Letters from our listeners
TEXT OF LETTERS SEGMENT
Kai Ryssdal: Nothing like a story about something as wholesome as milk to get those cards and letters coming. We ran a piece about raw milk last week in which there was this piece of tape:
Michael Payne: Would you have your child go ahead and suckle on a cow teat that had just been rolling around in the pasture? Common sense says no.
Kariamu Osei from Marina Del Rey, California, thought that was kind of alarmist.
Kariamu Osei: I don’t like milk of any type — not pasteurized, not raw, not made from soy or rice — but I’ve had the freedom to try them all and all adults should have that option. Instead of policing my milk, I’d rather the FDA spend its time and my tax dollars helping to decentralize our food production systems.
Some of you took issue with another dinner table discussion on the program, this one about food. Commentator Tyler Cowen pointed out that rising food prices overall could make higher priced organic groceries a little easier to swallow.
Alyssa Burgin from San Antonio, Texas, said not in her house:
Alyssa Burgin: Certainly when it’s justified, I’ve bought so-called luxury food items as well, but in a time when we’re all trying to pinch pennies in order to save for the basics, I certainly can’t see buying luxury goods that didn’t make a lot of sense to me.
To wash all that down, a comment or two about an interview I did with Elizabeth Royte about her new book on bottled water. “Bottlemania,” it’s called.
Antonin Guttman and many others of you wrote to say I forgot to ask about one of the biggest issues all those plastic bottles bring:
Antonin Guttman: You should have said something about its environmental impact because it’s so obvious that there’s all this manufacturing and distribution and so forth all for almost nothing, just for the fad.
I did ask. We just didn’t have time to squeeze that last drop in the interview that ran. Here’s what Elizabeth Royte had to say:
Elizabeth Royte: We recycle very few of our water bottles mostly because we consume the water on the go — when we’re in cars or going to work or school or out on trails or whatever — and there isn’t always a blue bin around for recycling. So only about 14 percent of water bottles makes it back into recycling systems which adds up to about 30 billion water bottles a year going into landfills and incinerators.
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