Letters To An
Overseas Friend.

TV is my window to the actual world. Radio is my slightly more opaque window to the actual world. The Internets? I don’t know.

There’s been a story making its rounds on the local news outlets concerning the mistreatment of dairy cows by the hands of some temporary/under-experienced/evil farm hands at a particular farm close to here. That’s the extent of the detail that my attention has allowed me to capture and retain. I suppose there’s some food safety angle in there that should concern me, but other than that, it’s mostly noise to me, I am afraid. But I do hope these cows find happiness.

A day or two later, there was a spin off story which caught my ear but not enough of my ear due to me being in the middle of something that required my focus at the time. I tried to pay attention each time I was lucky enough to encounter it on the radio (oddly enough, hourly), but no, other things… I suppose I could easily find it on the CBC website, but no need. I got what I needed and knowing the story more exactly might only disappoint at this point. So I’m going to ruminate on the projected shadow of this story. And it is:

It looks like the milk collected at this particular farm is designated for destruction. Something about abused cows give abused milk (which sounds unpalatable) or at the very least selling this milk now feels icky. Whatever the reason, the destruction of this milk is government policy. OK. Protect us. Ah, but the milk producing community protests. According to one member from the milk production group* sampled for a sound bite, the milk has been tested and deemed safe for sale and consumption. He claimed that destroying the milk would be a waste of good food. Now I care a bit more. This could be the offspring-of-Koreans-of-a-certain-generation thing going on, but throwing out perfectly good food makes me anxious. I’ve finished many questionable meals due to this anxiety. I ate that lamb leg from the depth of my freezer. I compared it to the freezer fossil record of its surroundings (for real) and dated it to over a year old. After some serious butchering, I had enough lamb salvage for a very edible stew. So I’m down with the farmer. But what do I know? I’m sure there are many good reasons for destroying this milk.

My main interest in this story, though, is the passion with which farmer advocated for the salvation of the milk. Why does he care so much? It doesn’t affect him, does it? No one likes to waste food any more than he does, but this milk has a taint, maybe not a physical taint, but a taint nonetheless. So here’s what I got: farmer has a relationship with milk that is unknowable to me and probably most non-dairy farmers.** This relationship, while not necessarily sacred, is closer to holy than I can comprehend. It’s about more than wasting a thing. It’s about wasting an essential thing. A good thing.

If I ever went to the clinic to give blood, and this blood was screened and well handled but for some reason was to be (in my opinion) arbitrarily destroyed, perhaps I’d be at least mildly (to heavily) ticked? What of other bodily fluids? Where I see and sense cows milk, what does farmer see and sense?

Just signifier? Milk mythology?




*He may or may not represent the group in any official capacity. I couldn’t glean that from the bits I remember so I’ll just say I don’t know if he does
**I once knew a dairy farming family of five that threw down a gallon jug a day. It might have been two.

Things I heard on the radio today.

In the aftermath of a fatal non-recall debacle, the CEO of General Motors robotically reading to us about her passionate life-long commitment to communication. CEO’s in the know know: do not speak from the heart to a hostile audience.

Stephen Harper couldn’t say Vladimir Putin’s* name with any kind of smoothness. He innocuously starts with poo-TEEN (which sounded correct to me) then catches himself and fake-corrects himself by saying poo-TEEN again. After fumbling about for a second or two, he quickly settles down and finally goes with poo-TIN with the inflection going up at the end to turn the name into a question.** He then carries on with the rest of his spiel, cool as a cucumber. A little jarring to listen to a world leader not be able to smoothly say the name of a another world leader but certainly mis-pronunciations are no big deal. To my ear, he basically, at least initially, said the name of the ruler of Russia with the Anglophone pronunciation of a Quebecois dish. Nothing wrong with that. Happens all the time.

I think it might have just been a faulty switch on the PM-bot. Someone left him in Show Quebec Love Mode. Luckily, he was only set to poutine, and he never got around to “GO HABS!” while discussing the Crimea. Not that making a positive reference to the Hockeys is ever a bad idea in these parts, but the Canadiens are now out of the playoffs. A lack of hockey tournament enumeration, I am sure, would have been picked out by some as irrefutable evidence for the alien evil that is Stephen Harper. But as far as poutine goes, right reference, Mr. PM, just the wrong place. Not that any of this matters to his governing abilities or even to his reputation. Either you believe he is the guy who single handedly saved us from the Great Recession, or he had a hand in its creation. There’s no middle.

All the while, I am a person who often forgets where he is and strings together the words, “selection bias” without prejudice. It’s hard to tell if the subsequent look I get is, “that’s not even English” or “You think you’re better than me?”


* I understand when speaking of name pronunciations, I might be exposing my ignorance but… I believe Putin is pronounced POO-teen. If so, I’d say to pronounce it poo-TEEN is closer to the actual than is poo-TIN.

** Since Vladimir Putin is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, it seems perfectly logical to me to pronounce his name as a question since riddles are questions.