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Home Cheese-Making DVD Hits the Road!

Okay, it’s taken a while and we were expecting to release this title last year. We even had a few people ask for it for last year’s Christmas, but the truth is we took too long to finish it. So now it’s here, ready to go! Elisabeth Fekonia’s Home Cheesemaking and All Things Dairy DVD has finally been released!

Elisabeth Fekonia lives on six acres near Mount Cooroy on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast and over the last 15 years she has been teaching people how to make all sorts of dairy products from raw cow and goats milk. She has two milking cows and a number of assorted goats which all have different names like “Bambi” and “Lydia” and so on, and in this true DIY permaculture title she teaches you the basics of making your own dairy delights. Cheddar Cheese from raw cow’s milk, a soft brie from goat’s milk, cottage cheese, Ghee, Kefir, Sour Cream and Yoghurt are all taught in this entertaining DVD.

She even shows you how to milk a cow or goat as well as many small tips on keeping your animals healthy. Mineralisation of stock feed is an important ingredient in keeping you and your family healthy and Elisabeth shows you how to mix your own mineral blend for your dairy cow’s diet. From milking the cow she takes you into her colourful home and into her kitchen and Elisabeth shows you how to make your own cheese without fancy implements – just simple tools that you can fashion yourself. My favourite was a stainless steel dogs bowl that she transformed into a new life as a cheese container!

If you really want to live an independent sustainable life – then Elisabeth is the real McCoy!

Elisabeth is a permaculture teacher who writes frequently for Australian lifestyle magazines as well as conducting frequent Cheese and Sour-bread making workshops in Queensland. She and her husband Frank have appeared on SBS-TV and frequently on Australian ABC Radio. You can order the DVD here!

13 Comments

  1. Does anyone have a footnote for the quote at 1:34 “Raw dairy products are just so good for your health.” I’m a long time feta lova and having recently read The China Study, I’m lookin for more scientific studies on the subject of diet and health, especially as it relates to dairy.

  2. In all honesty, there’s a hell of a lot of evidence showing that dairy products are not good for you at all.

    https://www.rense.com/general26/milk.htm

    The dairy industry has long promoted the myth that it’s good for you – talking about high protein and high calcium. But the process of breaking down protein actually uses calcium – to the point where it will leech calcium from your bones to accomplish it. Some links below will get you started, but simply looking at the demographics of osteoporosis sufferers, and you’ll find that dairy intensive places like NZ, Australia, UK, U.S., etc., all have high rates of osteoporosis, whereas low-diary places like Asia, South America and Africa have low to virtually no cases of it.

    Same goes for diabetes, another lifestyle disease directly connected to a high fat, high protein diet. Same goes for heart disease, for the same reasons.

    Osteoporosis:

    https://milk.elehost.com/html/osteoporosis.html

    https://www.makingpages.org/health/calcium.osteoporosis.html

    https://www.milksucks.com/osteo.asp

    https://www.naturalnews.com/002684_Robert_Cohen_cows_milk.html (Four part series – click link at bottom of page to proceed further)

    https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you-eat/calcium-full-story/index.html

    Diabetes:

    https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-12/hhmi-rdh122105.php

    https://drpeterdingle.blogspot.com/2010/01/fat-causes-type-2-diabetes.html

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2654180/?tool=pmcentrez

    Heart Disease:

    https://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/173/8/884

    https://www.redorbit.com/news/health/1642110/highfat_diets_can_contribute_to_heart_disease/index.html

    Then there’s the topic of biomagnification, that I explain in the next link. This particularly applies to animal products from animals in the industrial system, but still applies to one degree or another to all animals on the planet, due to the fact that pristine environments are rare to non-existent today:

    https://www.permaculturenews.org/2008/08/13/pesticides-and-you/

    https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/512642_4

    https://www.wisegeek.com/what-are-biomagnified-pollutants.htm

    A little home made milk and cheese from your goat/sheep/cow that’s been raised in nice, natural conditions on nice natural feed, if it’s just an add-on to your main diet of lots of fresh fruit, vegetables, nuts and grains from your garden, which is in turn combined with the healthy exercise involved in growing it all, is not going to knock years off your life – but it well may if the proportion gets out of whack….

    I’d recommend the book Food Revolution, by John Robbins:

    https://www.foodrevolution.org/

    https://www.amazon.com/Food-Revolution-Your-Diet-World/dp/1573247022

  3. Hi everyone! Nice to discuss about this milk-health topic.

    I read a book, The Enzyme Effects, by Hiromi Shinya. He explains how milk is disadvantegous for human health. In this world, among other mammals, only human drink milk after the weaning stage. It’s just not natural, he said. I guess we’d find similar or same reasons in the links provided by Craig above.

    Meanwhile, I’ve found from personal experience that some milk products promote human health greatly. It’s the fermented ones, in my case raw goat milk kefir. The product have been consumed by hundreds of people and it helped tumors, diabetes, gout, and even cancers healing.

    I think I’ll choose to be moderate for this topic, just like to eat red meat or not.

  4. I’ve just started making kefir myself. I’ve noticed a difference in the first week with my intestinal health and digestion of foods, so theres something to be said with getting a gut full, literally, of a large matrix of bacteria and yeasts you get eating live culture compared to the ultra pasteurised foods denuded of living organisms.

    I gave up most milk, I never drink it for a drink, only for a bit of splash in a milo or in the old days a coffee (gave up all stimulants so no more coffee and tea – another story about how much better I feel although nearly a 3 month process to get it out of my system).

    My milk consumption has risen a bit but its still about half a cup or so a a night before bed of kefir natural with no additives and not refrigerated but left out on the bench at all times.

    Scary though the first time you have some and worry about something that may have sat out of the refrigeration for five days or more but then you don’t get sick or die and get better digestion and think hey! Then its more liberating on trying other fermented foods of our ancestors with live cultures in them instead of pale modern imitations, real kraut compared to modern ultra pasteurised, cooked cabbage put into vinegar or yogurts with only one or if you are lucky two bacteria and missing the other 28 bacteria and yeasts of the traditional kefir (health food shop powder is just as bad for only having 3 or so bacteria and not the full 27 extra yeasts and bacteria of the real kefir).

    So I’m all for raw milk products fermented into kefir drinks or fermented into cheeses versus buying dead products in a modern supermarket.

    Cheers,
    Peter

  5. The big difference here that we need to pay attention to is the word RAW diary products.

    Just like vegetables, fruit, red white or any color meat you like the health side of food is all about raw living food full of enzymes where processed with natural living processes, as fresh as possible, as local as possible and diverse within practicality within season which creates moderation. This is the best diet we can eat, and we can do it better now than ever before because we have more diversity to use than ever before. Our gardens are 800x more diverse than they were in the middle ages.

    Sterilization processing of dairy is a serious problem to health as is monoculture organic food with high energy input product.

  6. Why would milk be unnatural? Try telling that to nomad people in Asia or to Maasai, they depend on it :) I think that, if we have been doing it for so long, it must be quite ok.

  7. Craig, thx for links. Lot of info there. The China Study by Colin Campbell echoes your position and is well footnoted. Here is the book, free to read on Google books: https://clickn.in/chinastudy The intro is only 8 pages and gives it to you in a nutshell. The remainder of the book simply supports the intro.

    I was looking for any counter arguments.

    In the meantime, I’m all hemp and coconut milk. I am starting to see yogurt, kefir, and ice cream from coconut milk here in the US.

    I wonder if there is hemp or coconut cheese?

  8. There is a lot of information on milk out there and a lot of disinformation as well. There is one important distinction. Most studies showing milk is bad for you bases their studies on pasteurized commercial milk. I agree this form of milk is very bad. Raw milk that comes from organically raised grass fed animals is very good for you. I could explain this in detail; however, I have found over the years if you do not do your own research you will only believe what you want to believe.

  9. I think with all due respect that if humans have milked cows and goats for centuries and we are still living on the planet there might be a reason why all the dairy products are not so bad for our health…

  10. As with everything else, dairy products are good when consumed in moderation. I love cheese, but I do not make it any central part of my daily diet.

    I’m quite fond of goat’s milk, but it’s been a long time since I’ve drank any dairy products on a regular basis. Nowadays the only time I drink homogenized milk is right before bed on some nights, as it has helped me relieve my constipation more than once. (I’m lactose intolerant, BTW.)

    Human beings are just as much part of the food/energy chain as much as the animals of the wild. Which is why it pays for us to know just what our dairy cows are fed on a regular basis, for instance.

  11. The French eat a lot of dairy, but its all about the portion sizes. In America they have like “gallons” of milk jugs, which is not good.

    Also A1 and A2 milk – A1 being from too greatly inbred cows which have an indigestible protein.

    Also unpasteurised/unhomogenised or “raw” milk is better. Theres a guy on youtube who swears by it. He is lactose intolerant, and can drink “raw” milk. he cant drink the pasturised/homogonised type because of the destroyed enzymes.

    Im going to eventually get a cow i think.

  12. whoops forgot to mention something else, my parents make kefir as well, they have some kind of Tibetan milk fungus which removes impurities etc.

    If you want more info on this fungus send me an email and ill pass it onto my mum.

    [email protected]

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