So how much would you pay for milk?

[IWanders]

All the articles on the news is making me think, if the supermarkets put the price of milk up how much would you be happy to pay? I don't like the thought of harming our dairy industry and making more families struggle.

Personally I would be happy as long as milk didn't go above say £3.50 on 6 pints which is the size I buy.

It would mean having to cut back on other things to compensate but I am curious as to how much others think milk should cost?

flat, I don't really have the energy to debate it. There are a lot of people who are anti milk. Some who eat paleo do have it. People should make their own decision. I am just saying for me it does not work and plenty of others agree with me. Cordain's Paleo Answer is very extensively footnoted. It will be in that book but I am not here on a mission to put people off drinking milk. I am just saying you'd all be better off not drinking it at all and sticking to water.

As for ancient skeletons there are quite a lot. I had my own DNA tracked back 25,000 years and that it is compared to is DNA from a skeleton in that era.

All I can say is people who eat as I do are healthy and slim and most British women are fat and often ill.

I have stopped buying cheese as it has got too expensive lately (56p rise on a block of value cheese that tastes like soap, and 97p on a block of decent branded cheese). I have one DC on a dairy free diet due to CMP allergy. One thing I CAN say is that milk replacements are ALL considerably more expensive than milk is, and I couldn't afford it for all my DC's, so milk would be an unaffordable luxury for all over 5yo in my house.

I wouldn't like it, especially with no other real way to get calcium into their diet as I can't afford to buy any extra green leafy veg than I do now, and I would worry about the lack of calcium causing issues especially for my DD who is going through puberty right now (possibly storing up problems with osteoporosis in later years?).

But the fact would still remain that more than 5p on a 4-pint bottle would be my breaking point. I couldn't afford 5p a punt, that would put 20p on the price of a 4-pinter.

The thing is, I don't think YOU need to pay more....... the supermarkets and processors just need to take less!

Xenia

flat, I don't really have the energy to debate it.

Perhaps that's a weakness in your diet then.

There are a lot of people who are anti milk. Some who eat paleo do have it. People should make their own decision. I am just saying for me it does not work and plenty of others agree with me. Cordain's Paleo Answer is very extensively footnoted.

Good for Cordain.

It will be in that book but I am not here on a mission to put people off drinking milk.

Then what was the purpose of your post?

I am just saying you'd all be better off not drinking it at all and sticking to water.

A viewpoint which, as far as I can tell, is entirely unsubstantiated by any actual scientific evidence.

As for ancient skeletons there are quite a lot.

Which is why I wanted to know which skeletons you were referring to, because early humans are one of my fields of interest.

I had my own DNA tracked back 25,000 years and that it is compared to is DNA from a skeleton in that era.

I'm sorry, I simply don't understand what you're on about. You had your DNA 'tracked back'? And that convinces you that drinking milk is bad?

All I can say is people who eat as I do are healthy and slim and most British women are fat and often ill.

Anecdote is not the same as data.

Cazboldy, I wholeheartedly agree with that.

Oh, and milk isn't a 'loss leader' either. They still MAKE a profit on it, the supermarkets, just not the percentage that they do on other food...

If the supermarkets started paying a decent amount to dairy farmers per unit of milk, then milk might actually be a true loss leader for them, but as it stands, it isn't.

I did not say the fact I had had my DNA tracked back convinced me milk was bad. You seemed to be saying no one has seen corpses from paleo and compared them with corpses from neolithic times. I was just saying yes we have evidence of size, height etc of people.

I have read a huge amount about milk. Anyone who wants to know if it is good for them can see lots and lots of research about it - pros and cons - on line. Most people do not eat it on the planet although some cultures had become tolerant of lactose and can just about take it.

I am flicking through a book here as people seem interested. Let me see what I can see in the dairy chapter. Dairy products are 10% of the average US consumer's calorie intake. There are many pages of a chapter here. 65% of the people on the planet cannot manage lactose. There are lots of pages about studies. There is an epi. study in 1993 in 40 countries which showed that milk had the highest relationthip to cardiovascular dath rates than any other food or nutrient combined.. 2010 meta analysis of dangers of too much dietary calcium is shown.

For diabetics a 2005 study examined boys' insulin response depending if they were on a high milk or high meat diet. The milk one was much worse. Ther eis then a section about impact of milk on acne. Then allergies (milk is the number 1 allergy). Certainly if I have milk the next day my nose runs. I never have a runny nose and at most once a year catch colds since I started eating well. Milk and cataracts. Meta analysis of hip fracures in 2007 at harvard shows high calcium intake did not affect hig facture rates in 170,000 woment.

However you wanted the evidence about height - which is a big paleo point - that before agriculture humans were taller, stronger and in better health. that is not in that chapter. I will have to look later. It is interesting though, as if we had three periods and in each we have got worse that is notable . the paleolithic era of about 2.5m years or whatever it was, then 10,000 years ago we settled down and found agriculture and started not having to hunt and ate a lot more carbs and health got worse (obviously not everyone will agree with me) but at least we were still moving around most of the day and outside in the sun and eating 100% wholefoods and then the third era - last 40 - 50 years or may be 100 when we moved to white sugar, very processed foods, crispy crem donuts, chocolate digestives, sweets, and all the other stuff which is making us the unhealthiest generation ever and fatter than we have ever been.

Anyway I don't want to spoil the milk drinkers' party but if they cannot afford it just move to tap water and eat more veg and eggs.

SpringGoddess wrote (about Farmers' Markets) "I would have expected them to be cheaper given their rhetoric on supermarket profits."

If they are at some location on a regular basis, they are perhaps charged between 25 and 50 pounds for the day, and with fuel, and their time spent there, plus any accessories (tables, chairs, perhaps) they will have invested up to 150 pounds for being there.

Yes, would be nice to assume they undercut the supermarket, but I bet the council wants a chunk of any income they make during the hours they are there, and it's their risk if, on the day, the weather is awful and not a single person buys anything (yet the council will take their fee anyway).

I'm not an apologist for farmers, I have no links with them, but would prefer they have funds to provide better welfare, rather than be driven into bankruptcy and/or suicide because a big portion of what we pay is not reaching them.

Whether shareholders of big supermarkets ever know what areas are most profitable is debatable, I rather assume it is kept very secret because it is commercial suicide to show which makes most and least profit, and there may be some who (on religious grounds, perhaps) might find it distasteful that Vodka and Durex Play bring in most profit!

The idea that paleolithic people are veyr much taller than neolithic is well attested; see for example Plague's Progress, by Arno Karlen - but there is no evidence that this has anything at all to do with dairyin the diet, since most neolithic peoples of the near East made limited use of dairy.

What it did involve was a reduction of lean protein in favour of grains. Essentially, we swapped guaranteed calories per diem for optimal nutrition. The paleolithic population struggled to meet daily calorie needs, while neolithic life meant people could avoid hunger by eating grain, basically junk food.

Xenia, if you eat grains and fruit you are eating a neolithic diet. If you want to eat paleo, it's lean meat, ideally not farmed, berries, and a small amount of vegetables.

Sieglinde, is it my imagination, or are you suggesting that a meat diet is more virtuous in some way than a grain diet?

Not more virtuous. Just the opposite. Better for a tiny minority of people's survival, yes. If we were eager to sacrifice 98% of the world's population we could all be taller and healthier by eating like hunters. If not.. and I'm not, grain is the best way to keep a big population of humans afloat. Bear in mind that this was a response to Xenia.

sieg, there are lots of differences and between different cultures - on the icy tundra you don't eat the same as in Africa but yes I don't eat grains. I do eat fruit. I am not some purist but what I eat makes me feel pretty good so it's hard not to recommend it to others.

My point was about grains rather than milk. It is indeed as sieglinde says the move from meat/fish to grains which made us worse off in my view. There is a lot of information about it on line and people can form their own view.

It was just on a dairy thread with people worried they may not be able to afford milk I was suggesting give it up, drink water and you'll probably be healthier anyway.

Well, I agree on the grain issue, and even on dairy, but most people here in the developed world can't afford a protein-based diet like this. That was my point. It's not wonderfully novel to suggest that the rich may eat better than the poor... especially if they can afford organic/wild meat and fish, with more trace elements. But that really requires a very big spend on food.

The only way it can be done on a middle income is really stringent portion control - perfectly possible, and I did it once for my ex who had ulcerative colitis and needed almost constant diet monitoring - and we were on benefits then... but it was a whole day's work.

I think it's a fascinating issue and it is quite a big one. Should people individually do something that damages them (such as sending their child to the local sink school)but which might benefit others or do what is best for their own family? Most of us probably go for the latter.

So the next question is can we as a family afford to ditch grains/dairy and still survive. Why is that so expensive? I never understand this at all. I only drink water which costs nothing. So these people say a single person on £50 or £60 benefit a week can't they eat like I do? I eat lots of tins of sardines, eggs (value eggs as I am castigated elsewhere on mumsnet, not the free range con) and they are very cheap, they really are even from Tesco. Kale, spinach etc is not that expensive and lots of people who are lucky enough to have a garden are able to grow their veg. I suppose what I am saying is there are degrees of this and that you probably get 90% of the benefits from ditching junk food/sugar and even supposed good carb and a small extra bit might come from water taken directly from a natural spring, proper free range eggs etc but you are virtually all the way there if you do not bother with the latter issue.

I think such things would only work if everyone did them, actually. Possibly if there were no alternatives... but I wouldn't be in favour of this, anyway.

Why is it expensive to eat lean meat and fish/eggs? Why do people eat junk instead? Separate questions, I think.

As I said, I once had to manage a very low-grain and protein-rich diet on benefits, and on Australian benefits which were in those days MUCH LOWER than UK benefits in that you had to get housing costs and utility bills from them. It can be done, but you have to be willing to sacrifice almost all pleasure in eating and also - frankly - even meeting daily calorie needs. Look on eating as a kind of medicine. We did this for quite a while, and I don't think it was especially healthy; we got every cold going and I had repeated bouts of cystitis. I think we were probably short of trace elements.

His colitis got better, though. Yes, all tinned fish and cheap eggs, mostly boiled because that is a. cheap because it requires no fat etc b. doable without many cooking resources. We never ate junk because we couldn't afford it. We did eat an orange each every day, or a tomato. You can do this, but it has to feel like life or death, because honestly most people can't stick it. His body punished him pretty savagely if he cheated, which made it simple. He was 20 and didn't want to die... You'd like him, Xenia. He's a multimillionaire (well, you'd like that part), with only a few convictions for fraud and insider dealing and two of the most spoilt kids I've ever met.

In other words, you have to be really strong-willed, and most people aren't. As I dare say you have noticed . But you probably have lots of other pleasures in your life, intellectual or physical. Most very poor people look forward to that takeaway, that pint or pack of fags or biscuit or scratch-it as their ONLY pleasure. They don't have much hope that willpower will change anything. And in most cases, it won't.

I think that once you get out of a habit (or a child never gets into it) then you actively find foods like chicken and spinach nicer than crispy creme donuts but it does take a while for your tastes to change. Then the pleasure becomes your chicken dinner and you wouldn't eat a pack of chocolate disgestives unless someone were forcing them down your face.

Dairy is not a vital part of a diet.
Soy milk and other milk substitutes are fortified with calcium and other vitamins.
Considering the number of people on this planet it is pretty inefficient /unsustainable to eat animals/animal products, far more efficient to use that land to raise crops to feed humans directly.

A lot of Xenias stats are from that Diet Trap book, author was on MN recently. All his stuff is well referenced. I also read another book with completely different conclusions, also well referenced.

Those robotic milkers look ace. They were on countryfile and the cows choose to go in to be milked (there was food outside too). Of course they do, any breastfeeding mum could understand that. They even had a timer system to stop the cows going in to often. Cows were still out on grass, they just wandered in to get milked when they felt uncomfortable.

People like traditional "England" with its wee green fields with cows in. It is inefficient, but pretty and an integral part of your culture.

Itsall - yes, but there are problems with soy, too. Fermented soy is an ancient human food, but food like soy 'milk' is very recent.

Xenia, agree entirely about habit and childhood - I got flamed once for saying my kids never eat fast food, ever, and they still don't and haven't at 17 and 12 - and we never ever have bought baked goods in the house, even - but choc digestives, which I actively loathe - are calorie for calorie MUCH cheaper than a chicken dinner. Therein lies the problem. So milk prices are actually linked to a poor diet in this way.

I don't really like or need dairy or soy. I think most people can adapt their diet to change it after a while. I amn ot sure if I have read the Diet Trap but all the paleo/primal websites and those about diet for health (Dr Wahls and MS and Dr de Maisons and depression and eating disorders) all seem to be coming to pretty much the same conclusion - eat unprocessed food as we used to eat it. That is the message I would want to get over. If you eat some dairy or you want some carb fine but make the basics food in its natural state and we would reverse the world obesity and health epidemics.

ItsAllGoingToBeFine

Considering the number of people on this planet it is pretty inefficient /unsustainable to eat animals/animal products, far more efficient to use that land to raise crops to feed humans directly.

I see this claim consistently, and it's made by city-dwelling vegans who have absolutely no idea about agriculture. But if you want to grow wheat on the Welsh hills, then be my guest. Apparently the foolish farmers who rear sheep on them don't realise the greater efficiency that can be obtained.

flatpack, rotfl. Good point. Wheat is only borderline hardy in the UK - see all those straight lines that end in a U-turn through it? That's the pesticide and fungicide and herbicide truck - it goes round about once every 3 weeks.

Actually the really disastrous wheat is the imported stuff from Canada with its very heavy gluten load. Virtually all bread contains it. In England, even so-called heritage long-straw wheat dates from the late 1960s. So wheat bread is not tried and tested... also think about other grains, of which the best are probably oats, rye and barley. Make your own wild yeast, too.

Ask your vegans how they get Vitamin B12, flatpack.

I get my B12 from various supplements/supplemented foods sieglinde it's really not hard.

How about a compromise flatpack meat should only be raised on land that is unsuitable for any type of plant crop?

but there is a lot of inefficiency in growing grain, in order to feed it to animals which we subsequentyly eat.

ItsAllGoingToBeFine

How about a compromise flatpack meat should only be raised on land that is unsuitable for any type of plant crop?

How is that a compromise? Instead of growing crops everywhere you can't, you're proposing to grow crops everywhere you can. You're still proposing a command-economy agricultural solution, a system that as well know worked marvellously in the Ukraine in the 1930s and in China in the 1950s. Since when did someone who's only ever got their boots muddy in a park have a valid opinion on crop growing and animal husbandry?

Here's an alternative compromise. How about you and all the other city-dwelling vegans who've never got closer to nature than your local Waitrose stop trying to tell us normal human beings what to eat? We don't want your lifestyle, we don't like your lifestyle, and if that's how you want to live then fine, just stop trying to foist it on to the rest of us.

PigletJohn

but there is a lot of inefficiency in growing grain, in order to feed it to animals which we subsequentyly eat.

Cows in the UK aren't reared on grain. This point has been made several times in this thread.

I am not convinced supplements are that great a way to get what you need. Recent research on vit D seems to show supplements of it do not really work as we need them and you are better off having 20 minutes in the sun without sunscreen etc (in other words how we used to live for 2 million years).

But the sustainability /efficiency thing isn't just about the UK, it's a whole world thing.

As for rearing animals on plant crops:

chicken feed: www.millbryhill.co.uk/small-holder-533/poultry-products-654/poultry-feed-664/farmgate-layers-pellets-3211.htm

I was unable to find any information on what is contained in cattle feed I wonder why but lets assume cattle eat grass, if grass can grow other plants can grow and it is more sustainable to eat those plants than it is to eat the cow that ate the plants.