Dairy Products

A coalition of doctors concerned about racial bias is mounting an attack on a national dietary institution: the food pyramid, which calls for a balanced diet of dairy and meat, vegetables and breads.The Washington-based Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) argues that because most members of minority groups can't easily digest milk, the continued inclusion of dairy products as a dietary staple is wrongheaded. They will recommend that the guidelines list dairy as an option and suggest calcium-rich alternatives to milk and cheese.

A new federal government report confirms something that Harold Lenhart has known for years: There is very little correlation between the price dairy farmers get for their milk and what consumers pay for the product at the supermarket."

The soup had me and my fellow diners swooning and spooning. There were pieces of asparagus and mushroom floating in a golden liquid. The flavor was smooth yet complex. It was, I learned later, the flavor of good old-fashioned buttermilk.The buttermilk soup was the first course in a seven-course dinner held at Hampton's restaurant in Baltimore's Harbor Court Hotel. Executive Chef Holly Forbes had cooked up the feast to honor Jonathan White, the man who made the buttermilk, and the clabbered cream, and the cultured sweet butter, and all the other high-flavor, high-fat dairy products that many big dairies shy away from.

Forget bad weather, low milk prices, rising costs, health-conscious consumers or the encroaching suburbs, the biggest threat to Myron L. Wilhide's dairy farm can be found 50 miles south in Washington.With Congress trying to meet its budget-balancing goals, a wealth of entrenched programs has been put on the chopping block from Medicare and student aid to public transportation and environmental cleanup.In Republican-dominated western Carroll County, the effort to reduce spending on social welfare programs generally met with approval -- until, of course, it came time to take up the billions paid annually to the farm industry.

About 30 county residents told Navy and Anne Arundel officials last night that the U.S. Naval Academy Dairy Farm in Gambrills should be preserved intact.About 150 residents attended an informational meeting at Arundel Senior High School on the Navy's plans for the site and commented on them.The 862-acre farm, founded in 1911, supplies dairy products for midshipmen.The Navy is studying whether the farm is the best source for dairy products, and whether the farm might generate more profit to fund midshipmen's extracurricular activities if it were put to some other use, said Capt.

Washington.--The growing furor over the safety of milk from cows hyped up to super production by a bio-engineered hormone is best understood as a three-way competition in irrational antics.There are the manufacturers, led by Monsanto, which received approval to market a man-made hormone to stimulate the output of milk -- a product so chronically in overflowing surplus that it needs no stimulation. Generically known as bovine somatotropin or bovine growth hormone, Monsanto's version is sold under a more appealing name: Posilac.

IHS plans $50 million offeringIntegrated Health Systems Inc. said yesterday that it filed a plan with the Securities and Exchange Commission to sell $50 million in convertible subordinated debentures. The proceeds will be used for general corporate purposes, including acquiring new geriatric facilities and putting the medical specialty units into existing ones, according to Marc B. Levin, vice president for investor relations.The bulk of the new offering -- $35.4 million -- will be used to repay outstanding long-term debt, including $25 million borrowed from a new $50 million revolving line of credit with Citibank.

Detour dairy farmer Myron L. Wilhide says some of his neighbors and friends are smarter than he.They have given up the long hours in the barn and field, the frustrations with the weather and fluctuating milk prices that he has battled for 30 years, he adds wryly.But Mr. Wilhide, 52, intends to stay in the business and now is part of a statewide effort to keep the dairy industry alive."People want the most abundant, cheapest and safest food; we have to keep working on it," he said.Mr. Wilhide is one of 26 members of a task force appointed by state agriculture officials last spring to study the industry and recommend ways to help it survive.

Two Maryland-based dairy companies, whose future had been in question because their owner wanted out of the business, have found a buyer with expansion plans in mind.High's Dairies Inc., a Laurel company doing business as East Coast Ice Cream, and Embassy Dairy Inc., based in Waldorf, were acquired by the Protein Group, a Stamford, Conn.-based ** distributor of dairy products, the Protein Group said Tuesday.The two companies had been owned by the Morningstar Group Inc. of Dallas, a food-products company.

"Where's the Beef?"Vegetarian Cynthia Blum and others with similar diets have little interest in the answer to that question, posed afew years back on a popular commercial.For the last 14 years, the Westminster resident and her husband, Michael, have been vegetarians, a diet they consciously selected for health reasons."Becoming vegetarians started out as an experiment," recalled the 39-year-old Blum. "Right after we got married, we both had gained a lot of weight, and we just felt yucky for two people in our early 20s. We gave ourselves 30 days, and in that time we saw adifference."

By the time you read this, Bobby Prigel, the only organic dairy farmer in Baltimore County, should have a few thousand more bucks to help catch up on his legal bills. His friends and neighbors - at least the farm-friendly neighbors who think that a dairy farmer ought to be able to sell his cows' milk on his own farm - will have thrown a party to defray some of the $130,000 Mr. Prigel has had to spend to get his Long Green Valley creamery open. Other neighbors have not been so generous; they've tried to grind Mr. Prigel down and stop him from processing his milk in the big, barn-style building across the road from where his cows graze.

Suicide bomb detonates during U.S. raid in Iraq BAGHDAD: Eleven Iraqis, several women and children, were killed yesterday when a suicide bomber set off explosives during a raid by U.S. forces on a house in Mosul, the U.S. military said. A military statement said the bomb detonated as U.S. forces exchanged gunfire with suspected insurgents and stormed a building in search of a wanted man. The military said it was unclear whether those who died, all believed to have been from one family, were killed by the explosion or by gunfire.

Anyone who travels through Baltimore County's Long Green Valley on a regular basis has to stop now and then so that Bobby Prigel's cows can cross the road. Prigel is a dairy farmer who produces milk the old-fashioned way, moving his herd from pasture to pasture, on both sides of Long Green Road, letting the cows actually walk and chew grass at the same time. Prigel's fourth-generation family farm, Bellevale, is the only organic dairy farm in the county. Unfortunately, you can't buy Prigel's milk.

You know it like the Pledge of Allegiance: "Milk helps build strong teeth and bones." But does it really? Or, as nutrition researchers from Harvard and Cornell universities are radically suggesting: Have we all been duped by the dairy industry's slick, celebrity-driven "Got milk?" advertising campaign? Milk, the sacred cow of the American diet, is under attack and not just by animal-rights activists. Though federal dietary guidelines and most mainstream nutrition experts recommend that people age 9 and older drink three glasses of milk a day, researchers are examining the role of dairy in everything from rising osteoporosis rates, Type 1 diabetes and heart disease to breast, prostate and ovarian cancer.

Maryland farmers struggling to make a living cheered when Congress narrowly approved a free trade agreement with Central America late Wednesday. Owners of the Domino Sugar refinery near Baltimore's Inner Harbor jeered. The groups mounted intense lobbying campaigns on Capitol Hill in recent weeks and watched late Wednesday night as Republican leaders in the House of Representatives held open the vote for nearly an hour longer than planned to get more backers. President Bush had personally made the rounds to appeal to lawmakers on the accord his administration negotiated.

Milk: Does it do the body good? The answer, according to a paper published in this month's Pediatrics journal, is no - at least if you are talking about bone growth in children. Reviewing 58 published studies on the relationship between calcium intake and bone health, researchers associated with the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine - an animal rights group based in Washington, D.C. - asked whether there was any scientific evidence to justify federal recommendations on calcium intake and whether dairy products are the best sources of calcium for kids.

Jeff Semmont is nostalgic for a time he has never experienced. The 32-year-old from Ellicott City thinks fondly of times when residents could leave their homes and cars unlocked, and daydreams about a drive-in movie theater and restaurant where teens could hang out. So it is no wonder that when Semmont sold his dry-cleaning delivery business, he settled into a job that harks backs to days gone by. Dressed in a starched white uniform, driving a refrigerated...

Jeff Semmont is nostalgic for a time he has never experienced. The 32-year-old from Ellicott City thinks fondly of times when residents could leave their homes and cars unlocked, and daydreams about a drive-in movie theater and restaurant where teens can hang out. So it is no wonder that when Semmont sold his dry-cleaning delivery business, he settled into a job that harks back to days gone by. Dressed in a starched white uniform, driving a refrigerated truck...

I RAN INTO my cousin, Katie O'Hare, the granddaughter of my great-Aunt Cora, at the corner of 32nd and Barclay streets bright and early one Saturday not long ago. She was buying her half-gallon of South Mountain Creamery milk imported to Baltimore from Middletown in Frederick County. We then launched into a discussion of our family's mania for cream-rich dairy products - and the lengths we would go to satisfy our tastes for butterfat. Katie recalled the early morning hours with her father, my cousin Billy-O, drinking their cream and munching on a fresh-baked cruller.

The four-year struggle by Maryland farmers to become part of a regional dairy compact is over, but state dairymen are not complaining. The Senate included an alternative to dairy compacts in the version of the new national farm bill it passed Wednesday. The proposal would make $500 million in subsidies available to dairy farmers in 12 Northern states, including Maryland, when the farm price of Class 1 (drinking) milk drops below $16.94 per hundredweight. "It looks good, it has my hopes up," said Carroll County dairy farmer Myron Wilhide.