Cheese and Wells

This article, originally put up on the neo-conservative news site WorldNetDaily, is written by Garth Stapley for the Modesto Bee of Modesto, California.

Hilmar Cheese Company, the world's largest cheese maker, wants to drill an "injection well" nearly 3/4 of a mile underground. It has filed a permit request with the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to do just that. The well would contain the waste liquids resulting from cheese manufacturing at the Hilmar Plant. As Stapley reports, the company - founded in 1984 - has had a long history of pollution violations with the California government.

The company produces one million pounds of cheese every day!

This is but another example of how the "bigger-is-better" philosophy wreaks havoc with nature, the economy and government.

Couldn't the demand for California cheese be just as easily met by hundreds of small producers, working either separately or in a co-op fashion? Certainly with the reduced scale, there would be much less chance for the amount of liquid waste that Hilmar generates now. Further, with lesser waste, there would be fewer headaches created over how to dispose the waste, yet not threaten drinking water supplies or the local eco-system.

In a Distributist society, there would be no behemoths like Hilmar Cheese. Better there be hundreds or thousands of small cheese makers meeting demand than one or two big leviathans like Hilmar.