(This is a LONG page-- keep scrolling down for breast feeding information, recommended dairy substitutes and great recipes! At the VERY BOTTOM of this page you can read about my visit to a small local "Humane" dairy farm.)
DAIRY IS UNNECCESSARY! Great recipes, products, cookbooks and inspiring information to help you go dairy free!
The experience of being a mother and my passion for motherhood, make it easy for me to never consume milk or cheese. Forcibly separating a mother from her children or not letting her decide when or if to nurse her own babies is a horrific injustice. Yet, that is what happens to millions of cow mothers over and over, when humans choose to steal the milk of mother cows for the frivolous reason that, "It tastes good."
This Cashew Cheese spread is a great substitute for cream cheese, and tastes amazing using a complex of flavors from fermentation of cashews from rejuvelac, miso, and mirin it's not hard to make, but due to the fermentation takes a few weeks from start to finish-- but it's so worth it!
Free From Harm has GREAT recipes and links -- click on the button below to go right to this dairy-free cornucopia.
Jo Stepaniak's, Uncheese Cookbook and her Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook revolutionized my vegan kitchen. Simple and easy recipes that simulate the taste, and mouth-feel of cheese, and cheese-based recipes. I love these books!
SCIENCE SHOWS HOW TO REDUCE BREAST MILK CONTAMINANTSIf you picked up an information sheet from when I was tabling, and would like to learn more about how avoiding meat, dairy, eggs and fish can reduce your exposure to PCB's Dioxin, DDT, mercury and other heavy metals, which can be passed through breast milk, here are scientific references that support this. The button below will take you to a blog post that I wrote compiling some of the scientific studies and that page will also link you directly to the abstracts of the studies I cited as well.
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This Sunny Cheese Sauce is a super quick and easy cheesy sauce made from potatoes and carrots, nutritional yeast and sunflower seeds, and is immediately ready for use. Great over pasta, or broccoli, or mixed with salsa for a wonderful, "Hot Cheeze Dip"
Try this super simple recipe for making a tofu-based crock cheese -- reminiscent of the "cheddary spreads sold in ceramic crocks.
Simple Vegan Blog has a terrific recipe to make your own simple low fat mozzarella.
<---Fabulous Recipe Books!--->
Make Your Own Plant Milks!Scientific Studies
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This Smokey Gooda is a fantastic hard cheeze that can be sliced and served with crackers. The base is nut milk , with Vegemite or Marmite, nutritional yeast and liquid smoke for flavoring. Agar and corn starch make it firm. It needs to set up a few hours before it's ready to eat.
Minimalist Baker has a recipe for a gluten-free vegan Mac and cheese recipe.
Miyoko Shinner, has taken vegan cheesemaking to a whole new level by applying traditional cheese making techniques that use bacterial cultures to nut based milks. The results are extraordinary! You can buy her finished cheeses from Miyoko's kitchen, or get this book, Artisan Vegan Cheese and do it yourself.
MOTHERS SHARE THEIR BREASTFEEDING JOURNEYThere are many health benefits to avoiding all dairy products while pregnant, breastfeeding, and for the rest of one's life including reduced risk of developing both types of diabetes, reduced rates of many cancers, less allergies, asthma and autoimmune disease -- in addition to reducing the level of contaminants in breast milk. But setting health aside, there are powerful reasons of compassion and justice too. Here ten mothers share their personal stories of making this connection and how that influenced their breast feeding journey
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Do you know about these nutrients that pregnant and nursing mothers especially need to make sure that they are getting optimal amounts of ?
Viamin D is often called the sunshine vitamin -- because we can make it from sun exposure. Cow's milk is only a source of this vitamin because it gets added during processing. Because of pollution, sunscreen, washing too soon after getting sun, and many other factors of modern life, few of us make optimal amounts of vitamin D and we need to make sure our babies are getting enough! Many people benefit from taking oral vitamin D. Look for VEGAN D3 which is well absorbed and less likely to be contaminated with animal diseases. (other D3 comes from sheep and they can carry scrapie which is like mad cow disease)
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Many things can interfere with our ability to extract or absorb B-12 from the foods we eat, AND from SWALLOWED supplements. A SUBLINGUAL B-12 taken under the tongue bypasses all these problems. Although we sometimes can store B-12 for years, stored B-12 is not thought to be available for babies via the placenta or breast milk, so mothers must have a regular reliable source of B-12 for their baby to get it. Lack of B-12 can cause serious irreversible neurological damage at any age, can stunt the growth of children and can contribute to heart disease and dementia. So make sure you get regular B-12.
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DHA and EPA are two long chain fatty acids critical for development of the brain, eyes and nervous system. Our bodies can make these from the omega 3 fats in greens and in seeds from flax, chia, walnut, and hemp, however many of us do not make this conversion well. Some algae are rich in DHA (and thus fish that eat the algae concentrate DHA -- that's why is a rich source. But each level up the food chain you also concentrate dioxin, DDT, mercury etc which are in ocean water. Not all contaminants are removed by distillation -- especially PCB's. So omit the middlefish and get DHA from algae! I prefer Ovega brand --because it also has EPA that is NON-GMO.
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Folate is a B -vitamin abundant in leafy greens (aka "folliage" which this vitamin is named for -- like Bok Choy!) Folate prevents neural tube defects during pregnancy, but naturally occurring folate (found it plants) is not stable when it is isolated for use in supplements or to enrich foods, so a synthetic form of it, called folic acid is added to processed foods and is what is used in most multivitamins. But now studies show that the two are not equivalent -- women who took folic acid supplements in pregnancy later were found to have higher rates of breast cancer and some other cancers. So get your folate from leafy greens!
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Here are just a few examples of the many vegan alternatives now available for just about every sort of dairy product people are used to consuming, and I have found most grocery stores to be VERY interested in carrying new vegan products when I ask them to. Just look at what is available:
My Visit to a Small Local Dairy Farm -- The Iwig Dairy
As part of the Kaw Valley Farm Tour, I visited the Iwig Dairy and was part of a group given a formal guided tour of their operation. We were shown the bottle washer, the milk separator, pasteurizer, homogenizer, freezer and ice cream maker. But when we came to the milking barn, we were told it was not really set up for people to go inside. So I asked if I might just look in the window at it and they said the milking part was far in another area and I wouldn’t be able to see anything. In light of the fact that they admitted doing gruesome bodily mutilations to unanesthetized cows, and how they seemed oblivious to the profound psychological distress they routinely subjected mother cows and their babies to, not allowing us to actually enter the milking barn (THE part of a dairy operation that the public most associates with where their milk comes from) it left my imagination to conjure up barbaric and cruel possibilities as the reason we were not allowed in to see it (because what they did unabashedly share – suggested they were quite desensitized to things that most people would consider egregiously violent, unjust and traumatic for animals -- as long as they had not grown up on such a farm and been taught that these things were in fact completely ok to do to animals -- and of course absolutely necessary if one was to be profitable.)
The Iwig farmers told us that all bovines have horns and that these must be removed for safety reasons. Since it is well established that cow horns are well innervated and removing them is a deeply painful process, I asked if they anesthetized their cows before subjecting them to this. They did not, but did point out that, when possible, they preferred to do so right at birth because it was less traumatic. “How so?” I querried, and they compared it to human circumcision – much less painful if done at birth – but then admitted, that they also frequently do it at a much later time as well – and pointed to some cows that got it done around 9 months, but again emphasized it was not that big of a deal. (Leaving me to think that the only ones that doing it at birth is “less painful for” are the humans carrying out this barbaric procedure.)
When I asked why the babies must be removed from the mothers at only one day old – I was told it was driven by economics – the mothers simply wouldn’t produce as much milk without being hooked up to a milk machine early on, although they never explained why this couldn’t be done AFTER allowing the babies to suckle several times each day – but I suspect that would require more time/inconvenience than they were willing to invest – after all – legally (and psychologically to the farmers) cows are only property/business assets, not living beings with feelings, who suffer excruciatingly in the process of humans exploiting them, for completely unnecessary reasons. They had justifications for what they did, and savvily used my questions as a segue to point out that cows are each very individual – and some are completely uninterested in being mothers at all and actually abandon their babies – thus they reasoned, there is nothing wrong with stealing day old nursing babies from their mothers. (Hmmm....could the trauma of having been removed from their own mothers at young ages and never having experienced "mother's love" themselves have anything to do with this?) I silently gave thanks for the fact, that I was born into a time/place/member-of-a-species where more powerful entities didn’t use the fact that some mothers of my species abandon their babies as justification for not allowing me to nurse and mother my own.
(This description of my visit to the Iwig Dairy is excerpted from my blog post, about the Kaw Valley Farm Tour: "The Happy Meat and Dairy of Kaw Valley.)
The Iwig farmers told us that all bovines have horns and that these must be removed for safety reasons. Since it is well established that cow horns are well innervated and removing them is a deeply painful process, I asked if they anesthetized their cows before subjecting them to this. They did not, but did point out that, when possible, they preferred to do so right at birth because it was less traumatic. “How so?” I querried, and they compared it to human circumcision – much less painful if done at birth – but then admitted, that they also frequently do it at a much later time as well – and pointed to some cows that got it done around 9 months, but again emphasized it was not that big of a deal. (Leaving me to think that the only ones that doing it at birth is “less painful for” are the humans carrying out this barbaric procedure.)
When I asked why the babies must be removed from the mothers at only one day old – I was told it was driven by economics – the mothers simply wouldn’t produce as much milk without being hooked up to a milk machine early on, although they never explained why this couldn’t be done AFTER allowing the babies to suckle several times each day – but I suspect that would require more time/inconvenience than they were willing to invest – after all – legally (and psychologically to the farmers) cows are only property/business assets, not living beings with feelings, who suffer excruciatingly in the process of humans exploiting them, for completely unnecessary reasons. They had justifications for what they did, and savvily used my questions as a segue to point out that cows are each very individual – and some are completely uninterested in being mothers at all and actually abandon their babies – thus they reasoned, there is nothing wrong with stealing day old nursing babies from their mothers. (Hmmm....could the trauma of having been removed from their own mothers at young ages and never having experienced "mother's love" themselves have anything to do with this?) I silently gave thanks for the fact, that I was born into a time/place/member-of-a-species where more powerful entities didn’t use the fact that some mothers of my species abandon their babies as justification for not allowing me to nurse and mother my own.
(This description of my visit to the Iwig Dairy is excerpted from my blog post, about the Kaw Valley Farm Tour: "The Happy Meat and Dairy of Kaw Valley.)
