The Power of Our Fork – Sarina Farb

My friend Philip Wollen calls all factory farming “gulags of despair.” This is the sad truth. The dairy industry is one of the most egregious of all. I was shocked at the age of 44 to find out about our cruel practices taking place with dairy cows.

He told me 97% baby calves were striped from their mamas at birth. The mothers cry for days. Have you ever watched a mother cow run and bellow after the truck who grabbed her baby away? Can you imagine doing that to a human mother?

The newborn baby boys raised for veal are tied up to small stalls, all alone, unable to move so their muscles can be kept tender. Desperate for their mamas, as they all are, I cried as they tried to suckle my fingers when I visited them.

Mama cows develop high levels of cortisol from being isolated. She told me the mama cows were painfully raped with rape guns repeatedly to keep them pregnant. They are excruciatingly machine milked 2-3 times per day. The mamas with swollen tits get mastitis, painful udder infections. Dairy milk is pooled together in large tanks so virtually all dairy milk contains pus. A liter of milk can have up to 400,000,000 pus cells before it is considered unfit for people to drink. I saw them try so hard to kick off the metal clamps. At 4 years, they are slaughtered for hamburger and never live to 25.

To fatten them, the vegetarian cows are fed fish. We feed more factory farmed fish to cows than we do to humans. This sickens them so we give them antibiotics possibly making humans more resistant. Many species of farmed fish are carnivorous, which means that fish must be caught from our already-exhausted oceans in order to feed them. It can take 1 pound or more of fish from the ocean to produce 1 pound of farmed salmon or sea bass. Aqua farmers feed fish oil and meal to the fish who naturally eat only plants to make them grow faster. Fish farmers lace fish feed with powerful chemicals and antibiotics to help fish survive the deadly diseases caused by severe crowding and filth. These fish pellets higher PCB and dioxin contamination levels found in farmed fish, which are seven times higher than the already-dangerous levels found in their wild counterparts.

Besides the natural female estrogen, male testosterone, bovine growth hormones, cows get hormone injections, i.e., manmade zeranol, trenbolone acetate and melanogaster acetate to make them produce more milk, gain muscle and fat weight and thus increase profit. The Food Commission links these hormones to acne, obesity, allergies and cardiovascular disease.

Dr. T. Colin Campbell’s research at Cornell University shows that casein (casomorphin) in milk is our most powerful cancer promoter, especially for breast, prostate, colon and testicular cancer. Milk causes biological changes in our bodies which is a rise of the insulin-like growth factor IGF-1 hormone. Having higher IGF-1 in one’s blood shows a higher risk for cancer.