Veally Good Food.

Supermarkets – including Tesco, Waitrose and Marks & Spencer – are backing a campaign to get us eating more home-produced veal. The aim is to reduce the number of low-value bull calves being exported for veal production abroad. But the scheme won’t help more than a tiny fraction of calves from Britain’s dairy herds. They’re victims – not of British food preferences – but the industrialisation of agriculture.

This is an extract from an article posted on The Guardian’s Comment is Free website in January 2008.

“Until we came under the control of the EU’s common agricultural policy, dairy farmers relied on well-fleshed, traditional breeds such as the British Friesian to produce our milk. In those days, the male calves had value because they could be fattened economically for beef on fresh grass and silage.

“But in their bid to turn out ever-greater quantities of milk at ever-lower cost, dairy farmers have come to rely on what US nutritionist Sally Fallon calls “freak” cows – animals with abnormally active pituitary glands. Hard-wired to produce copious amounts of milk, they have to be fed – not on fresh pasture, the natural food of ruminants – but on high-energy feeds such as maize and cereal grains, and high protein feeds such as soya...”

“By insisting that their milk suppliers put cows back on pasture, they would force farmers to abandon the industrial “freaks” and go back to the traditional breeds that thrive on grass… The milk of grass-fed cows is richer in vitamins, omega-3s and the cancer-fighting compound CLA than cows fed on soya meal and cereals.”

Click here for the full article – Dear dairy.

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