The World Peace Diet: Eating For Spiritual Health And Social Harmony

112 / the world peace diet
So-called organic milk may contain smaller quantities of the artificial
toxins, but not of the natural ones, whose presence in cow’s milk
reminds us that this is a food that is designed for calves, not for humans.
How are the mother cows actually pushed to produce such gigantic
volumes of milk? They are forced to eat cholesterol in their feed and are
injected with a blend of hormones, including estrogen, progesterone,
prolactin, and testosterone. Dairy consumers receive little protection
from these hormones, since regulations on using them are minimal. As
Mason and Singer demonstrate in Animal Factories, the Food and Drug
Administration and the Department of Agriculture exist to serve and
protect agribusiness interests rather than consumer, environmental, or
animal interests. 4 As but one example, while Canada and all European
governments banned the use of rBGH, Monsanto’s controversial, genetically
engineered, milk-increasing recombinant bovine growth hormone,
the FDA dutifully approved it in 1985. It has been used on dairies in this
country ever since, despite scientific evidence that it may increase cancer
risks in both consumers and cows. 5
Dairy farmers also discovered long ago that if cows were fed
cholesterol-rich foods, they would give a lot more milk. Of course, an
adult cow in the wild is a complete herbivore and would never eat animal
flesh, milk, or eggs (the only sources of cholesterol, which is absent
in all plant foods). But dairy cows, like many other farmed animals
enduring the debasement of modern industrialized agriculture, are given
feed “enriched” with animal flesh and offal, by-products from the slaughter
of fish, birds, and other mammals, including perhaps other cows and
even their own calves. It is all unspeakably perverse, yet it has been standard
procedure on dairy operations for years. According to former dairyman
Tom Rodgers, even the smaller dairy operations feed their cows
“enriched” feed to boost output so they can compete economically. 6
Because each dairy cow is forced to produce far more calves than
can be used on the dairy, her calves are immediately slaughtered, auctioned
to veal operations, or auctioned to build beef herds and killed at
one to two years of age. In all these cases, parts of their bodies will end
up at the rendering plant, mixed with the offal and unusable body parts
of fish, pigs, poultry, road kill, laboratory animals, and euthanized dogs,