Dairy and Government: An Unhealthy Union
Over the weekend I read an enlightening, if disturbing, article in the New York Times about cheese. Everyone can agree that cheese tastes delicious, but with its high concentration of saturated fat and close to 100 calories per square inch (and really who stops at a square inch of cheese?), it’s a treat best consumed in moderation.
However, it turns out we eat about three times more cheese than we did in 1970—we also weigh an average of 30 pounds more than we did back then too. And while the United States Agriculture Department—a government agency—is fighting obesity with one hand, it turns out it’s using the other to shove cheese down our throats.
You see, through an organization called Dairy Management, the government is actually funding large-scale campaigns to get Americans to eat more cheese. Dairy Management is a marketing creation of the Agriculture Department that does things like pay $12 million to promote Domino’s Pizza’s new cheesier pie: with 40 percent more cheese, a slice of this stuff contains over two thirds of the daily recommendation for saturated fat.
So why is the government pushing Domino’s on us? Some explanations:
Urged on by government warnings about saturated fat, Americans have been moving toward low-fat milk for decades, leaving a surplus of whole milk and milk fat. Yet the government, through Dairy Management, is engaged in an effort to find ways to get dairy back into Americans’ diets, primarily through cheese.
Then there’s this:
In 2007, the department highlighted Pizza Hut’s Cheesy Bites pizza, Wendy’s “dual Double Melt sandwich concept,” and Burger King’s Cheesy Angus Bacon cheeseburger and TenderCrisp chicken sandwich. “Both featured two slices of American cheese, a slice of pepper jack and a cheesy sauce,” the department said.
These efforts, the department reported, helped generate a “cheese sales growth of nearly 30 million pounds.”
So once again we are faced with an insurmountable irony, not dissimilar from the one we find in the beauty industry: The very people who are supposedly policing consumer health are also playing ad agency to the crappy food that’s making us sick. Conflict of interest much?
What’s more is that they also seem to be actively deceiving consumers—sounds familiar again—with false health claims. Dairy Management mounted a major campaign around the idea that cheese actually helps with weight loss, despite the fact that research they funded couldn’t even support such claims.
I highly suggest reading the whole article, but suffice to say this stuff seriously pisses me off. I’m not mad at cheese, but how do you think kids growing up on Domino’s new “Wisconsin” pizza—the super-cheesy slice that Dairy Management helped conceived and promote—are going to turn out? With obesity rates already through the roof, and the cost of treating it as daunting, it’s not hard to guess.
ARGH. Great post. This cheese story is making me crazy… both because USDA has behaved so badly and because I love cheese so darn much.
And I must admit, in my quest to eat less factory farmed meat, I’ve been eating way more cheese — because my grocery store sells a heck of a lot more cheese than it does grass-fed beef. Now I sure understand why!
Will be interesting to watch the dairy industry scrambling over how to handle this one…
I agree. I wonder if they’ll put out some kind of official response or just ignore.
Americans are know for (and not in such flattering terms) unnecessarily adding cheese to everything. It is sort of an international joke.
As I child, I never liked cheese or anything else that left that greasy feeling on the roof of your mouth after I ate it. As an adult, I could really take it or leave it. There are absolutely delicious cheeses out there, don’t get me wrong, but the fat content is a real turn off.
Although I agree about the amount of cheese consumption, etc. in this country, the real commodity that is pushed on us is corn. Michael Pollan’s book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, explains this much better than I could, but essentially corn is everywhere, in everything, even things we don’t eat.
For example, cows are not biologically designed to eat corn, but they are fed corn because it is cheap and plentiful (overproduced and subsidised), which is one of the reasons that cows require antibiotics in the first place. They aren’t designed to digest it – remember all that two stomachs stuff you were taught in school. The latest and not so greatest trend is to start feeding farm-raised fish corn. I eat grass-fed locally raised (my hats off to all the vegans out there, I wish I could do it), but many people do not have that option. We are destroying our food supply. Don’t get me started on Monsanto.
CG, I’m in total agreement. The corn story articulated in Omnivore’s Dilemma, as well as in documentary FOOD Inc. (this movie is a must-see: http://www.foodincmovie.com/), is beyond horrifying. But it looks like something pretty similar is happening in dairy… As with corn, they need to get rid of their surplus and as with corn they’re feeding it to us in the form of added cheese to fast food favorites. Makes me so mad! :)
The Complete Guide to Chinese Health and Medicine — This book opened up my eyes So much to all the rejections our body gives to Cow’s Milk. It is, simply put, not meant to be consumed by us.
I was born and grew up thinking you needed milk for Calcium consumption — guess what? for us to be able to drink the milk, and consume the cheeses, they need to be pasteurized to kill any bacteria. Turns out that, after the pasteurization process, this calcium is barely there. This is why you always find the milk cartons with “Added Vitamin A, D and Calcium” or other additives.
I consume Goat cheese (the book explains, read and you’ll see why). I do bend it over at times, and have a slice of cheese on a sandwich I’m craving, but I’ve stopped consuming milk altogether, and am often willing to ask for my dishes to be “w/o any cream or cheese please”.
Yes! The government and industry keep telling us that consuming such things are good… but Cow’s milk was not meant to be consumed by HUMANS! and we reject it, every time! in ways such as: Acne, rashes (anywhere in your body), clogged pores and arteries, itchy patches -constant, if you consume it everyday-. This goes for anything coming from the cows.
I’m not vegan. I just became aware of the damages. And guess what? I had those rashes, and breakouts, and itchy patches I could not understand… as soon as I stopped consuming milk (everyday) and cheeses often (4-5 times x week), all of the above disappeared.
I adore cheese I think its my favourite thing ever. Yes I am that lame. What I do is just buy ridiculously good, but also expensive cheese and the let the act of being a broke university student temper my cheese consumption. One kind of cheese that I do find beneficial to eat every day is locally produced organic cottage cheese. Thanks for the great site.
*sigh*. You know, I’m not happy with how government subsidies work, and of all things they shouldn’t be pushing fast food that’s DESIGNED to make us fat, but you really can’t point at cheese and scream “EVIL!” We’ve all been sold on the low-fat high-carb no-saturated-fats for years, and that’s not helping. In fact, it’s probably making us all sick and depressed. The book I’m reading now has years of research into the fact that we all NEED some saturated fat for our brain’s sake (as a part of a high protein, high veggie balanced diet), and if you’re not milk-intolerant then cheese is a good way to get it and some needed protein into your diet. Cheese, in moderation, is a good thing.
This is somewhat of a side bar, but it is something interesting that I read about cheese in the book “Skinny Bitch” ( a book that is very inspiring to become vegan).
Page 127:
“All dairy products contain casein, but cheese has the highest concentration. In fact, cheese contains far more casein than is naturally found in cow’s milk. It also has phenylethylamine (PEA), an amphetamine -like chemical. When we kid around and say we are addicted to cheese, it’s not a joke- it’s true.. Casein even finds it’s way into soy cheese.”
I was already vegetarian before reading this book, and after, I decided to mostly give up dairy to. Although I didn’t think I had an low energy issues prior, I have to say, after a week I definitely felt a difference for the better. It took some time to adjust to rice milk in my coffee, and I traded my daily yogurt for one that is made w/coconut milk. I like to bake once in a while, and I still use eggs and milk if called for in a recipe. I had a some milk left after baking something so I used it in my coffee. I was quite surprised that it didn’t taste as good as I remembered.