Mmmmm. Milk. When I think of milk, I think of white mustaches and dunked cookies, of the comfort of hot chocolate and the “Got Milk?” ad campaign that was everywhere when I was growing up. I remember replacing cow milk with soy milk when I decide to eat vegetarian, and, of course, when I continued on into veganism. Then one day my face swelled up in big red blotches, and bam just like that I was allergic to soy and out my main protein source. I started dreaming about cheese, and soon returned to vegetarian shores. Re-enter milk, stage left.

I hadn’t become vegetarian (or vegan) because I found the consumption of animal products to be inherently wrong, but because I found the animal product foods industry to be inherently wrong. Workers are treated poorly and the animals even more so. We’ve all seen the PETA pictures of the factory farms. It’s not a pretty sight, and all the “supermarket pastoral” pictures of cows grazing in bright green fields under an open sky on the supermarket milk packages couldn’t make me forget it. So when I started drinking milk again, I knew I wanted it to be from a small local farm, and I knew I wanted it to be raw, that is to say, unpasteurized, unprocessed, unmolested.

My reasoning had to do with what I had been reading about whole foods, particularly raw milk. I read stories about people whose doctors had pronounced them lactose intolerant who could drink raw milk with no problem. I read stories and studies about the way children grew faster when drinking it and about it curing everything from asthma to digestive disorders. And all this because during pasteurization the good bacteria are killed along with the bad and during homogenization many of the milk’s nutrients are destroyed. As a French-born cheese shop owner in Berlin told one journalist, eating pasteurized cheese “…is like being at a funeral. The bacteria are dead, the cheese is dead, it can’t develop any further. It only tastes like water and fat.”

Unfortunately, raw milk is something that government food regulators are fond of banning. Here in Germany, it is only technically illegal—that is, it’s illegal to sell for consumption the way supermarket milk is, but can be sold if labeled otherwise (Vorzugsmilch or Ab-Hof-Abgabe). Which means that here in Germany I can read the government warnings, but am ultimately left free to make my own decision. In the United States the FDA conducts undercover sting operations on Amish farmers who presume to sell unpasteurized milk products to people who have consciously decided it’s raw dairy or nothing, people who are willing to sneak around the law to get it, people who are willing to fight for their right to whole foods. A friend of mine had her buyer’s club shut down by just such an operation in May. (You can read about it here.)

The FDA is convinced that raw milk is bad for you, but, unfortunately, they have done an incredibly poor job proving it: their studies are biased, their statistics faulty, and many of the illnesses that they have linked with raw milk consumption involved no tests on any of the raw milk in question (raw milk advocates have put together a report that refutes the FDA’s evidence against raw milk point for point, and you can download it by clicking here). Even according to their own statistics there are more food-related illnesses caused by deli meats and pasteurized milk than there are by raw milk. The thing is that there is a risk involved in any kind of food, and you can get sick from pasteurized dairy just as you can from unpasteurized dairy.

The beauty of the raw milk most food enthusiasts are drinking, that I am drinking—and when I say “raw milk” I mean unpasteurized, unprocessed milk from grass-fed cows, not unpasteurized mass-produced grain-fed industry cow milk—is knowing exactly where your milk came from and who farmed it. The farmers’ names and address are printed right on the label, and often it is one of those farmers who, every Saturday, hands me fresh bottles of milk and wraps my cheese in white paper before telling me to have a great weekend. Can you say that about any mass-produced milk? Even the crunchy organic stuff? I trust people I know more than I trust a faceless, nameless factory farm, more than I trust the FDA and their statistics. For more information about raw milk, click here.

And what about you? Do you drink raw milk?

This post was a part of Kelly the Kitchen Kop’s Real Food Wednesdays.

It never would have occurred to me to put flowers in pancakes, until I saw one of my Platz-mates do it and became enamoured. Now when the elder trees begin to bloom—and we have a dearth of them on the property—it’s one of my favorite things to do with them. Besides failing at making syrup out of them that is. (Hopefully I’ll be trying that again this year, and this year no one will take the brew out of the fridge and leave it to grow a mold sweater in the sun while I am away. Grrrz.)

The process is simple: make some pancake batter like you usually do (which for me consists of equal parts flour and raw milk, and a pinch of baking powder and salt), slap it in the pan like you usually would, and then break off some blossoms from the thicker bits of green branch and stick them in the dough. You’ll want to let the pancake cook through as much as possible before flipping it as excessive flower-on-pan action can lead to excessively blackened flowers.

Afterward they’ll look like this, you’ll feel like a god damn gourmet, and your pancakes will have the light, sweet taste of elderberry blossoms.

Wherein a first-time scavenger gets mountain of snacks right from the store:

“I’ve never officially dumpster dived. Other then picking stuff up off the sidewalk. Anyway, after reading articles about dumpster diving and seeing someone in the act a few weeks ago, I thought ‘why not? maybe I should try it!’. Well, I hadn’t gotten around to it. But today I attended a going-out-of-business sale at a local small business, I noticed a trash can that was full to the brim of food, and simply asked the employees if I could take it all. It made their job easier and they gladly accepted.

“The food is mostly organic/whole foods type ‘fancy’ stuff. I ended up with maybe 100 dollars worth of cookies, crackers, candy, bag after bag of pretzels, several jars of salsa (SCORE!), and an entire case of berry preserves. It may not have been an ‘official dumpster dive’ but I kept some food out of the landfill, and I’ll be able to share a bunch of it with friends and family in the coming weeks, and that’s good enough for me.”

Keep your eyes open, don’t be too shy to ask, and you never know what you’ll end up with.

In my other life (the one where I work behind a desk in an enormous pink-and-white building veined with gray-office-lined hallways) this past month, I needed to write a few articles about parenting in Germany, and, accordingly, I did a lot of reading on the subject. Expat parents. Custody law. Statistics. Averages. Birth stories. Studies. Interviews. At the end of it all I had four articles and one conclusion: if you’re going to spawn, Germany is an incredibly pleasant place to do so.

While some countries still allow employers to not only dismiss pregnant women, but to dismiss them on grounds of being pregnant (coughtheUSAcoughcough), Germany has a lovely law called the Mutterschutzgesetz (Maternity Protection Act). Women cannot be fired while they are pregnant. They do not have to work during the six weeks leading up to their due date (unless they want to), and they are not allowed to return to work until at least eight weeks post-hatch (though women can take up to three years leave)—and all of this is paid. And employers must provide appropriate breaks and break rooms and flexibility and and and. Basically, it helps lessen discrimination against mothers and mothers-to-be at work. (Father’s could still use a bit more support in this department however.)

The German government will also pay you a stipend for every kid you have. Monthly. Until the kid turns 21 (or 25, depending on student status). That’s a lot of fucking money. For kid numbers one and two you’ll receive 184 euro per month per child, and for every subsequent child you’ll receive an additional 215 euro/month. And new parents can take up to three years maternity or paternity leave and expect to find their jobs waiting for them when they return. And you can expect to be paid a percentage of your salary during the first year.

So why does the German government deem it prudent to throw enormous sacks of money into the wallets of parents? Historically the Kindergeld program (aka those payments I mentioned) was created by a bunch of racist fools interested in helping more “Aryan” families breed. But the program exists today because the population is shrinking, and that means the taxpayer base is shrinking, and that means that soon there will be more retired folks than there are young people paying into the health insurance and pension plans that support them.

Herein lies one of the (environmentally) fatal flaws of this sort of government: overpopulation is making our species even more unsustainable than its cultural habits already were, the planet (and we) are the worse for it, and yet, because governments require citizens (and therefore children) to function, they are offering bribes to anyone willing to breed in hopes of continuing with business as usual. And yet it seems that Germany has accidentally stumbled upon a great way to deal with overpopulation/reduce population numbers—by offering a situation in which both people who choose to have children and people who choose not to have them have a thorough support network.

The question of dealing with overpopulation is an incredibly touchy one, and I for one would fight to the death with rabid wolves before I’d let the government tell me or anyone else how many children we were allowed to have. And of course Hitler-esque “solutions” are despicable, not to mention unthinkable. (And yet when you get to discussing how population numbers could be reduced, somebody in the room always makes a snarky comment about the Third Reich.) Yet a first step in reducing overpopulation has nothing to do with eliminating people who were already born, but giving people the tools they need should they choose not to give birth to any more people (or choose to only have one child instead of five, etc).

Sure, in Germany you’ll find more than adequate support for parents (more than in the United States in any case), and that’s great. But there is also plenty of support for people who don’t want to have children—access to birth control, abortion, and education—and I’d bet that has something to do with the fact that no bribe has been able to stop the birth rate here from decreasing. Give people the tools and the support they need to make a decision either way and coercion is out of the equation.

If German parenting culture interests you, here are the fruits of my very metaphorical labor this month at work. Sure, my usual writing style has been neutralized into government-compliance, but facts abound.

Parenting in Germany: An introduction

Expat parents

Mothers in Fatherland

Re-defining fatherhood

NOTE: A friend recently told me about a study that I really wanted to mention here, but couldn’t find to cite. Story was, birth rates decreased in direction relation to an increase in education levels among women. As way of offering a bit of “proof” for this hypothesis.

Well, well, well. Another dumpster diver ticketed by the police. The charge? Scavenging. According to the police officer: “Def was observed scavenging in the dumpster to the rear of Weiss Markets. Def. was removing expired food from the dumpster and attempting to steal it.” I guess those expired food items will finally get the chance to rot in the landfill with their brethren that they deserve, thanks to another diligent officer. God bless America. Cough.

For all potential Lancaster dumpster divers out there, the song of your demise goes something like this: “§ 258-31.1 Scavenging prohibited. It shall be unlawful for any person, except the owner or tenant of a property or the employee of a licensed hauler (as defined in Article IV of this chapter), to remove any garbage, refuse, rubbish or any other solid waste or recyclable materials placed for curbside collection.” (As reported on the Dive! spacebook page.)

But! The story has a happy ending after all. According to the person who notified freegan.info (on whose e-mail list I read about it this morning) in court the charge was dismissed for the lunacy it was: “When the police officer began to speak, the judge interrupted him and said that the charge didn’t apply. The ‘scavenging’ law is for those who make money on others’ recyclables. And just like that, the Judge declared him innocent. So it worked out really well.”

I wouldn’t make a habit of depending on the law, but at least in one case it was on our side.

Other stories of dumpster (out)laws:

Legality in a Dumpster

Dumpster Diver Arrested in Belgium

Dumpster Diver Arrested in England

Table diving is one of those scavengers’ tricks that divides the mice from the men, as they say. Or, as I say, the germa-phobes from the kind of survivalists who will survive the zombie apocalypse by eating bugs and roasted rats. Table diving, a term fairly common in the punk community, refers to the act of “dumpster diving” a table. That is put plainly: eating the leftovers people leave behind at restaurants before the bellperson manages to whisk them off to the trash. Though I have my doubts about eating bugs (I think my conditioning to find them hideous and disgusting may be irreversible), I’m happy to dine on the leftovers of strangers.

This week’s dumpster find is a tale of table diving from Montreal scavenger Nokizaru, whose dumpster story you might remember from a previous dumpster find of the week post. Here’s what he had to say of his table-diving exploits:

“It’s probably Friday night (but Saturday works too) and we’re all walking home through St Laurent (the street in Montreal with a ton of bars and clubs) when someone suggests ‘Let’s go table at Belle Pro!” which is of course responded to by a collective “yea I could go for some poutine!’

“But wait, Nokizaru, what is Belle Pro? What is poutine? Well I guess it’s time for some Quebec food-culture lessons: poutine is a dish that consists of french fries, gravy and cheese curds, it’s pretty delicious and probably not good for your body in the long term, and Belle Province (Belle Pro for short) is a fast food chain that sells poutine, but more importantly hosts a plethora of drunk, post-nightclub people who really like getting full before finishing all their food.

“Either way, we’ll end up walking to the Belle Pro and sitting, you know, without ordering anything at all, trying our best to not look like dirty skids. Depending on how adventurous/social/drunk some of us are we’ll either wait for people to leave without throwing out their plates or we’ll boldly ask people if they’re done and take their plates if they are. Of course there’s the ongoing silent battle with the busboy who feels it’s his job to clear tables faster than we can get to the left overs (and also gives us dirty looks) but we usually win that battle, since we’re like, professionals.

“The photo above is one of the end results of us tabling one night, maybe five of us got maybe six or seven plates of poutine before we were full and turned in for the night. ‘Twas a good night.”

And someday I hope journey to Montreal and dine on poutine until my seams burst. Because to date my own table diving efforts have been limited to pizza and beer. Which brings me to one last bit of scavenging terminology: the floater, also known as the half-empty beer that has been abandoned at the party or restaurant, just waiting for you to drink it. Waste not want not…

Have you ever table dived? Can you even imagine trying it? Or is the idea of a stranger’s leftovers too gross?