In the furniture industry, they have a derisive saying- that encapsulates a cheap but profitable category of the sofa and chair market.  “Flash on trash” means upholstered furniture made from a frame of woodwork scraps that are merely stapled together, then wrapped in low-grade foam and finally covered with attractive and showy fabric.  The upholstered piece looks good in the showroom, but it won’t hold up in day-to-day use.  The foam quickly degrades so that you can feel the framing pieces underneath as they soon start to loosen and wobble.  Instead of a good-looking piece of furniture being an outward reflection of internal strength and quality, it’s a masquerade.  It’s cheap to make, and when many people see it, they can’t tell the difference.

If the displacement of substance with appearance were limited to furniture, it would be a rip off but not a tragedy.  But when the ethos of phoniness subverts the life-sustaining processes we rely on, then it’s no longer just a case of economic trickery and deceit.  It becomes a matter of life or death: long term health versus chronic disease and early death.

Spraying toxic chemicals on plants-

and soil can make plants look almost like the ones that used to grow in healthy, rich soil, without having to spend all the time and energy that traditional farming used to require.  Eggs from egg-farm factories look very similar (from the outside) to the eggs laid by hens who roam sunlit pasture land.  The only differences are the negative impacts that the degraded food has on the person who ate it, and that the farming practices have on the land upon which we all ultimately depend.  By the time the negative results are noticed, the harm is done and the perpetrator has pocketed his ill gotten gains.

Let’s take a closer look at one of the most ancient foods with an honored place in almost all cultures:

MILK.  Thousands of years before the industrial revolution and the invention of refrigeration, people raised cows, goats, sheep and buffalo (in the East, and these weren’t bison) for their milk, and turned the milk into cheese to provide essential nutrition.  Ancient Greece’s Homer describes cheese making and the Romans disseminated their advanced cheese making techniques throughout Europe and the Near East.  Cultures thrived on natural milk and their dairy products.  In the middle ages and the Renaissance, people developed many cheese varieties that are still popular, such as Cheddar, Parmegiana and Gouda.

In colonial America, the dairyman was a valued tradesman, and the dairy buildings were some of the best-designed, best-built, and most fastidiously maintained structures in their communities.  Over millennia, people learned how to care for cows and carefully handle their natural raw milk to provide a consistently healthful source of valuable nutrition for their community.  These natural dairy traditions were handed down and were still widely practiced into the early 20th century.  President Taft arranged for a cow to graze on the White House lawn between 1910 and 1913, providing his household daily with fresh raw milk and butter.  The idyllic image of contented cows grazing in a sunlit meadow while frisky calves nurse from their mothers is such an icon of health and nutrition that to this day graphic illustrations of such scenes often make their appearance on labels of modern-day cheese, milk and yogurt.

But how faithful are these images to the lives of dairy cows today?  Current practice has over 85% of America’s cows removed from the pasture and raised in confinement.  Calves are typically separated from their mothers within a day of their birth, and instead of real milk are fed a milk substitute, typically containing some powdered milk along with lard and either lime-treated corn flour or hydrolyzed fish protein.

As cows get weaned of their milk substitute, they are kept penned up in CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations) where they have no access to natural pasture land and are offered a feed made of byproducts from other industries, e.g., whole cottonseed from the fabric industry; distillers grains from the alcoholic spirit industry; blood meal from slaughterhouses; brewers grain from the beer industry; meat by-products, fish meal, feather meal, peanut skins, soybean hulls, tallow, thin slop or wheat bran.  All these byproducts are cheap, and none of them is what a cow would naturally eat.  To get cattle to eat this unnatural diet, only this food made available to them, it has just enough silage added to make the whole mixture barely palatable, and the silage is mixed in so thoroughly that a cow can’t pick out the silage and leave behind the foreign byproducts.  The silage isn’t necessarily composed of cut grasses that a cow would naturally eat either; up to three-fourths of the silage could be cheaper substitutes, especially corn plant silage, the plant scraps left over after corn has been harvested.  If you look at the feed that is used in CAFOs, it doesn’t remotely resemble the grasses that cows are meant to eat.

Ah, but there’s more to “flash on trash”

in the dairy industry than where the cows live and what they eat.  In order to lengthen the time that a cow lactates, factory dairy farms inject her with rBGH (the artificial recombinant bovine growth hormone), which in turn stimulates the cow to produce the hormone IGF-1, which is a cancer accelerator in adults and in non-infant children.  The cows are milked three times a day, instead of two.  All of the modern conventional dairy practices are aimed at producing ever larger volumes of milk at ever decreasing costs.  Factory dairies harvest over three times the amount of milk per cow each day than traditional cows used to give.  Because cows confined in CAFOs can’t walk away from their feces and urine, they are given daily doses of antibiotics to fend off the likelihood of infectious diseases.

Cows can’t sustain the dietary, pharmaceutical and quota pressures for very long; a typical dairy cow lasts only three years before it is shipped off to the slaughterhouse.  (By contrast, grazing cows typically give milk for over twelve years, and they live like cows the entire time.)  What factory farming does to cows affects their bodies, and that affects their milk.  The contrast between the milk fat content of factory cows and pasture-grazing cows is a good indicator.

Milk from factory farmed dairy cows has as little as one-fifth the amount of conjugated linoleic acid, a type of natural fat that is a potent cancer fighter.  Additionally, naturally raised milk contains the ideal balance of essential fatty acids (omega-3 and omega-6), which when roughly equal lowers the risk of cardiovascular disease, auto-immune disorders, allergies, obesity, diabetes, and dementia.  A gram of typical milk fat from pasture-grazing cows has 16.5 mg of omega-3 and 16.6 mg of omega-6.  When a cow’s diet is changed to one-third pasture grass and two-thirds feed, the amount of omega-3 drops by half, while the omega-6 almost triples, to be almost five times the amount of omega-3.  Cows in a CAFO that have no natural pasture grass in their diet at all have even much worse ratios.

Pasture-grazing cows absorb from living grass and natural sunlight much more of the fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E (plus beta-carotene), which are then stored in their milk fat.  These are also nutrients that are critical for humans and virtually unobtainable in adequate quantities from plant sources.  CAFO cows can’t produce the same high levels, and whatever levels they do produce is diluted further by being dispersed into the higher volume of liquid milk that is forced from them by factory dairies.

The milk from conventionally raised cows is so poor in comparison as to not be the same as milk raised in the traditional way by cows in natural sunlit pastures.  But what makes it even worse is what’s done to the milk after it has been harvested from the cows.

Shelf life is prime prerequisite for food products.  With a long shelf life, food products can be packaged, stored and moved like industrial commodities, and all the cost-reducing efficiencies developed on the factory floors and warehouses of other industries can be used by the food industry.  In order to increase the shelf life of milk, it is pasteurized, typically heated to a high temperature for a relatively short amount of time.  It increases shelf life by killing off harmful bacteria in the milk.

Why are there harmful bacteria in milk?

In factory farms, cows are packed in so tightly that they have to stand in their own feces, where pathogens can thrive.  Also, factory farm milk is so poor that it lacks the full complement of beneficial bacteria that crowd out and even actively destroy pathogenic bacteria, unlike the raw milk of pasture-raised cows which have built-in defenses against pathogens.  So the poorer quality factory milk can be stabilized by killing off bacteria, both the bad and the good.  In the process it also destroys enzymes and vitamins, denatures proteins, and lowers B12 and B6 levels.  Longer shelf life is achieved by further degrading the milk.

After pasteurization, the milk is then homogenized.  This has two benefits to the conventional milk industry, but causes detriment to those who drink it.  In the old days when milkmen delivered un-homogenized milk in glass bottles, consumers could compare the richness of milk from competing dairies by looking at how much cream rose to the top—bad news for the producers of poor milk.  Homogenization “solves” that by breaking up milk’s natural fat globules into tiny spheres about a micron in diameter so that they’ll stay suspended and not float to the top.  The process was sold as being more convenient than having to shake the bottle of natural milk, but it also makes all milk—the rich and the degraded– appear indistinguishably white.  As a further “benefit”, the dead bacteria from pasteurization that would otherwise have settled to the bottom of a bottle now stay suspended and unobserved in the white liquid.

Another unseen characteristic of homogenized milk is that the micron-sized spheres of creamy fat are now small enough to be absorbed directly by the tiny villi of our small intestines, and a form of fat that is not naturally occurring enters our arteries with unhealthy cardiovascular implications.  To resolve this problem, industrial milk producers remove a lot of the fat from milk, and ply us with low-fat dairy products.  What little was left of raw milk’s original fat-soluble vitamins (especially D and E) is further reduced by the reduction in fat (degraded by homogenization, admittedly).

So a perfectly healthful food that supplies critical nutrients is degraded to increase profits.

The degradation process causes new problems, which are resolved by a process that further degrades the food.  The new process introduces its own new set of problems which are resolved by an additional process that even further degrades the food.  Throughout this procedure, the distributors of this cheap and degraded food make sure that the processed milk continues to look a lot like real milk, and at the end of the day they claim that it is just as good.

It’s worth our while to support the small number of remaining farmers who raise dairy cows in sunlit pastures.  They’re the ones who give us truly nutritious milk, not the factory-dairy industry which can afford to hire celebrities in fake milk mustaches to tout a degraded beverage with only the outward appearance (the “flash”) of healthful and nutritious milk.  It’s one thing to sit on furniture that’s flash on trash, but what we put in our bodies should be real quality.

John Chisholm is co-owner of a small company that makes Good-Gums, a toothpaste-replacement that supports the body’s ability to heal its gums. When WAPF Chapter Leaders started carrying Good-Gums, John started learning and practicing Weston A. Price dietary principles, as lucidly explained by Kevin Brown’s Liberation Wellness. Already a regular exerciser and feeling pretty healthy, John didn’t anticipate how well his body would further respond to unprocessed, full-fat, pasture-raised foods.