This week, European dairy giant Arla announced it would be trialing a special food additive on its dairy cows in the UK to reduce their methane emissions. You may not have heard of Arla, but you definitely know at least one of its brands: Lurpak butter, Castello cheeses, Cravendale milk.
The proprietary food additive, called Bovaer, is said to reduce enteric greenhouse gas emissions—read: cow farts and burps—by as much as 27%. Bovaer is being added to forage for cows on 30 Arla farms across the UK, in partnership with big supermarket players Morrisons, Tesco and Aldi.
Arla wants to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 30% per kilo of milk, by 2030—a key date in the globalist calendar, owing to the emissions targets in the Paris Climate Accords and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The World Economic Forum’s famous thinkpiece was called “Welcome to 2030” for a reason. 2030 is a key “inflection point,” even a “tipping point.”
The aim, clearly, is for the Arla trial to lead to a rollout of Bovaer on a massive scale, across the corporation’s entire Europe-wide network of cooperative farms. There are 2,500 Arla farmers in the UK alone, and many thousands in other European nations. Arla is the sixth largest dairy corporation in the world, with an annual net revenue of nearly 14 billion euros.
Arla haven’t actually said anything about what Bovaer is, but you can look it up. Wikipedia will tell you. Bovaer is a mixture of silicon dioxide, propylene glycol and 3-nitrooxypropanol. It’s that last ingredient that’s key, because it impairs the enzyme methyl coenzyme M reductase, which is involved in the production of methane in the cow’s rumen. Bovaer isn’t GMO, but it is proprietary nonetheless, being manufactured by a Belgian-Swiss perfume company called DSM Firmenich.
Announcement of the initiative was greeted with widespread anger on social media, as consumers realized they would have to forego some of their favorite dairy brands if they want to be certain to avoid participating in Arla’s little experiment. Thousands of users tweeted their displeasure, and other dairy players, large and small, tweeted out messages of reassurance to their customers that they would not be adding Bovaer, or anything else like it, to their animal feed this winter or indeed ever.
Arla’s response was predictable. They and their supporters reached for familiar labels: “misinformation,” “baseless conspiracy theories” and so on. Reporting—like this piece from The Grocer—focused on “unsubstantiated claims the additive could be unsafe” and “wider conspiracy theories centring on Bill Gates, the World Economic Forum and climate change denial.”
It’s true: DSM Firmenich isn’t owned by Bill Gates and has nothing to do with the lilac-sweater-wearing, poop-water-sniffing misanthrope who still hasn’t explained to anybody’s satisfaction his friendship with the late Jeffrey Epstein. But Gates money is being used to develop a methane-reducing feed additive that’s very like Bovaer.
Don’t get me wrong: Bovaer has been approved as safe in multiple countries and territories around the world. In 2021, it was approved for use in Brazil, and then Chile. The next year it was approved in the EU, and now this year the FDA and Canada’s regulators have given it the green light, too; although it’s unclear when or on what scale it will start being used in the US. In 2022, DSM Firmenich and US company Elanco Animal Health Inc. entered into an exclusive licensing agreement for Bovaer in the US, so we can be sure, at least, that it’s coming to US dairy farms at some point in the near future.
Of course, approval doesn’t mean a product—a food additive, a medicine, an industrial chemical—is safe. Just ask the children born with seal flippers instead of limbs because their mothers were given thalidomide. That went on for the better part of a decade before anything was done about it. After decades, the addition of fluoride to public water supplies across the US is about to be reversed, because of what we now know about fluoride’s effects on IQ and cognitive development.
I’m not saying Bovaer is thalidomide. What I am saying is that consumers have a right to know what’s going in their food products, why it’s being added and—most of all—whether it’s truly safe. What’s more, consumers should have a clear choice about whether they consume particular chemicals and substances. Products should be properly and clearly labelled.
Unfortunately, it looks like that last piece of basic decency isn’t going to be honored by corporate food producers. Events from elsewhere in Europe give a clear suggestion of where we’re going with Bovaer and with other “climate-saving” additions to the food supply.
Norwegian dairy corporation Tine started adding methane-inhibitors to its branded “Future Milk” a little while ago, and told consumers the product was more climate-friendly. They thought their Norwegian customers, complaisant beings that those once-Vikings now are, would rush to do their bit for the planet by drinking the special milk.
Instead, Tine got the same frosty reception as Arla just did. Nobody wanted to drink the special milk.
So what did Tine do? They stopped selling Future Milk and just mixed the special milk in with their normal milk and didn’t tell anyone. Now consumers of Tine’s milk have no choice but to drink “Future Milk.” Very clever.
In the Norwegian case, it doesn’t really matter anyway, because the government has already decided that by 2027 all dairy cows must be fed methane-inhibitors. Come to Norway, they’ll say, the land of Future Milk and honey.
Corporate control of the food supply, and secrecy about what substances corporations add to their products, has been a disaster for our health, especially in the US. The FDA’s Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) system stands as a beacon of insanity in this regard, allowing corporations to create new food additives, say they’re safe on the basis of “internal data” and then add them to their products for sale without any oversight whatsoever. Whereas there are around 2,000 food additives licensed for use in the EU, nobody has a bloody clue how many are being used in the US. It may be 10,000. It may be more.
External testing of many of these additives reveals them to be harmful. That’s why Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made reform of the FDA and food-additive licensing a central plank of his “Make America Healthy Again” agenda. The food supply needs transparency. Secrecy is making us fat, sick and depressed like never before. The secrecy is killing us.
Unfortunately, the climate-change agenda provides a compelling reason for more, not less, secrecy in the food supply. For more, not less, choice.
After all, it’s for the greater good—the benevolent tyrant’s refrain. Be a good child and drink your milk and don’t ask questions.