If you ask Lorraine Lewandrowksi, almond milk is not milk.
Vegans “just pontificate” and are bad for farmers. People trying to get rid of genetically modified crops are going to get rid of farmers, too.
“Query: if you eat anything with a GMO, do you become GMO? If you eat chicken sh*t, do you become a chicken sh*t? ” Lewandrowski recently tweeted in response to an argument against using genetically modified crops.
The Herkimer dairy farmer goes by @NYFarmer on Twitter. And when she tweets, 20,000 people see it. She uses social media to campaign for the family farmer and against popular causes and people she says are threatening farmers’ way of life.
Lewandrowski isn’t your usual anything. She has a law degree and a degree from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. She works in a quiet law office in Herkimer, near Utica, handling the everyday legal affairs of small-town folk. She starts and ends her days on the dairy farm where she grew up, which her brother now runs with her sister, who is the town veterinarian.
As Lewandrowski helps milk the cows and takes care of people’s wills, she is tweeting about the local food movement, vegans, milk prices and increased rates of farmer suicide.
If someone gets in her cross hairs, Lewandrowski can be an unrelenting critic. Take Mark Bittman: Lewandrowski has been doing battle with Bittman, the former New York Times food writer and best-selling author of “Eat Vegan Before 6” book for years.
Since 2011, Bittman has been a target of Lewandrowski’s. Columns about the vegan lifestyle (no products that come from an animal) with headlines like “No Meat, No Milk, No Problem,” began to irritate Lewandrowksi. But what put her over the edge, perhaps, was a 2012 piece in which Bittman wrote that people who stop drinking milk aren’t hurting farmers — at least not family farmers.
“But what about the bucolic cow on the family farm?” Bittman wrote in the New York Times. Both rarely exist now, he continued, replaced, instead by massive factory farms with between 10,000 and 30,000 cows that never see pasture.
That is the case in some places, but in the area around Herkimer where Lewandrowski’s family has farmed and lived for four generations, the majority of the farms are small, like her family’s. Their farm has 100 milking cows and the work is primarily done by family. They are exactly the image Bittman said no longer existed.
They are also the major supplier of New York City’s milk; Lewandrowski calls the region the “milkshed.” So when someone tells all of New York City, and the nation, that dairy is bad for them and small family farms don’t exist anymore, Lewandrowski feels inclined to speak up.
It’s possible she’s a bit snarky at times. Lewandrowski said Bittman eventually blocked her and sent her a twitter direct message telling her she was doing herself and her cause a disservice by the way she was taking him on.
(Bittman has not replied to an email seeking comment).
She continues to tweet at Bittman and the vegans.
“Oh poo poo,” she tweeted at @VegOs when that twitter user argued that some people simply can’t digest dairy proteins.
Lewandrowski called the makers of milk substitutes (soy, rice, almond) “freeloaders” on dairy’s good name, in support of a Vermont bill to require milk substitutes to use a term other than “milk” in their name.
Lewandrowski, though, says she doesn’t mean any harm by her tone. She’s mostly trying to poke a little fun while getting a serious message across: there are big problems looming for small farmers across the nation.
When the price of milk (which almost no normal person can explain) plummeted in 2009, people she knew lost their farms. Farm families fell apart. Many have not recovered from that drop.
Lewandrowski makes her case outside of social media, too. In 2013, she called up poet and environmentalist Wendell Berry to ask for his help. On social media, she’d been reading about a freak blizzard that ravaged cattle ranches in Wyoming and South Dakota, but had gotten virtually no attention in the media.
She looked up the 82-year-old icon’s number and called him at his home. Berry, a recipient of the prestigious National Humanities Medal, came to the phone at his farm and the two chatted, she said.
They ended up talking about the local food movement, and how many people involved often don’t really understand where the food is coming from, Lewandrowski said.
Berry and Wes Jackson, Berry’s friend and a force in the sustainable farming movement, often speak at New York City events with Lewandrowski’s nemesis, Bittman. In the past, she’s asked Jackson to talk to Bittman about the harm he’s doing to local farmers.
Jackson, who like Berry is in his 80s, said he hasn’t had that conversation with Bittman just yet.
Lewandrowski’s Facebook and Twitter feed are also full of the photographs of bucolic scenes that she snaps while she’s out and about: Morning light on a corn field. Calves in the barn. Sunsets glittering on the snow.
Her followers from urban areas like those scenes. It makes them feel peaceful to see life out on the farm. Lewandrowski, who did a stint working in corporate banking in New York City, understands that well.
She’s not sure how food and agriculture have become such divisive issues.
“It seems like food is so polarized,” Lewandrowski said. “It’s worse than religion already.”
Source: Syracuse.com
