The Milk of Human Blindness

The Times reports today (via, Tim Worstall), that faceless interfering ricebowlers at DEFRA are seriously suggesting that the milk industry shift, as they so quaintly put it "to ensure that some 90 per cent of milk on sale will not require refrigeration by 2020".

This means we will be expected to switch to that god-awful UHT. Currently 93% of our milk is fresh. We consume fresh milk despite all the inconveniences because it is infinitely better than UHT, which, to me, has one purpose, to both colour and reduce the bitterness of bad warm drinks sometimes passed off as tea or coffee. Fresh milk is better to me because it tastes good. I can drink a pint of fresh milk and sometimes get a primordial desire to do so, but I can barely tolerate 5g of UHT. However, DEFRA wish to change consumer behaviour and force us to go backwards, to accept substandard food and drink in the name of the Great Green God. No, not really, but upon the dogma of that "religion" in reducing our sin carbon footprint.

DEFRA appears to have been infested with that mind virus, the Green Religion of Unthought. This is "Global Warning" - not Global Warming, but the trend now for using the threat of some future as an excuse and cover for, basically, totalitarian, authoritarian or just plain Robber Baronetcy.

What I see, apart from the blatant social engineering, undermining, guilt, bullying, memes, insults and just plain Fascism, is a convenient way to destroy our fresh milk habit and industry. The aim, I suspect, is to turn the UK into a market for ghastly UHT from anywhere in the EU. Right now, European calcified water and fat emulsions UHT is pretty much ignored in the UK and rightly so. One reason, apart from the fact that UHT is just plain shyte, is, I suspect, tea.

The UK are tea drinkers. Unlike coffee, tea is almost always drunk with milk and that milk needs to be fresh milk unless you are a self-flagellating zealot who is happy to train your taste buds to accept mediocrity or worse in the pursuit of your punishment dietary regime.

One of the excuses for this issue is the energy used in refrigeration. I suspect this is a bit of a con, really. A refrigerator is just a mover of heat, not a creator of cold. If you chill the contents you are warming the outside. If you want to reduce the amount of pumping losses, then you create more efficient refrigerators using such wonderful devices as Stirling Engines or, duh, put DOORS ON THEM. You do NOT use the PATHETIC excuse of "carbon footprint" to try and destroy an industry which exists solely due to consumer choice (note that) so that the world can bend to fit the prejudices, plans and non-sequiturs of a bunch of imbeciles at DEFRA.

Pound to a penny there is an EU directive at the bottom of this.

UPDATE: The BBC covered this at 1PM today, but just parroted the government lie line and had no real exposure, almost like a softening up exercise. Self-loathers!