Saturday, May 29, 2010

Milk again, and sea farms

7:47 AM 5/29/10

I looked at milk again today, in the grocery store this time. It's possible to get milk without vitamins A and D if you buy whipping cream. But I want to avoid carageenan (it's harmless, but I don't want it anyway) or any other additives. I found one organic brand that said it only contained milk and cream (it was some kind of whipping cream) and nothing else.

Milk (not cream) always has the vitamins added, including organic milk. To me, if it has synthetic vitamins added to it, it doesn't qualify as 'organic.' I'm pretty sure that it's required by law that they add synthetic vitamins to milk, whether we want them or not.

Why do I care about this? Because I didn't want to stop drinking milk. I had to, because it was making me sick. It was actually Meyer Dairy milk that made me sick. It was the best-tasting, freshest milk I'd ever had. The grocery store milk was always sour on the day I bought it, because of bad handling, leaving it sitting out at room temperature, etc. Meyer Dairy milk wasn't sour. However, it made me sicker than any other milk had ever made me. I think maybe I got sick because they reuse the glass bottles. Maybe they only rinse and sanitize the bottles, when actually, the bottles would have to be scrubbed out with something abrasive that actually touches the bottle instead of just rinsing. I don't know. The Meyer Dairy milk tasted great though, which is why I regret having to stop drinking milk. So that's one reason why I want to troubleshoot all the things that could be wrong with milk. I'd like to be able to drink it again.

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The other thought 'we' were thinking tonight was that I was fantasizing about moving to the seashore and living there, and then they suggested that I should live on a floating sea farm. The sea farm would float just below the surface and create lots of shallow areas to grow shellfish and other small fish along with kelp and seaweed. It would be a complex structure with lots of small spaces for things to grow on, up near the top, and down deeper in the water. People could live there and eat their own farmed seafood and not have to worry about buying land. The entire ocean could be farmed with these floating structures.

So I wondered why nobody was building floating sea farms, and I thought there had to be a reason. The only reason I can think of is wind waves. When the wind blows across hundreds of miles of ocean, it can make wind waves that are dozens of feet high. These huge waves knock over boats and I imagine they would tear apart the floating sea farm, unless it was designed to cope with extreme wind waves or storm waves.

People probably are actually trying to build things like that. I just want one that's stable enough for people to live on permanently, like it's their own home, and so they won't have to buy land. There is so much room in the oceans that it would be very helpful if we could start populating them.

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