Milk Products

Kohler Mix Specialties Inc. has expanded its recall nationwide to all cartons of milk products produced at its White Bear Lake, Minn., plant because of possible contamination. The recall now involves 270,000 cases of products, a spokeswoman said. The products include half-and-half, whipping cream, skim milk, 1% and 2% milk, whole milk and chocolate milk. The plant code of PLT 27-416 is on the top seal of affected cartons.

The owner of a Venice health food market and two other people were arrested on charges related to the allegedly unlawful production and sale of unpasteurized dairy products, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County district attorney's office said. The arrests of James Cecil Stewart, Sharon Ann Palmer and Eugenie Bloch on Wednesday marked the latest effort in a government crackdown on the sale of so-called raw dairy products. Prosecutors in Los Angeles alleged that Stewart, 64, operates a Venice market called Rawesome Foods through which he illegally sold dairy products that did not meet health standards because they were unpasteurized or were produced at unlicensed facilities.

State health officials have issued a recall for Stueve's Natural Raw Certified Milk because of the presence of salmonella, a harmful bacteria. The order applies to those brands of Stueve's Natural containing the code date DEC 6E, according to the Department of Food and Agriculture. The products affected by the action are the City of Industry firm's whole and nonfat raw milk and the company's raw cream.

At a time when so many people are trying to clean out their systems with detoxifying pads, pills and gadgets, let's take a moment to honor the liver, the best detox device a body can have. Without prompting, the liver breaks down and dispenses with all sorts of toxic compounds, including alcohol and acetaminophen. Anyone who is truly interested in removing poisons from the body should probably spend less time applying detoxifying pads and potions and more time protecting their liver. One way to give your liver a lift is to avoid bombarding it with too many poisons in the first place.

As a result of the current outbreak of food poisoning and deaths linked to cheese produced by Jalisco Mexican Products Inc., state officials are now questioning the adequacy of inspections of milk-products plants in California.

If you've been under the impression after your weekly trip to the grocery store that you've been paying more for milk products, you're right. In fact, government tinkering, exports and the weather are to blame for a nearly 9% increase in consumer prices for dairy products in the past year, dairy experts say. According to government figures, that is more than double the rate that prices in general have gone up in 1989 and half again as much as all food prices.

The owner of a Venice health food market and two other people were arrested on charges related to the allegedly unlawful production and sale of unpasteurized dairy products, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County district attorney's office said. The arrests of James Cecil Stewart, Sharon Ann Palmer and Eugenie Bloch on Wednesday marked the latest effort in a government crackdown on the sale of so-called raw dairy products. Prosecutors in Los Angeles alleged that Stewart, 64, operates a Venice market called Rawesome Foods through which he illegally sold dairy products that did not meet health standards because they were unpasteurized or were produced at unlicensed facilities.

Bones need calcium. Doctors, dietitians and researchers agree on this point. Conventional wisdom holds that dairy foods are the best source of calcium, and that American adults need to pump up their dairy intake to get the large amount of calcium their bodies need every day. Not everyone, however, believes the conventional wisdom. Researchers are even raising questions about whether children need as much milk as guidelines recommend.

Adohr Farms in Santa Ana won four contracts totaling $1 million from the Defense Subsistence Pacific Region to supply milk and milk products.

Adohr Farms in Santa Ana won a $292,109 contract from the Defense Department to supply milk and milk products.

A court handed down a death sentence today to a man who manufactured a milk additive that caused thousands of Chinese babies to develop kidney stones, some of them fatal. The defendant, Zhang Yujun, was the first of 21 defendants to be sentenced by the provincial court in Shijiazhuang, Hebei province, in China's most famous product tainting case. Another defendant, Zhang Yanzhang, received a life sentence.

Inside a courthouse cordoned off by yellow tape and a phalanx of police, the alleged perpetrators of China's tainted-milk scandal are being brought to trial here. But the sensational consumer safety case has been shrouded in so much secrecy that it is hard to say whether justice is in fact being done.

A long struggle over what kind of milk counts as organic is coming to a head. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has issued draft rules for organic milk that would require that the cows be on pasture at least half the year and get plenty of fresh grass. The proposals are meant to close a loophole that has allowed some huge feedlots to sell their milk as organic even though their cows rarely grazed on fresh grass.

Have you checked out the price of milk lately? Be prepared to be confused, baffled and amazed. What people pay for milk in California is based upon a complex combination of state regulations and retailing strategy. The state determines the minimum price that milk processors -- the companies that bottle milk or turn it into cheese and ice cream -- must pay farmers. The price fluctuates monthly based upon what butter, cheese and powdered milk sell for on commodity exchanges.

Even after regulators assured the public that all contaminated baby formula was off the shelves, B.X. Wei wasn't going to feed his 2-month-old son anything that came out of a can. Especially not one made in China. But his wife didn't have enough breast milk for the baby. Then the 30-year-old businessman from Jiangsu province remembered that during his childhood, women would nurse each other's babies if one ran out of milk.

China's product-quality chief resigned Monday as the government sought to contain a national crisis over tainted baby formula that has sickened 53,000 children and implicated the biggest dairy producers in the country. The official New China News Agency said without explanation that Li Changjiang had stepped down as director of the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine.

The fact that a dairy wants to challenge critics of raw milk products looks, to me, more like bringing truth out into the open rather than silencing it. I agree that the comparison of the risks of raw milk to toxic waste is not an appropriate comparison. Why not compare the risks of chemical additives in processed milk products to the risks of raw milk products? Those who raise doubts about the safety of raw milk products avoid addressing the issue of chemical additives found in most other milk products.

Half of all cups of coffee in the United States get creamed, but who's counting? Presto Food Products, for one. And Carnation, for another. Presto, a small City of Industry company, has had the West Coast market for liquid non-dairy creamers much to itself since introducing Mocha Mix in 1962.

The number of children sickened by tainted milk in China has jumped to nearly 53,000, the government said Sunday as it vowed to crack down on those responsible. More than 80% of the 12,892 children hospitalized in recent weeks were 2 years old or younger, the Health Ministry said in a statement posted on its website. It said most consumed infant formula from the Sanlu Group. An additional 39,965 children received outpatient treatment and were considered "basically recovered," the ministry said.

Sweat dripping down his face, Mo Chongjian paced the second floor of Guangzhou Children's Hospital, clutching a medical report and an ultrasound image of his 13-month-old son's kidneys. The scan was pocked with white dots. "You see here. Both of his kidneys have stones," said the 38-year-old security guard, a short, stocky man with big eyes. "When I think back, I remember that my son couldn't sleep well at night.