Letters to Editor - bLetters

We welcome your opinion on public issues, in either of two ways. You can submit a letter to the editor for possible publication in the printed edition. The Virginian-Pilot welcomes letters to the editor on all topics, although concise letters (150 words or less) on public issues will receive priority. Letters may be edited for length, style and clarity and writers are limited to one published letter every month. Please add your name, city, street address and daytime telephone number for confirmation.

The other way is to comment on the published letters in this blog. In this online forum, you can comment as much as you want by using the comment box at the end of each entry.

By e-mail: letters@pilotonline.com

By mail: Letters to the editor - P.O. Box 449 - Norfolk, VA 23501-0449

By fax: (757) 446-2051

Category: Readers' Opinions

■ 18 December 2008 | 5:00 AM

The real story on Yoder's

Re 'Yoder Dairies to end home delivery, close Beach store,' front page, Dec. 9:The closing of Yoder Dairies is more than a nostalgic obituary for eggnog. Write about what we're really losing.

Talk about BPAs, phthalates and bleaching chemicals that were not in glass bottles or the environmental impact of recycling. Write about Slow Foods Movement or locavores. Cover the health aspect of national organic brands supplementing with Omega 3 because they don't use grass-fed cows (which produce it naturally).

Tell the social responsibility angle of driving in Virginia to see that your milk was produced kindly and cleanly. Show the economic impact of giving money to a faceless corporation that cannot produce a product I can confidently feed my children.

Giving money to mega-businesses for a product we can't trust while hoping they are doing their best job for the American public is kind of how we got into this economic situation. Why didn't The Pilot let its readers in on these impacts?

Jill Doczi

Virginia Beach

View 5 comment(s) Link to post

ADVISORY: Users are solely responsible for opinions they post here and for following agreed-upon rules of civility. Comments do not reflect the views of The Virginian-Pilot or its Web sites. Comments are automatically checked for inappropriate language, but readers might find some comments offensive or inaccurate. If you believe a comment violates our rules, click the "Report Violation" link below the comment.

I dumped them myself

Submitted by Dead Head on Fri, 12/19/2008 at 9:14 am.

Rather than use the apparently poison milk from Big Milk! It just seemed that the undercurrent of the letter was just one more lament that the free market was the great evil. I don’t want Mom and Pop to go out of business, but I don’t think the government is supposed to assure them a gig either.

Much is Lost When Real Food Producers Go Under

Submitted by A Markowitz on Fri, 12/19/2008 at 8:38 am.

Jill is right. Anyone who hasn't eaten local free range eggs or real chicken much less real unadulterated dairy products doesn't know what they've lost. It's like the difference between home grown and store tomatoes. What bothers me most though is to see a productive small business driven under by unproductive money shuffling big business. That these parasitic mega-enterprises subsidize inferior, tainted products meant to squeeze out maximum profits is not unrelated to rising incidents of cancer, obesity, and other health issues. Maybe the upside of our economic downturn will be a return to smaller, local, more natural food sources. At least we have the Farm Market and Organic Depot where some small local producers can still sell their produce.

Yikes, Dead Head

Submitted by gabriellel45516 on Thu, 12/18/2008 at 9:48 pm.

Who dumped your cornflakes on the floor this morning?

Here’s the story

Submitted by Dead Head on Thu, 12/18/2008 at 12:59 pm.

People don’t want to pay for this – including you. This is more of the Al Gore dogma – lamenting global warming while he flies around in a private jet and burns more energy to light his estate than some small towns. This company is not the victim of the uniformed, but of the free market (emphasis on FREE). If folks wanted to pay for the convenience and health benefits, they would, but they don’t, so they didn’t. You can wax poetic till the cows come home (pun intended) but there’s no conspiracy here – in a free society folks have the right to be lazy, unhealthy, slow witted fools if they choose. If you don’t want to participate in such a society, grab some Ayn Ryan books and go live on a mountain top somewhere – but stay out of my pocket.