Dairy Reduction

I was looking at Debbie's lunch ideas, my family's eating habits, and our freezer, and then thinking (not always a good thing for me to do, but I do it anyway). It appears that **cheese** plays a huge role in my family's food print. We buy a lot of cheese, usually sliced for sandwiches or grated.

But now I'm thinking...calcium, good. What else is good about it? I don't buy organic cheese (nor milk, since I rarely buy milk and no one really drinks it in my family, but Short One who will drink chocolate milk or Skinny Cow). OK, so I'm thinking (and I could cozy up to google and find out for sure, but not today) that it takes about 10 gallons of milk to make one pound of cheese. Clearly not a frugal use of resources since it takes about 50 lbs of feed and 30 gallons of water (I think) to yield about 6 lbs of cheese. They also poop something like 20-25 lbs a day. And none of this factors in the HUGE amount of pus that is allowed in American milk but not Canadian or European (which is one reason why we sell our milk abroad mostly as [unnecessary] food additives not as milk or cheese *or* to developing (aka "3rd world") nations, because we dont' meet the standards demanded in other developed nations)...anyway, I digress....

So, how do I start to make cheese a "sometimes" food? Although I hate consipracy theories, I'm also convinced that the dairy lobby is right up there with the pharmacutical lobbies and that MY best interests aren't THEIR best interests...However, even though I recognize the potential benefits of milk drinking (which can be fat free), I'm just not certain that I should be encouraging my children to eat as much cheese as we consume. Fat free cheese simply is not worth eating. It's gagalicous. Fat is what makes cheese cheese. That's like calling oil-free, fat-free, air popped popcorn a "treat". It's really just a "filler that you don't normally get."

I wonder if my family could do a "cheese free week challenge." (probably not as long as they are working on 4-H projects...4-H is firmly in the pocket of the dairy lobby). Maybe a "cheese free, lunch meat free" week is called for because they eat a lot of lunch meat.

I'm out of town the 22-27 and then at a tournement the last weekend of the month, then out of town again from June 10-18, then the cousins come for 2 weeks....so maybe this would be a better thing to re-visit in July.