I am part of a group called Jain Vegans. It’s a forum for us to share info, ideas, seek advice and debate.
This post is about a debate around sprayed soya and diary milk/curd.
Nandita wrote a factual clear email to us all which I was very grateful for. I had no idea about the issues outlined below! 🙁
I do think that sprayed soya is better than milk or curds in most cases.
This is because the cow is higher on the food chain and so consumes a large quantity of soya to produce the milk she does. The result, cow’s milk has higher pesticide levels than the soya and no one even measures them.
Pesticides used on the feeds for the animals are concentrated in their milk and meat. For e.g. The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) researched milk for 7 years taking 50,000 samples from across India. They found 5.7 mg/kg of HCH in milk on an average. Under the food adulteration act only 0.01 mg/kg of HCH is allowed. Vegetables, grain and fruits contain on the average lower levels, yet most levels in India are above the allowances.
What’s more is that the chances that the animals get GM soya is very high and no one knows what the result of that will be.
I know there are people who say, “I only drink organic milk.†but how many of them really check which milk is used to produce the cakes, cookies and other foods or the cheese sandwich etc they eat when they eat out? Vegans do.
Today even human milk has higher than acceptable levels of pesticides because most people are eating pesticide laced foods all the time and these pesticides get concentrated I mother’s milk.
