My blog is back! It doesn’t have an official name beyond davidgumpert.com; the title for this post is “The March of Life,” which may or may not stick for a name.
Anyway, an update: I’ve been off doing “genealogy” research the last year-and-a-half. Genealogy is the study of family history, and it’s become very popular in recent years with the evolution of the Internet, advances in DNA testing and the transition of paper records into digital archives. People are using it to understand their pasts—exactly where they came from, their medical histories, and to gain perspective on their ancestors’ struggles.
It was that last item that drove me to dive in, actually beginning in the 1990s. My “ancestors’ struggles” during the 1930s and 1940s in Germany were struggles to stay alive and escape Germany in one piece; not all family members made it out, and even those who did emerged seriously traumatized. There were few family stories in my growing-up years about “the good old days,” mainly because any fond memories of “good old days” were wiped out by much worse “bad old days.” They were so bad that no one wanted to talk about them.
So I grew up with a lot of silence about the past. It wasn’t until the 1990s that I began to fill in some of the gaps, with discovery of a partially completed memoir by an aunt who had died in the 1980s. It was the story of her escape from Germany as a teenager in 1939, and then hiding out in Belgium and France to avoid the invading Nazis; I spent ten years doing research and writing to get the story published in 2004.
But the book, Inge, was only part of the story. By the time it was published, I was too exhausted from the seemingly unending sadness and violence associated with not just my family, but with the families of other children who were with my aunt, that I didn’t have the strength to research the rest of the story having to do with Inge’s parents and in-laws and cousins. I needed to move on to something else, and that something else turned out to be this blog.
Chronicling the challenges facing raw dairy farmers had its own share of emotional difficulties—farms shut down, owners put on trial, inappropriate government intrusion—all for selling raw milk and other dairy products. But the threats were nowhere near what my family and many others faced in Nazi Germany and elsewhere in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s.
Indeed, one of the things I always admired about the farmers I got to know over the years after I began writing this blog was their very sensible (to me) approach to life and death. They were raising cattle and pigs and chickens, and they tended to do this with much care, and even in some cases gave names to animals they would have to slaughter at some point in the not-too-distant future. But as some farmers explained to me, that was the “deal” they signed up for when they decided to become farmers.
Most of them were very committed to taking great care with their animals. Sure, the fate of the animals helped determine their livelihoods, but they made sure the animals got outdoors to graze on grass and forage for insects or leaves. The farmers tried to make the actual slaughtering process as humane as possible. In other words, they treated their animals with respect, care, and love.
Even when politics intervened, and made some of the discussion here quite intense, I was always reassured by the commitment of the small farms I encountered to producing the best quality food possible, with care given all around—for the environment, for neighbors, and for customers.
The genealogy research I’ve been doing over the last couple of years to produce a sequel to Inge has helped me realize that there is a strong connection between genealogy and farming for their respectful tracking of the paths of life. The connection has become increasingly obvious to me; as one example, I came to discover that my great grandfather, Hermann Joseph, started in business in the late 1800s as a farmer not far from Frankfurt selling oats and raising cattle (see a newspaper advertisement he ran below); he eventually turned the cattle portion into a major tallow production business with a factory employing 20-plus people selling products all over Europe during the early 1900s; his son, my grandfather, was accused by police and public health authorities during the Nazi period of selling tainted tallow, for which he was put on trial. My blog experience reporting on farmers accused of selling tainted dairy products has helped me immensely in interpreting what was going on.
So I continue in both worlds—food politics and genaelogy.
I thought I’d re-start this blog by seeking to make connections on these topics. I won’t always do that, and I won’t try to force the matter; sometimes I’ll write exclusively on the politics of food and health, touching on some of the same topics as before (food politics and health challenges) and sometimes I’ll discuss larger issues of life (like preparing for death). But we’ll see how it goes.
Here are a few topics planned in the early going:
- A new look at Rep. Thomas Massie. I was a big booster of the conservative Kentucky Congressman in his early days in the House for trying to reform federal restrictions on meat sales, and then got down on him for his aggressive Second Amendment promotion. His focus on the Epstein affair has me shifting again.
- Why do people keep getting sick from Raw Farm dairy products? Mark McAfee has been a wonderful spokesperson for raw dairy safety, but he seems to have difficulty keeping his own products safe.
- The positives and negatives of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s tenure as secretary of Health and Human Services….and there have been a good number of both.
- Yes, you can find excellent ‘mass-produced’ pastured eggs. My favorite brand described, actually from many farms.
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