Well it has been a long and talkative day for us raw milk lovers here in BC so I will try to just do a quick summary of the speakers and some of my favorite quotes from each of them for the folks who were unable to attend the Fresh Milk Food Politics conference today. I have uploaded a bunch of photos from the conference to flickr here. The lighting was a bit dim so some of them didn’t come out that well, but please feel free to use the images as you would like.

Jackie Ingram our MC got us right down to business, reminding us that Canada is the only G-8 country that cannot figure out how to incorporate certified raw milk dairies (although they used to) and has simply banned it.

Alice Jongerden started off the day with a personal discussion of the obstacles to farming in North America, reminiscing about Maple, the cow that gave so much milk that she had to share her with her neighbor, which eventually led to more and more friends requesting to join in her cowshare. And of course I really appreciated her comment: “You can’t park a cow on your balcony.” Because we live in an apartment with a very narrow balcony which I often do fantasize about having a goat living on. From there Alice got into the statistics of the dwindling numbers of farmers in North America today and wrapped up her speach with her vision of a brighter future with micro-dairies springing up across Canada.