That is the primary in a collection of tales on how manufacturing facility farming shapes America. You may go to Vox’s Future Good part for future installments and extra protection of Large Ag. This collection is supported by Animal Charity Evaluators, which acquired a grant from Builders Initiative.
In early 2023, Marielle Williamson emailed her Los Angeles highschool principal requesting permission to protest milk.
A senior and president of the varsity’s Animal Consciousness Membership, Williamson wished to arrange a desk exterior the varsity cafeteria to distribute literature about inhumane circumstances on dairy farms and the air pollution they spew — and promote options, like soy milk. It could be counterprogramming to the Bought Milk? ads aired in the course of the college’s morning bulletins and plastered throughout the varsity’s hallways.
Williamson ultimately bought the inexperienced mild from her principal, however with one confounding stipulation: She’d even have to advertise the advantages of cow’s milk.
The varsity’s demand stemmed from a US Division of Agriculture (USDA) coverage that states faculties “should indirectly or not directly limit the sale or advertising of fluid milk.” Doing so would violate the foundations of its participation within the Nationwide Faculty Lunch Program, which all public — and lots of non-public — faculties closely depend on to subsidize their meals, and will lead to fines and different corrective actions.
The coverage “goes to indicate the stranglehold that the dairy business has over LAUSD [Los Angeles Unified School District], over faculties that take part within the Nationwide Faculty Lunch Program,” Williamson instructed me.“My principal is a superb man, nevertheless it was the coverage that he simply needed to comply with.”
Moderately than acquiesce, Williamson protested the coverage. Working with the Physicians Committee for Accountable Drugs (PCRM), a plant-based vitamin advocacy group, she sued the USDA, the Los Angeles Unified Faculty District, and her college’s directors, arguing her proper to free speech had been violated.
Months later, the varsity district settled the lawsuit, affirming college students’ proper to criticize dairy. The district additionally accepted a donation from PCRM for use to buy soy milk for college kids who need it, freed from cost. (The USDA didn’t be part of the settlement and has sought to dismiss the lawsuit.)
Dairy’s stranglehold on college meals started some 80 years in the past and has solely tightened since. It was constructed on the outdated concept that cow’s milk is crucial for kids’s well being — an concept that has had immense endurance attributable to an enormous and deep-pocketed advertising, lobbying, and analysis machine. That false impression has resulted in insurance policies just like the one Williamson was up towards, and the nationwide requirement that milk should at the very least be supplied, and in many colleges have to be served, to each scholar at each college meal.
In current a long time, although, milk consumption has quickly declined whereas nutritionists have more and more come to query milk essentialism. Most individuals of shade — together with one-fifth of white individuals — can’t even correctly digest it, and it’s not obligatory to the upkeep of a nutritious diet.
And it’s an unsustainable product, each environmentally and financially. In 2015, based on one estimate, a staggering 71 p.c of dairy farmers’ income was depending on authorities assist.
The varsity cafeteria is an important area wherein the talk round milk has performed out. The Nationwide Faculty Lunch Program accounts for a significant slice of milk gross sales and helps children purchase a style for the stuff — and the notion of its necessity — at an early age.
Williamson and others who wish to scale back faculties’ reliance on milk are combating towards a long time of indoctrination. However the resistance she confronted when proposing a easy protest reveals how tough it is going to be to interrupt dairy’s grip over the federal government — and the remainder of us.
The story of milk as a youngsters’s superfood begins within the early 1700s with a person within the London suburbs named Dr. Taylor, who claimed an all-milk weight loss program had cured his and lots of of his sufferers’ epilepsy. Taylor’s weight loss program by no means took off, nevertheless it did encourage one other physician: George Cheyne, a Scottish doctor, author, and non secular mystic.
Cheyne, a vegetarian who thought of cow’s milk as a type of center floor between meat and greens, really helpful an adaptation of Taylor’s all-milk weight loss program that included greens however no meat.
Based on Anne Mendelson, creator of Spoiled: The Fantasy of Milk as Superfood, Cheyne’s dietary routine was “certainly one of trendy England’s first movie star diets.” After he died, his perception in an “Edenic, innocent weight loss program,” as Mendelson put it, was picked up by different physicians and utilized in a brand new context: Humble cow’s milk got here to be thought of nature’s excellent meals for kids.
Our meals setting — what we’re served at college, in eating places, and on grocery retailer cabinets — is formed by federal coverage. By means of my years of reporting on animal agriculture, it grew to become evident that dairy, and particularly milk, has been foisted on us greater than another meals, and infrequently towards frequent sense. That shortly grew to become clear after tracing the historical past and advertising of milk because the 1700s.
“It acquired and by no means has misplaced a uniquely exalted standing as a life-giving proxy for mom’s milk, an idea not carefully associated to any dietary actuality,” Mendelson wrote. It’s an aberration she considers — together with the assumption that milk is an incomparably wholesome meals for adults — to be “in all probability one of many greatest errors within the historical past of contemporary vitamin.” (And to state the apparent however taken-for-granted reality of milk consumption, people are usually the one species that drinks the milk of one other species, and drinks milk previous infancy; cow’s milk is designed for calves and subsequently has a unique nutrient profile from human breast milk.)
As demand grew, the US authorities took maybe probably the most consequential actions within the historical past of milk: In 1862, it established the Division of Agriculture together with a slew of state and college agricultural analysis facilities throughout the nation.
The large analysis effort was, and stays at this time, dedicated to maximizing agricultural output from crops and livestock, together with dairy cows. Finally, crop scientists discovered protect hay and different grasses to feed cows in the course of the winter, and milk manufacturing moved from a seasonal to a year-round mannequin.
As America’s milk sector industrialized and output kicked into excessive gear, creating monumental surpluses, the dairy business discovered its greatest and most enduring base: schoolchildren.
In 1946, Congress established the Nationwide Faculty Lunch Program to subsidize college meals. The laws had a twin objective: to make sure ample energy and vitamin for kids and to offload agricultural surpluses, together with milk. Colleges have been required to serve college students one cup of complete milk at each meal. The regulation was a win-win for business: In a single day, it locked in arguably its greatest buyer, and shedding a few of its overproduction in flip raised costs for dairy producers.
Milk consumption peaked round this time and steadily fell within the following a long time attributable to a confluence of things, together with the invention of lactose intolerance amongst many individuals of shade within the Sixties and the rising recognition of soda, juice drinks, bottled water, and, ultimately, plant-based milks over the next a long time.
Within the Seventies and ’80s, there have been additionally rising issues over dietary saturated fats. The USDA — a longtime good friend to business — and the US Division of Well being and Human Companies dealt a painful blow to dairy’s celebrity vitamin standing when the first-ever federal dietary tips have been printed in 1980, wherein consultants suggested People to eat dairy and different animal fat moderately.
“The meat, milk, and egg individuals thought the USDA had stabbed them within the again,” Mark Hegsted, who oversaw human vitamin for the USDA on the time, stated later.
“They thought or assumed the first obligation of the USDA was to guard and promote agriculture,” not optimum human vitamin, Hegsted, who had begun to query milk’s dietary worth within the Fifties, later stated. He was assigned to a brand new place the following yr.
However issues rotated for Large Dairy just a few years later in what grew to become probably the most consequential regulation for milk in current a long time.
In 1983, Congress handed laws to create the Nationwide Dairy Promotion & Analysis Board, a semi-governmental group overseen by the USDA with the singular objective of accelerating dairy gross sales. In 1990, it created an equal entity only for milk. Each are funded by skimming off 15 to twenty cents from each 100 kilos of milk produced, which generates over $400 million yearly for a sprawling net of promoting and analysis organizations. (The USDA has created such entities for over 20 agricultural merchandise, however dairy is way and away the biggest.)
That pot of cash introduced us the Bought Milk? marketing campaign of the Nineteen Nineties and early 2000s, thought of one of many biggest promoting campaigns in historical past, from the nationwide Milk Processor Training Program, or MilkPEP, and the California Milk Processor Board. But it surely couldn’t stanch the bleeding. Milk consumption continued to say no and hit a new low in 2022. Over the a long time, intensive consolidation within the dairy business has pushed tens of 1000’s of farmers out of enterprise.
Faculty cafeterias have been important to serving to milk hold on; at this time, faculties alone buy round 8 p.c of the US fluid milk provide.
Lately, the cool, informal Bought Milk? slogan has been changed with the nagging, anxiety-tinged Gonna Want Milk, which has been focused squarely at Gen Z. The marketing campaign has featured newbie athletes, Olympians, and e-sports stars. It’s even paid actress Aubrey Plaza to make enjoyable of plant-based milks and star YouTuber MrBeast to speak up dairy sustainability. (Milk’s per-pound carbon footprint has gone down in current a long time, however plant-based milks are nonetheless vastly higher for the setting.)
MilkPEP did not reply to an interview request for this story.
The quasi-governmental dairy promotion board, Dairy Administration, Inc., has embedded dairy scientists in quick meals corporations to formulate new, extra-cheesy menu objects, like Taco Bell’s grilled cheese burrito, which comprises 10 occasions as a lot cheese as a typical taco, and has partnered with Domino’s to provide a specialty product for varsity lunch packages. Whereas milk gross sales have crashed in current a long time, these efforts have helped cheese gross sales soar.
Dairy can actually be a part of a nutritious diet. However incessant advertising and proactive initiatives to jam as a lot milk and cheese into faculties and quick meals eating places as potential conflicts with the federal dietary tips, which suggest limiting sodium, saturated fats, and added sugar.
Dairy Administration, Inc. didn’t reply to a request for remark in time for publication.
The USDA’s “vitamin and advertising missions and objectives don’t battle,” an company spokesperson stated in an e mail. “USDA doesn’t have a supporting function, however fairly an oversight function in business advertising efforts.”
“The vitamin neighborhood has purchased that dairy meals are semi-essential with out a lot essential considering,” stated Marion Nestle, a New York College vitamin professor and famend creator of quite a few books on the meals business’s affect on vitamin analysis and coverage.
That’s begun to alter, with some vitamin leaders difficult business’s efforts to foist dairy onto customers and children.
Questioning milk essentialism
Regardless of the shortage of proof — and the truth that so many People have problem digesting milk — the USDA, the dairy business, and lots of within the vitamin neighborhood proceed to repeat the narrative that we should eat copious quantities of dairy, citing its excessive calcium ranges, to construct sturdy bones and stop fractures later in life.
Through the Nineteen Nineties and early 2000s, dairy business representatives even warned of a “calcium disaster” and pushed a “3-a-day” servings promoting marketing campaign. Finally, they bought their want: In 2005, the federal government upped its really helpful every day servings of dairy merchandise from two or three, relying on the age, to three for everybody.
However the quantity of calcium we want is in dispute, and it doesn’t want to come back from dairy.
“Sure, you want calcium for wholesome bones, there is no query about that,” stated Erica Kenney, an assistant professor of public well being vitamin at Harvard College. However there’s a mismatch, Kenney stated, between the accepted knowledge on milk, calcium, and bone density, and what the scientific literature says.
Kenney pointed to a 2020 paper printed within the New England Journal of Drugs merely titled “Milk and Well being,” co-authored by two of her Harvard colleagues: preeminent vitamin scholar and longtime dairy skeptic Walter Willett and pediatrics professor David Ludwig.
Within the paper, they type via a long time of analysis to conclude that prime milk consumption throughout adolescence and maturity doesn’t scale back the danger of hip fracture later in life.
“Low dairy consumption is clearly appropriate with low charges of hip fracture,” the authors write. Excessive milk consumption throughout adolescence might even “contribute to the excessive incidence of fractures.” That’s evident in elements of Europe, the place among the most milk-hungry international locations have the very best charges of hip fractures. In the meantime, a lot of Asia experiences low charges of hip fractures and consumes little milk.
Calcium wants should not common and may be influenced by a number of dietary elements. For instance, excessive Vitamin D consumption helps the physique take up calcium, whereas excessive protein consumption excretes calcium — what’s often called the “calcium paradox,” which might assist to elucidate these variations between Europe and Asia.
It’s price cautioning that a lot of the analysis on calcium, bone well being, and fracture threat is correlative, not causal — as is the case with a lot vitamin science. However the authors consider US authorities calcium suggestions — that are primarily based on research with “severe limitations” — are too excessive. For all age ranges, US suggestions are a lot increased than the UK’s, and for some age ranges, they’re increased than these of the World Well being Group.
Nonetheless a lot calcium one requires, Kenney famous, it doesn’t want to come back from milk. Different calcium-rich meals embody nuts, beans, lentils, tofu, sardines, seeds, and darkish leafy greens. Calcium is only one of a number of elements that determines bone well being; exercising, avoiding smoking, minimizing alcohol consumption, and getting loads of vitamin D may also help construct sturdy bones, too.
Total, dairy’s influence on well being outcomes is blended. Its consumption is correlated with better threat of some cancers, particularly prostate most cancers, however is inversely related to the danger of colorectal most cancers. In a single giant, multi-decade examine, dairy consumption was related to decrease mortality than processed pink meat and eggs however considerably increased mortality than plant-based protein.
Willett has stated milk is non-obligatory — as has the American Medical Affiliation — as long as you’re following a high-quality weight loss program, and Harvard’s Wholesome Consuming Plate limits dairy to 1 to 2 servings per day. The three servings per day advice, in Willett and Ludwig’s view, is not scientifically justified.
“The present version of the Dietary Pointers, the 2020-2025 version, is predicated on the preponderance of present scientific and medical information,” a USDA spokesperson stated in an e mail, including that folks can meet dietary suggestions with fortified soy merchandise.
The rules’ advice might also stem from an inherent battle within the USDA’s function. “The USDA has a twin mission of offering wholesome meals to youngsters and supporting American farmers,” the company’s web site says.
“These issues should not all the time essentially going to be completely aligned,” Kenney stated.
Ending the USDA’s milk-crazed period
Marielle Williamson’s incapability to easily criticize dairy at college make clear the business’s affect in class cafeterias. However she’s not alone in dealing with absurd USDA guidelines that govern college meals.
A few decade in the past, it got here to USDA officers’ consideration that some faculties in Oklahoma and Kansas had hung posters within the cafeteria informing college students that they may select water as a substitute of the milk that was supplied to them.
Children throw away an astonishing 41 p.c of milk in faculties, based on USDA analysis, so the indicators may very well be interpreted as an innocuous technique of decreasing meals waste. However the dairy business wouldn’t tolerate it.
Based on paperwork obtained by PCRM via a Freedom of Info Act request, in 2016 an government from the Worldwide Dairy Meals Affiliation (IDFA) complained to the USDA undersecretary that its members “have reported declining milk consumption in class districts which are encouraging college students to take free bottled water as a substitute of milk.”
“It’s applicable for faculties to supply water — they need to offer water to college students, however actually not in a approach that conflicts with providing milk,” Matt Herrick, a spokesperson for IDFA, instructed me.
In 2018, the USDA despatched a “clarification” memo to each little one vitamin state director, warning them that water supplied to college students “shouldn’t be made accessible in any method that interferes with number of parts of the reimbursable meal, together with low-fat or fat-free milk.” The emails obtained via FOIA present that a part of the memo was drafted by two giant dairy corporations — Prairie Farms and an organization it owns a majority stake in and manages, Hiland Dairy — which had additionally complained to the USDA in regards to the matter. Internally, the USDA dedicated to “improve monitoring of the beverage advertising practices throughout the nation.”
“Concerning the posters talked about, our main concern was to make clear the dietary choices accessible to college students,” a Hiland Dairy spokesperson wrote in an e mail. “Offering correct details about milk’s advantages and different hydration choices like water helps college students and their households make knowledgeable decisions. Our objective has all the time been to assist insurance policies that promote youngsters’s well being, to not overreach or diminish different precious parts of their weight loss program.”
Prairie Farms did not reply to an interview request for this story. The USDA didn’t reply to a query referring to the 2018 memo in time for publication.
So, what would a extra reasoned, evidence-based milk coverage seem like? For starters, faculties shouldn’t be required to serve it. It additionally shouldn’t be served at each meal. And when it’s served, college students ought to have a selection about whether or not to take it, stated Nestle. Proper now, round 20 p.c of colleges require elementary and center college college students to take milk day by day.
A USDA spokesperson stated that the company encourages faculties to supply, fairly than mandatorily serve, milk to “scale back meals waste and provides college students extra decisions with their meals.”
Kenney agreed with Nestle that milk ought to all the time be non-obligatory, particularly as a result of lactose intolerance is frequent amongst individuals of shade, who now make up a majority of public college attendees. Milk can also be the commonest allergen amongst youngsters.
“Loads of children of shade are having milk served to them they usually cannot actually eat it or digest it comfortably and with out getting sick,” Kenney stated. The ADD SOY Act, launched within the US Home and Senate, would develop entry to soy milk in faculties; at the moment, college students face a burdensome course of to get it — one other situation Williamson wished to lift consciousness about in her college.
“USDA acknowledges that the construction in place may be burdensome for households who want to request a substitution or modification for fluid milk, whether or not for non-disability or incapacity causes,” an company spokesperson stated. (The USDA stated that lactose intolerance could also be thought of a incapacity.)
“USDA has acted inside its authority to make the method much less burdensome by broadening the scope of well being professionals who can present documentation to assist a baby’s want for an inexpensive modification for a incapacity … USDA doesn’t have the authority to require that milk substitutes be made accessible for all college students nor to offer extra funding to encourage faculties to take action. This may require Congressional motion.”
Many vitamin teams, medical consultants, and fogeys additionally wish to see additional limits or an outright ban on sugary flavored milks, like chocolate and strawberry milk, in faculties. The USDA thought of eradicating them from elementary and center faculties however lately declined to take action after dairy corporations dedicated to decreasing added sugar in flavored milk.
We might even be sensible to rethink federal dietary tips on milk. One not-so-radical transfer can be to cease classifying dairy as its personal meals group, which Canada did in 2019.
On the US authorities’s MyPlate, a glass of milk is the beverage of selection, however in Canada, “the beverage of selection is water,” stated Vasanti Malik, an assistant professor of vitamin on the College of Toronto. “Dairy nonetheless displaying as much as be really helpful to be consumed every day [in the US], that is the place I feel there’s some controversy or there’s not consensus.”
Traditionally, among the consultants who serve on the dietary tips committee have acquired funding from dairy corporations and Dairy Administration, Inc., the dairy promoting and analysis board overseen by the USDA. This stays the case for the committee advising the upcoming 2025-2030 tips and dairy vitamin analysis extra broadly.
Large Dairy places large {dollars} into ensuring we’re bombarded with their merchandise
Any reform efforts, whether or not in faculties or the federal dietary tips, shall be powerful.
For some 160 years, business and authorities have touted milk as a handy, low-cost vessel for key vitamins, they usually’re not incorrect. However that speaking level masks the truth that milk is just so handy and reasonably priced as a result of the USDA, with taxpayer {dollars}, has made it so via intensive, sustained investments. On the similar time, the business has invested in authorities, giving hundreds of thousands of {dollars} to members of Congress yearly.
It additionally invests in authorities personnel. Tom Vilsack first served as President Obama’s USDA secretary and left in the course of the Trump administration to function president of the US Dairy Export Council — of which the USDA has oversight — till President Biden appointed him as USDA secretary. Karla Thieman, certainly one of Vilsack’s chiefs of employees throughout his first time period, lobbied for quite a few dairy corporations and associations within the years after she left the company. Many of the lobbyists from the wealthiest dairy teams previously labored within the federal authorities.
Firms and organizations which have giant stakes in dairy additionally handsomely fund the nongovernmental however influential Faculty Diet Affiliation (SNA). Cargill, Dairy Farmers of America, Danone, Domino’s Pizza, Land O’Lakes, Kraft Heinz, and the Nationwide Dairy Council are all “patron” degree donors, the very best degree of assist, which requires a $15,000 donation. The program is “designed to extend your group’s interplay with college vitamin professionals,” based on the affiliation. “As an SNA Patron, your organization will take pleasure in better publicity and entry to high school foodservice professionals nationwide.”
“Each firm that sells to varsities desires to promote extra, and that’s actually all you must know,” stated Nestle. “It’s actually that easy. They’ll do no matter they will to get these merchandise into the varsity, they usually’ll do no matter they will to cease something that stops them from getting these merchandise into the faculties.”
