: all raw milk is dangerous”), had set up a Raw Milk Steering Subcommittee to investigate if raw milk needed regulation in Illinois.  To ensure deep understanding of the product and issues, the regulators picked — for this 19-member committee — exactly ONE person who sold raw milk as a vocation (Donna O’Shaunessy, see her blog post here).  Well, that’s not entirely accurate, because she wasn’t asked to be on the committee until they’d already had their first two meetings and had finished their draft recommendations.  When Donna inquired as to how the committee could propose drastic new regulations of a product without actually speaking to anyone who makes or consumes the product, the head regulator replied that she didn’t know how to contact any of those people.

Unsurprisingly, they came up with helpful recommendations like only allowing 100 gallons of raw milk sales per month.  And requiring that anyone selling raw milk get a Class A Dairy license.  In other words, force raw milk producers to spend tens of thousands of dollars on equipment you don’t need if you’re not a feedlot, volume milk producer; regularly produce hundreds of pages of useless documentation; and then limit their sales to the equivalent of about one cow’s monthly output. Did I mention that seven of the committee members represented the interests of mega-dairy operators Dean Food and Prairie Farms?  You know, commodity, low-cost producers who already have to have Class A licenses.

Mad yet?

As it turns out, even though IDPH couldn’t figure out how to find anyone involved with raw milk, Donna sure could!  She embarrassed IDPH into adding some more raw milk producers and some consumers to the committee (n.b., that is the only way to get a bureaucrat to do something other than what they had already decided they were going to do).  Also, it seems a BUNCH of people started contacting their alleged representatives, who started contacting IDPH asking them why they were making their constituents so mad.  People were also contacting the bureaucrats directly.  Smart people.  Passionate people.  Loud people.  Bother, bother.

Imagine what was going through the bureaucrats’ minds.  “But, everyone from the FDA told us raw milk was bad, and just a few fringe lunatics drink it.  And all of our swell friends from the big dairies had such good ideas — they don’t have any problem with 10,000 gallon chill tanks and separate milk parlors and monthly testing.  That’s what they let us tell them they have to do!”  Hilarious.

The third meeting first got moved to a bigger venue (the Illinois Corn Producers’ building in Bloomington) based on the number of people saying they wanted to attend (danged Open Meetings laws!).  Then it got rescheduled to add time for public comment because so many people wanted to direct a few words to our overseers.  Here’s what it looked like when I got there Wednesday morning:

That’s from about halfway back in the line of cars that were parked on the street. The parking lot was already full.

Here’s what it looked inside the meeting room after they switched into an even BIGGER building next door after lunch.

And as much as I hate being around, and watching, and especially listening to government bureaucrats tell us how much good they’re doing us, it’s almost fun when you’re in a room full of those smart, passionate, loud people who’ve had enough and don’t intend to take it anymore.

Almost, hell.  Turns out watching sausage being made can be fun — it just depends on who’s getting stuffed.

Well, it’s getting late, and The Wife and The Oldest Son and I are off to watch a Cubs game tomorrow from one of the rooftops.  I’ll give you the play-by-play analysis of the meeting later this weekend (I probably won’t be able to catch any comments until Saturday).

Cheers!

The Older Brother

Back in September, I mentioned that a regular blog reader had developed a low-carb dining iPhone application that provides nutrition information for food items at hundreds of restaurants, as well as links to some low-carb nutrition blogs, including this one.  (The picture below is from that application.)

At the time, some of you wrote that you hoped an Android version would be released.  Well, it’s available now.  There’s a free version that includes some ads and a pro version that’s ad-free.

I still don’t own an iPhone or Android and don’t plan to buy either, so you’ll have to let me know what you think of the application.