Musings of a hand milker

Here I was just like every morning around 7 am. Sitting besides Louise our house cow and milking away. I am quite good at it meanwhile, about 9 liters in around 20 minutes.

Milking by hand is a wonderful way to relax and let your thoughts wander. The rhythm of the milk squirts into the bucket, the cow chewing away makes you very relaxed. I was looking at the creamy fresh and frothy milk in the bucket, enjoying the sweet smell of the milk mixing with the smell of Louise. She actually smells quite nice. Not at all like cow shit!

Looking at the milk I thought "So that's what our government regards as a live threatening deadly poisonous food." and it feels very odd if you look at it this way. It is such a positive feeling to get this milk from a cow and then it is supposed to make people sick and kill them?

Mind you, this is the same government which is quite happy to allow the sale of cigarettes and tobacco in every supermarket (yes that's the place where you buy this other white liquid stuff they - strangely enough - call milk). So here we have a product (tobacco) which is proven to kill you. What do they say in the TV adds? It kills every second of its users. But it is still legal to sell it although with restrictions.

On the other side it is practically impossible to legally sell raw milk. This reminds me of Joel Salatin's book "Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal". It is meanwhile allowed to sell cheese made from raw milk as long as it is matured for at least 6 months I think. So no New Zealand made Roquefort, because you could die from it! Yeah right! It seems to be ok that Millions of French people commit suicide by Roquefort all the time. I mean they are French, do I need to say more?

So can someone please explain this to me?

I suspect (clever me, he he he) that the reason why the sale of tobacco products is still legal comes from pressure by the industry. So let us see, maybe, just maybe the reason for not allowing the sale of raw milk products comes from some sort of industrial interest as well. Maybe the big cheese factories in New Zealand do not want to go into the raw milk side of the cheese market? And they don't want others to venture out into the wonderful delicious world of raw milk cheese. So are our food regulations driven by the industry and not by the government's concern about our health? Because surely if the government would be concerned about our health they wouldn't allow the sale of tobacco products, would they?