How old is the term "coconut milk"?

In the New Republic this week, Emily Atkin reviews the renewed Trump administration interest in restricting the word "milk" on labels for products such as "soy milk" and "coconut milk."

“As the [FDA] Commissioner noted, the dictionary definition of the word ‘milk’ does include coming from nuts, and this is not a new concept,” the Plant Based Food Association said in an emailed statement. Indeed, Gottlieb on Tuesday acknowledged that “if you open up a dictionary, it talks about milk coming from a lactating animal or a nut.” This is one of several reasons why non-dairy milk companies reject the idea that they’re misleading consumers.

The argument made me wonder how old is the use of "milk" for products other than cow's milk? Here are a couple entries from Merriam-Webster (which seemed to require sign-in after the first few lookups):

• Almond milk (14th century).
• Coconut milk (1698).

I also looked up 100 Bible verses with the word "milk" in English translation (Hebrew and Greek may be another matter). For the dairy industry, the good news is that most verses did refer to excretions from a lactating mammal. Isaiah provided the most metaphorical use I could find: "You shall suck the milk of nations; you shall nurse at the breast of kings." And the dairy industry may hope that Isaiah was just being aspirational in some of his comments: "He who has no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price."

Others have recently pointed out the many names of food products that could get caught up in an overly literal FDA rulebook, if it were applied consistently.

• Hamburgers (contain no ham ... and aren't from Hamburg either).
• Hot dogs (contain no dog).

The comment period for the FDA proposal will soon open, and I suspect there will be plenty of submissions on this topic.

Where are the dairy checkoff reports to Congress?

The fluid milk and dairy checkoff programs are required by law each year to submit a Report to Congress. But these reports have gone missing since 2012.

Under the federal government's authority, the public-private checkoff programs collect several hundred million dollars each year in mandatory assessments from dairy producers, to be used for industry projects and marketing initiatives such as "milk mustache" posters, "Got Milk" ads, Domino's and Pizza Hut marketing partnerships, and other fast food industry collaborations. The USDA reports play a key role in transparency for these federal programs.

The most recent report on USDA's website is the 2013 report covering the 2012 checkoff activities and budgets. When the annual reports stopped appearing, I assumed USDA had simply delayed sharing them on the website. This blog first pointed out their absence in 2015, more than two years ago. Finally, in answer to my Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request this summer, USDA told me in July that it would not share any documents, because the department had never published the reports or submitted them to Congress as required.

This morning, the lead story by Catherine Boudreau for Politico's Morning Agriculture covers this issue.

The Agriculture Department hasn't published legally required annual financial reports on a $400 million dairy research and promotional fund for the past four years, lending ammunition to farmers and other groups pushing for more transparency in checkoff programs.

A USDA spokeswoman told POLITICO the reports on the dairy checkoff are in the final clearance stage and should be posted within the month. The 2016 report is still in the works, she added. But the agency declined to explain the yearslong delay. In July, USDA turned down a Freedom of Information Act request for the documents from a Tufts University professor, saying that it had no records to send because the reports hadn't been published.

One of the best things about the annual reports, when they were still being published, was the independent evaluations by leading agricultural economists such as Harry Kaiser at Cornell and Oral Capps and Gary Williams at Texas A & M. At the 2016 annual meeting for AAEA, Kaiser and I organized a lively discussion of checkoff programs and nutrition.

The Organization for Competitive Markets (OCM), which advocates for reform of checkoff programs, also wrote about this today. The OCM points out that former Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack now is the CEO of the checkoff-funded U.S. Dairy Export Council.

I share the view of others quoted in the Politico article, suggesting that Congress should strengthen oversight over these programs and make both their finances and activities more transparent.

Major media spread strange dairy checkoff story about Americans thinking chocolate milk comes from brown cows

The Washington Post on June 15 reports the story, good for a laugh at stupid Americans and their ignorance about where their food comes from:

Seven percent of all American adults believe that chocolate milk comes from brown cows, according to a nationally representative online survey commissioned by the Innovation Center of U.S. Dairy.

It was then covered by a dozen other media sites, but the reporting is mostly weak. The whole thing seems like an industry organization's attempt at humor that went awry when it was picked up and taken seriously by more major media than intended.

None of the stories that I read noted that the Innovation Center of U.S. Dairy is a checkoff organization -- part of the network of dairy and fluid milk checkoff organizations loosely overseen by USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service and funded by more than $100 million each year in mandatory assessments that the federal government forces dairy farmers to pay into a common fund for marketing, promotion, and other purposes. The Innovation Center has an interest in educating Americans about real dairy products, so they think well of sweetened dairy beverages (chocolate milk is real milk) and don't think so well of soy milk and other non-dairy alternatives.

The Washington Post and other media imply that 7% of American adults are so dim that they think chocolate milk comes from brown cows, because chocolate is the same color as the cow. Before accepting this account of the survey result, we should all demand to read the actual questions and response frequencies, because this may be an exaggeration. For example, many cows actually are brown, so if the survey question asked whether chocolate milk can come from brown cows, a large fraction of Americans might answer "yes" -- and they would be right. If the survey question was at the end of a long survey and many people were clicking quickly by that point, it is easy to imagine 7% of respondents clicking this response at random. The context would clarify.

But none of the stories report the actual survey questions. Hilary Hanson at Huffington Post did better than most reporters in noting this:

One problem ― it’s tough to gauge the survey’s reliability. It’s possible, for instance, that some people were simply trying to be funny while answering the question.... The center, though, was unable to provide a full copy of the survey. And when asked about the survey’s methodology, McComb only said it was “conducted online.”

If you read the NPR version of the story, an interview by Audie Cornish, it sounds as if the interviewee Jean Ragalie-Carr is imprecise about the actual content of the question, leaving a listener to wonder if there was a multiple choice question with non-sensical options.

JEAN RAGALIE-CARR: When we asked them, where does chocolate milk come from, they indicated that they thought it came from brown cows.

SHAPIRO: Seven percent of Americans thought that.

CORNISH: Jean Ragalie-Carr is president of the National Dairy Council, which commissioned the survey. She says they put that question to a thousand people and gave them several options for how to answer.

RAGALIE-CARR: Well, there was brown cows or black-and-white cows, or they didn't know.

Cornish did quote another person with a bit more skepticism, but without really questioning the initial dubious story line:

CORNISH: Registered dietitian Lisa Cimperman says while she thinks some people were having a little fun with their answer, she's also not surprised that some might think chocolate milk comes from a brown cow.

Oddly, NPR reported interviewing the president of the National Dairy Council, which also is a checkoff organization (a fact that many Americans probably don't realize). But, the Washington Post article now has a correction at the bottom:

Update: This story originally said the survey in question was commissioned by the National Dairy Council. It was actually commissioned by the Innovation Center of U.S. Dairy, its sister organization. The Post regrets the error.

This update made me wonder if one checkoff organization (the National Dairy Council) requested a little more distance from a statistic that another checkoff organization (the Innovation Center of U.S. Dairy) was promoting.

The media should go a little slower in sharing a self-serving dairy industry meme, and we should all wait for more information about this survey before taking this result seriously.

An Idaho farmer reflects on health, advertising, and the dairy checkoff

USDA https://www.flickr.com/photos/usdagov/ CC BY-ND.

Rebecca Lampman lives and works with her husband and three children on their 250 cow dairy farm in Bruneau, Idaho. In addition to the cows, the family has an assortment of other farm animals that they enjoy. Rebecca also writes regularly for The Progressive Dairyman. Her published articles and a link to the farm's Facebook page can be found at the Feminist Farmer. 

All That I Have I Owe to Udders: Checking Out the Checkoff

 By Rebecca Lampman

Our dairy is forced to participate in the porking of the populous. I regularly find articles in the local farm paper with titles such as, “Dairymen’s Check Off Dollars Do Double Duty”. These articles are fed to farmers to explain how partnerships between fast food and the dairy checkoff program have fattened our wallet, causing some to smile. As a dairywoman and mother, however, I frown, knowing that our farm participates in America’s obesity crisis. I love dairy products and believe they can be part of a healthy diet. What I don’t love is being forced to pay an assessment that is used to encourage Americans to over-consume dairy products that are a major ingredient in many processed foods.

Despite having farmed for 20 years, it wasn’t until attending an industry meeting that I began to understand how this mandatory dairy checkoff program started. In the early 1980s, America was swimming in milk, so Congress passed the Dairy Product Stabilization Act -- a federal program to encourage consumption of dairy in an effort to deal with over production -- paid for by the farmer in the form of a mandatory assessment or tax.

I learned the “Got Milk” ads that the checkoff program used to sponsor are yesterday’s news. The dairy industry now invests our checkoff dollars in partnerships with food companies like Domino’s, McDonald’s, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut -- all restaurants I avoid out of concern for my family’s health. I realized that good news for the industry was bad news for our nation’s waistline.

After the meeting I couldn’t help but think, “Wait a minute. How can we as an industry tout the health benefits of dairy on one hand, and on the other, partner with fast food to produce some of the unhealthiest foods, in order to promote increased sales of our product?”

I have since been more acutely aware of the many ways in which my product is used and marketed with my money. A bizarre partnership with Coca Cola has been announced. McDonald’s is switching from margarine to butter.

And what about those articles telling us how grateful we should be for the checkoff program? Why is our support courted so heavily? Is someone concerned that farmers will begin to see that we are part of an industrial food and marketing system that is contributing to the obesity crisis in America, a crisis that touches so many of our families in personal ways in the form of diseases like diabetes, cancer, and heart disease?

Industry leaders may dismiss my concerns with the argument that people have the freedom to make any food choices they want, and that the dairy industry and its partners are simply supplying the public with the kind of food that they demand.

If it is all about personal choice and marketing has no influence on what is consumed, then why must I pay 15 cents for every 100 pounds of milk our cows give for dairy product promotion? If personal choice is what is so vital to protect and preserve, then I would like the freedom as a dairy farm to choose not to participate in a dairy checkoff program that contributes to obesity.

Our dairy farm is our life. My family believes that I am worrying about something that I cannot change. My husband and I have spent twenty years working with our children to build our farm. We enjoy dairy products and hope to continue to provide them for those that would like to enjoy dairy in healthy forms and amounts.

The sign on our barn says, “All that we have we owe to udders.” It is true. Our farm is about animals and people. I owe it to others to share the misgivings I have about the system of which I am a part. Our food system doesn’t have to remain stagnant or entrenched in its practices. We can make this better.

Where is the dairy checkoff Report to Congress?

Each year, USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) sends an official Report to Congress summarizing the activities of the dairy checkoff program. Through this program, milk and dairy producers must pay a mandatory assessment -- like a tax -- to semi-public federal checkoff boards that use the funds for advertising and promotion.

As this blog has reported in the past, the annual reports make lively reading, laying bare the program's ambitions for raising dairy consumption through healthy and unhealthy methods alike. For example, in Feb 2014, we noted that the report described the program's partnerships with Domino's and other restaurant chains to get Americans -- who already consume astonishing amounts of pizza -- to yet further increase their average pizza consumption. The pizza partnerships appear in tension with the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which also is overseen by USDA (jointly with the Department of Health and Human Services).

Recently, the AMS website has been redesigned. The dairy checkoff annual reports that formerly were posted there can no longer be found, at least for now. USDA may be intending to repost these reports as the website redesign proceeds. [Update Aug 20: AMS writes by email today that a link is now available to the archived reports from the website's pages for the fluid milk checkoff program and the dairy checkoff program. Thanks!]

Moreover, even though the annual Report to Congress is required under dairy checkoff program rules, AMS has not released a report for any year of program activities since 2012. The most recent report I have was a 2013 report covering the 2012 activities. When they become available, I look forward to reading the reports covering 2013 and 2014 activities. 

Dairy farmers may wonder at the scarcity and untimeliness of transparent information about the hundreds of millions of dollars they are forced to pay into these advertising and promotion programs. 

Yet, perhaps it is better to be a dairy farmer than a pork or beef producer. The other leading checkoff programs have no independent USDA Report to Congress at all. The only annual reports for beef and pork come straight from the checkoff programs themselves. In my experience, the dairy checkoff Report to Congress from AMS has always been more frank than the internal annual reports from the other programs, so the lack of timely posting seems like a loss for sound U.S. food policy-making.

Friedman School Wednesday seminar December 3: The secret life of cheese

Tufts biology professor Benjamin Wolfe will speak about "The Secret Life of Cheese" tomorrow at the Friedman School's Wednesday seminar.

Wolfe's work with Rachel Dutton, published in the journal Cell, was summarized earlier this year in Wired. The article discusses the remarkable connection between microbes in cheese and their possible ocean origins:

Benjamin Wolfe and Rachel Dutton ... recently brought 137 cheeses from 10 countries into Dutton’s lab at Harvard University for genetic analysis. In a paper published July 17 in Cell, they and colleagues describe their findings, which include a few surprises—like the presence of bacteria commonly found in marine environments on cheeses made nowhere near an ocean.

As a sometime amateur cheese maker with very mixed success, I'm looking forward to learning from this talk.

Report criticizes marketing for some dairy foods

Food industry critic and reform advocate Michele Simon this week released a new report sharply critical of marketing practices for certain dairy foods including pizza and sugar sweetened dairy drinks. Most of this marketing effort originates with the federal government's fluid milk and dairy checkoff boards, which are semi-public government-endorsed programs that are funded through a tax or mandatory assessment on dairy producers.

My view of this issue is not anti-dairy, nor do I favor government restrictions on private-sector advertising for dairy products. Yet, surely reasonable people can agree on this: any federal government-sponsored producer boards, and any marketing funded using the federal government's power of taxation, ought to be consistent with the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. The checkoff marketing should not be for Pizza Hut or for sugar-sweetened drinks. In these times of major health crisis and rising public sector health costs, we should expect the foods and beverages marketed in the government's own voice to be healthy.

For readers following up on this story, here are some related links from a diversity of official and non-official sources.

• The U.S. Food Policy blog post on this topic in February.
• The annual report to Congress from USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS), describing the fluid milk and dairy checkoff programs. Although the report is annual, the most recent report online appears to be 2011.
• A report from USDA's Agricultural Research Service (ARS) earlier this year about pizza consumption in the United States.
• The dairy checkoff program's website describing its partnerships with Domino's, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and McDonald's, with an online video titled "McDonald's thanks America's dairy farmers."
• A 2010 article by Kim Severson in the New York Times about sugar-sweetened milk in school meal programs.

USDA reports on pizza consumption and on dairy checkoff program initiatives to increase pizza demand

USDA's Agricultural Research Service (ARS) today released a new report on the role of pizza in American diets. ARS researcher Donna Rhodes and colleagues found that an astonishing 13% of the U.S. population consumed pizza on any given day, based on the most recent years of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES).

For this large population -- more than 1 out of 8 Americans -- who consumed pizza in a particular day:

• Pizza accounted for 25% (among kids) and 29% (among adults) of daily food energy intake. More than a quarter of all calorie intake was pizza.
• Pizza accounted for 33% (among kids) and 39% (among adults) of daily saturated fat intake. Compared with foods in general, pizza is much heavier in saturated fat.
• Pizza accounted for 33% (among kids) and 38% (among adults) of sodium intake. Compared with foods in general, pizza is much heavier in sodium.

In recent years, USDA's dairy checkoff program has spent many millions of dollars to increase pizza consumption among U.S. children and adults. Using the federal government's taxation powers, the checkoff program collects a mandatory assessment of 15 cents on every hundredweight of milk that is sold for use as fluid milk or dairy products. The total mandatory assessment in 2011 was $104 million for fluid milk and $98 million for other dairy products, according to the most recent annual USDA Report to Congress. These expenditures are many times greater than federal spending on promoting fruits and vegetables, whole grains, or any of the other foods for which the Dietary Guidelines recommend increased consumption. Each semi-governmental checkoff program is managed by a board of producers appointed by the Secretary of Agriculture, and all expenditures are approved by USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS). Much of the actual activity is carried out by Dairy Management Inc. (DMI), a dairy industry organization. The checkoff program goal is to provide increased economic demand for dairy producers.

The USDA Report to Congress found that the economic payoff to producers is greater for cheese marketing efforts than for fluid milk marketing efforts. The report concluded:

• For every $1 that the checkoff program spends on increasing demand for fluid milk, farmers get $3.95 in increased revenue.
• For every $1 that the checkoff program spends on increasing demand for cheese, farmers get $4.43 in increased revenue.

That differential payoff is unsurprising. During the recent years of checkoff program operation, the USDA report charted the following trend in fluid milk consumption:

Meanwhile, the USDA report charted the following trend in cheese consumption:

Pizza accounts for a large fraction of the increased cheese consumption, so the Report to Congress emphasized the value for producers of partnering with fast-food restaurant chains, especially Domino's Pizza:

On average, expenditures on marketing and cheese promotion were $12.0 million during the period. Owing to partnerships with the pizza industry, notably Domino’s Pizza, expenditures on cheese increased from the fourth quarter of 2008 to the end of 2011.

DMI spent over $35 million over three years in partnership activities with Domino’s. The Domino's relationship accounted for nearly three-quarters of DMI’s overall promotion expenditures in the cheese category over the 2009 to 2011 period.

According to the Report to Congress, Patrick Doyle, President and CEO of Domino's Pizza, explained why the support from the federal government's dairy checkoff program was so beneficial to the company, as follows:

“DMI support has allowed us to focus some advertising dollars on areas we would not have considered otherwise. The Wisconsin 6 Cheese pizza has twice the cheese of a regular pizza, but we had neither developed nor advertised such a product. DMI helped fund the research and media to launch this product”

The Report to Congress argued that the USDA-supported dairy checkoff program's pizza partnerships increased cheese consumption:

The promotional activities with Domino’s included new product lines, use of more cheese than had been provided on similar items in the Domino's chain before the partnership, and the introduction of specialty cheeses into the company’s recipes. In short, the assistance of dairy dollars was instrumental in positively affecting the pizza category, a category that is very important to the dairy industry.

Every dairy checkoff partnership must be approved by USDA. Every marketing message has official legal standing as "government speech" (because, otherwise, courts would see the mandatory assessment as a misuse of the federal government's taxation powers). The checkoff partnerships undermine USDA's standing as a credible voice in promoting dietary guidance for Americans, and they must be a terrible embarrassment for the many people at USDA who seek to promote healthful eating.

Many Americans find pizza to be an enjoyable treat, but, from a nutritional perspective, it is a dreadful choice of major food staple. It is understandable that food companies may promote pizza with their own money, but it is a travesty that the federal government should contribute so heavily to this effort, while neglecting other important nutrition goals.

Dairy industry petitions FDA to make it easier to flavor milk with aspartame

The International Dairy Foods Association (IDFA) and the National Milk Producers Federation (NMPF) have petitioned FDA to modify the standard of identity for milk, permitting companies to add a non-calorie sweetener without additional labeling.

The petition proposes to allow dairy companies to add the non-nutritive sweetener aspartame to milk, without being required to label the milk as "low-calorie" or "low-sugar."  Currently, aspartame is allowed in milk (just as in diet soda), but such milk must be labeled to let the consumer know.

It appears the dairy industry is especially interested in marketing low-calorie flavored milk through child nutrition programs.  The FDA summary of the petition explains:

IDFA and NMPF state that the proposed amendments would promote more healthful eating practices and reduce childhood obesity by providing for lower-calorie flavored milk products. They state that lower-calorie flavored milk would particularly benefit school children who, according to IDFA and NMPF, are more inclined to drink flavored milk than unflavored milk at school....

IDFA and NMPF argue that nutrient content claims such as "reduced calorie'' are not attractive to children, and maintain that consumers can more easily identify the overall nutritional value of milk products that are flavored with non-nutritive sweeteners if the labels do not include such claims.

My view is that milk with aspartame should be labeled as clearly different from regular milk.  The push to market sweetened milk through child nutrition programs is a debatable public health nutrition strategy, whether the milk is sweetened with sugar or aspartame.  The drive for sweetened milk seems like dairy industry marketing as much as sound nutrition program design.  It may be better to let children cultivate their taste for less-sweetened foods and beverages.  Although reasonable people may differ on that point, it would be unwise to settle the matter by allowing sales of aspartame-sweetened milk without noticeable labeling.

You can submit comments to FDA (by May 21) and read comments from others here. Some comments already submitted are strongly opposed.

Hat tip to Ashley Colpaart.

Farm Foundation to address dairy policy at National Press Club

The Farm Foundation will hold a forum on dairy policy February 6 at the National Press Club:

As Congress navigated its way through options to avoid the fiscal cliff in the final days of 2012, federal dairy policy shared part of the spotlight. In the end, Congressional actions included a nine-month extension of the Farm Bill, averting a legal mandate that had the potential to cause milk prices to more than double.

The challenges and opportunities of U.S. dairy policy will be the focus of the Farm Foundation® Forum on Wednesday, Feb. 6, 2013. The Forum will be 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. EST at the National Press Club, 529 14th St. NW, Washington D.C.

Providing insights on potential policy developments will be:

• Mary Keough Ledman, Keough Ledman and Associates
• Mitch Davis, Davis Family Dairies, Le Sueur, Minn.
• Sue M. Taylor, Leprino Foods
• Other producer perspectives

After the speakers' brief presentations, the floor will be opened for discussion.

Federal government says all sorts of things about soy milk

Mark Bittman this week describes how he overcame years of heartburn by giving up milk.  Though the NYT columnist agrees this experience hardly counts as a controlled experiment, it does point his critical attention toward USDA's dietary guidance message about dairy.

Today the Department of Agriculture’s recommendation for dairy is a mere three cups daily — still 1½ pounds by weight — for every man, woman and child over age 9. This in a country where as many as 50 million people are lactose intolerant, including 90 percent of all Asian-Americans and 75 percent of all African-Americans, Mexican-Americans and Jews. The myplate.gov site helpfully suggests that those people drink lactose-free beverages. (To its credit, it now counts soy milk as “dairy.”)

There’s no mention of water, which is truly nature’s perfect beverage; the site simply encourages us to switch to low-fat milk. 

Regarding MyPlate's inclusion of soy milk in the dairy group, however, not all federal government messaging seems to agree.

Soybean checkoff message

Like Bittman and MyPlate, the United Soybean Board also has high praise for soy milk. The board is a government-sponsored checkoff program, which has authority from Congress to issue federal government messages in favor of soybeans using money from a mandatory assessment on soybean producers. From the soybean checkoff website link we learn:

Soymilk is a great source of high-quality soy protein, frequently fortified with calcium and vitamin D for bone health, and an option for the lactose-intolerant.

Dairy checkoff message 

But the federal government's dairy checkoff program disagrees.  The program has authority from Congress to issue federal government messages in favor of dairy products using money from a mandatory assessment on dairy producers.  The dairy checkoff program has a bitterly sarcastic satirical flash-based interactive website, mocking soy milk for its sugar content, long ingredient list, and food science chemistry manipulations.

Mixed messages

By using checkoff programs to sponsor contradictory messages for different commodities -- while approving each message as "government speech" -- the federal government serves consumers poorly.  When will these programs be reformed?

Spinning dairy weight loss claims

The USDA's Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion (CNPP) provides the Nutrition Evidence Library, a clear and transparent source of systematic evidence reviews about all sorts of nutrition and health issues.

For example, here is the evidence review summary for claims about dairy consumption and weight loss:

Conclusion

Strong evidence demonstrates that intake of milk and milk products provide no unique role in weight control.

That seems clear enough: no unique role in weight control.

Meanwhile, the federal government's semi-public dairy checkoff program offers its own distinct review of the evidence.  Although many people do not realize it, the National Dairy Council is an arm of this checkoff program.  Its review says:

A growing body of research illustrates that enjoying three servings of milk, cheese or yogurt each day as part of a nutrient-rich, balanced diet may help maintain a healthy weight.

The first study mentioned is by Michael Zemel, the researcher who won a patent on dairy weight loss claims, which allows dairy industry organizations to collect royalties from food companies that use such claims. 

Buried deep in the subsequent studies, one finds contradictory evidence.  For example, a study by Wagner and colleagues in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition finds, "there were no significant differences in weight loss between groups.  The milk group showed significantly less reduction of body fat than the placebo group."  But you would not know that from the Dairy Council's summary statement.

The National Dairy Council -- whose messages have official status as "government speech" -- seems to be contradicting the more impartial review of USDA's scientists.  Why should the federal government be willing to play the role of "enforcer" for the National Dairy Council, collecting the millions of dollars in mandatory assessments that support the Council's industry-friendly spin on the evidence?

USDA posts the 2010 dairy checkoff report

The federal government's dairy checkoff program just today released the July 2010 Report to Congress, which was the subject of my earlier Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

The report, 16 months overdue, says that $108 million were collected in 2009 for fluid milk promotions, and another $283 million were collected for other dairy products (principally cheese).  The checkoff programs use the federal government's power of taxation to collect mandatory assessments, essentially taxes, from producers.  All the advertising and promotion messages count as "government speech."  The expenditures vastly outweigh anything the federal government does to promote healthy eating.

The introduction emphasizes the controversial Domino's campaign:

The Dairy Board continued to develop and implement programs to expand the human consumption of dairy products by focusing on partnerships and innovation, product positioning with consumers, and new places for dairy product consumption. One such endeavor was accomplished through a partnership with Domino’s Pizza and the creation of the American Legends pizza line.

The report later explains in greater detail:

The pizza industry plays an important role in the dairy industry. Twenty–five percent of all cheese manufactured in the U.S. is used on pizza, and Mozzarella comprises 49 percent of all cheese volume in the foodservice industry. Research showed that negative pizza cheese volume trends were having an impact on the dairy industry. As a result, dairy producers partnered with Domino’s to reinvigorate the pizza category and launch American Legends, a line of six specialty pizzas that use up to 40 percent more cheese than a regular Domino’s pizza.

The report shows that a large fraction of affiliated advertising expenditure goes toward cheese.

Professor Harry Kaiser at Cornell University wrote the accompanying economic analysis, showing the great effectiveness of the checkoff program in expanding dairy consumption on both a nonfat and fat basis (increasing intake of milkfat).  Professor Kaiser (a good colleague for whom I was a teaching assistant at Cornell) has previously written U.S. food policy to explain his view of the nutritional impact of the checkoff programs:

[W]e continue to believe that the nutritional state of consumers in the United States would be worse without generic food advertising programs. 

I am not convinced.  The checkoff programs should rein in the fast food collaborations and bring the promotions in line with the dietary guidelines, or they should let free markets work on their own and let producers contribute voluntarily to the checkoff programs.  The status quo, with the federal government promoting Domino's Pizza, is terrible.

The July 2011 report has not yet been released.  It is not clear whether USDA simply didn't submit the report to Congress as required, or instead whether USDA submitted that report but is not yet willing to share it with the public.

Where is the dairy checkoff report to Congress? (Update)

Despite a requirement in federal law to submit an annual report to Congress, the dairy checkoff program has not yet produced the report for July 2010 or July 2011, both of which are now long overdue.

Because earlier requests for a copy of the July 2010 report had been turned down by USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS), I filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in September for the two most recent missing reports.  However, AMS turned down the request today, saying that the material was classified as "pre-decisional" and "deliberative."  The AMS response said that the reports were still in USDA clearance, and that the 2010 report will be released shortly.

The Dairy Production and Stabilization Act of 1983 (.pdf) says:

Not later than July 1, 1985, and July 1 of each year after the date of enactment of this title, an annual report describing activities conducted under the dairy products promotion and research order issued under this subchapter, and accounting for the receipt and disbursement of all funds received by the National Dairy Promotion and Research Board under such order including an independent analysis of the effectiveness of the program.

Likewise, USDA's Dairy Promotion and Research Order (.pdf) requires the agency:

To prepare and make public, at least annually, a report of its activities carried out and an accounting for funds received and expended.

The dairy checkoff program uses the federal government's power of taxation to collect a mandatory assessment of more than $390 million per year from farmers, in order to support research, promotion, and advertising activities, such as the "Got Milk" campaign.  The checkoff program promotes increased high-fat cheese consumption through support for fast food pizza marketing campaigns.  The program's management corporation, Dairy Management Inc., boasts of the fast food collaborations.  Notwithstanding the tension between these advertisements and healthy dietary guidance, every checkoff program message is endorsed by the federal government (in legal terminology, the advertisements must be approved as "government speech").

I think dairy farmers and the public deserve more timely transparency in this federal program, which is vastly better funded than anything the federal government does to promote healthy eating.

NYT had it right, Daily Yonder wrong

The Daily Yonder thinks the earlier New York Times article about checkoff promotions is mistaken. Here is my comment on the Daily Yonder site:

This post understates the federal government role in the checkoff promotions, such as the Dominoes cheese pizza campaign.

The federal government established the dairy checkoff program, the Secretary of Agriculture appoints the board members from a slate of candidates proposed by the industry, USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service must approve every promotion campaign in writing, and the federal government uses its power of taxation to enforce the collection of the funds that sponsor these campaigns. If a cheese producer fails to pay, the U.S. Department of Justice takes them to court.

Your post says, "Industry Group Uses Its Own Funds To Promote Its Products." That is incorrect. A minority of producers -- especially those who produce a distinctive product and benefit little from general commodity advertising -- object to these checkoff assessments. It is not they themselves who decided to pay, and it is not an "industry group" making them pay, it is the federal government making them pay.

When dissident producers took the checkoff programs to court, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the checkoff programs, only because the federal government attorney convinced the justices that these programs are from top to bottom federal government programs, and their every message has official status as "government speech."

Other products sponsored by these checkoff campaigns: McDonald's McRib, Quiznos Steakhouse Beef Dip sandwich, Wendy's Bacon Cheesburger, and Pizza Hut Stuffed Crust Three Cheese Pizza. The checkoff programs encourage us to eat more beef, more pork, and more cheese all at the same time.

This blog post is full of misdirection -- saying the checkoff programs are not using "your tax money." This is like telling me that the government is not using "my tax money" for the war in Iraq or welfare checks or whatever you object to -- sure, the government is collecting the tax that funds those activities but they can reassure you that your particular tax payment was not the actual dollars used. Who cares which tax dollars were used for which purpose? If the federal government collected the tax, and the purpose is bad, we have a right to object.

Congress should either: (a) stop having the federal government enforce the checkoff assessments, or (b) expect that the checkoff messages serve our public health goals at a time when health care costs are threatening to bankrupt the government.

US dairy industry's "sustainability plan"

This week the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy announced a joint agreement to support a U.S. dairy industry goal to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 25% over 20 years. Unfortunately, the dairy industry's idea of sustainability through mitigation inhibits the real process changes needed to combat climate change and the creation of a truly sustainable food system.

The real way to combat climate change in dairy is by reducing dairy consumption (and therefore, production) and by producing dairy from cows raised on pasture, two things the industry is far from considering.

The Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy (ICUSD) was created in 2008 to foster industry-wide pre-competitive collaboration and innovation in strategies designed to increase sales of milk and milk products. One of the founding organizations of the ICUSD is Dairy Management Inc™, which manages the national dairy check-off program.

From an industry perspective, the "sustainability" focus is on CO2 emissions, largely in response to anticipated government regulation. Further, the approach is how to extract value and utilize opportunities to leverage demand. Much of the results from lifecycle analysis (LCA) conducted by land grant universities, show the largest reduction potential in the production phase of the dairy value-chain. Consequently, their strategy for sustainability is targeting nutrition management of cows (changing ratio of corn and protein feed) and the utilization of methane digesters to mitigate methane from manure lagoons.

Research presented on the Measurement of GHG Emissions from Dairy Farms at the Climate Change Research Conference by Dr. Frank Mitloehner, Air Quality CE Specialist Animal Science at UC Davis, had some interesting findings:

• The main dairy GHG source is cows, rather than waste.
  
• The CO2 emissions from cow respiration cannot be mitigated without reducing herd size.
• The leading methane contributor is enteric fermentation from cows eating corn instead of their natural fodder, grass.
• The leading nitrous oxide contributor is land application of manure and fertilizer for growing feed (corn).
  
• Nitrous oxide has almost 15 times more the global warming potential as methane.

That scientific perspective, emphasizing smaller herd sizes and the value of grass, is overlooked in much industry communication. Industry communication instead boasts of past efficiency gains and promotes increased milk consumption for good nutrition.

The most cited piece of literature by industry dairy sustainability initiatives is from Dr. Jude Capper currently at Washington State University. “The Environmental Impact of Dairy Production: 1944 compared with 2007” published in The Journal of Animal Science found that the carbon footprint per billion kg of milk produced in 2007 was 37% of the equivalent milk production in 1944. It concludes:

"Contrary to the negative image often associated with “factory farms”, fulfilling the U.S. population’s requirement for dairy products while improving environmental stewardship can only be achieved by using modern agricultural techniques. The immediate challenge for the dairy industry is to actively communicate…the considerable potential for environmental mitigation yet to be gained through use of modern dairy production systems."

Jill Richardson at La Vida Locavore recently criticized Capper's research in her post "Junk Science Study Says Factory Farming is Better" for including Roger Cady, former Sustainability Lead Monsanto and now works for Elanco (the former and current owners of rBGH), on the team of researchers. Cady was criticized by Tom Phillpot at Grist for conflict of interest in research extolling the environmental benefits of rBGH.

Capper’s twitter name is “Lactolobbyist” and she describes herself as a “dairy scientist passionately spreading the word about reducing environmental impact through improved productive efficiency and use of biotechnology.”

The other most cited resource in the milk industry's sustainability literature is the USDA's 2005 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which recommends consumption of 3 cups per day of fat-free or low-fat milk or equivalent milk products. According to Open Secrets, the dairy industry spent $3.3 million on federal lobbying in 2006, with Dean Foods, the National Milk Producers Federation and the Dairy Foods Association topping the list of spenders. The Dietary Guideline Advisory committee in 2005 was heavily criticized for its ties to dairy.

Ironically, the ICUSD primer reveals two important pillars of sustainable agriculture: the importance of place and scale:

“Today, in many states where climate is conducive, roughly 50% of producers use pastures to meet some fraction of their herds’ dietary needs. Of these producers roughly half practice continuous grazing which, compared to intensive grazing, is a less efficient method of providing forage and of sequestering carbon.”

They note: “generally this includes dairies in the Midwest, Southeast, and New England regions. although the amount of a herd’s dietary needs that can be met by pasturage varies by climate, management practices, and site-specific constraints.”

But, this discussion of pasturing and Midwestern production overlooks the dairy industry's real home base -- industrial production in California and other places with water shortages. According to the University of Minnesota Extension, California ranks #1 in the U.S. in total dairy cows (1.7 million cows on 2,030 dairies) and #1 in total milk production (21% of U.S. milk supply). The average herd size is 850 milking cows, with 46 percent of all dairies over 500 head.

These cows are not raised on pasture. They are raised on dairy freestall and drylot housing (concrete) in Tulare County in the San Joaquin Valley with 1,071,956 of their closest friends. Tulare County and five counties in the central valley account for 49% of the total milk production in California. Tulare County alone accounts for 25% of California’s total milk production and has an average herd size of 1,300 head.

And they drink a lot of water (in the desert) - 20-50 gallons a day and create a lot of waste - approximately 120 pounds, or 14.475 gallons of manure a day per cow.

Even with mitigation with methane digesters, the industry is off the mark towards sustainability. A real commitment comes from decreasing consumption of dairy and producing milk in the way it was intended, through cows on pasture. Seems like nature's own supply and demand curve. Until we have the dairy industry's commitment to these tenets, I am not convinced that sustainability in dairy is possible.

From the ICUSD site:

"Ideally the dairy industry will chart our own course in sustainability." -Jed Davis, Cabot Creamery

US dairy crisis, message from Willie Nelson & Farm Aid

The drastic drop in milk prices paid to farmers over the past year has led to an unprecedented crisis for dairy farmers who, on average, are being paid less than half the cost of production. Low prices and high production costs threaten to push nearly one-third of dairy farmers off their land over the next couple of months, strengthening corporate control of the dairy industry and severely impacting the health of local and regional economies nationwide.

“Setting a fair price for milk won’t fix all the problems that led to the current crisis, but it may be the only way to keep thousands of dairy farmers on their farms this year,” said Farm Aid board member Willie Nelson. “Unless Secretary Vilsack takes immediate action, huge areas of the United States may be left without any local dairy farms at all.”

Dairy farmers have been hit with a catastrophic combination of factors beyond their control. Farmers are struggling to pay bills from record high feed and fuel costs; adequate credit is increasingly impossible to come by; and the price of milk paid to farmers by processors collapsed a record 30 percent in January alone, and is currently down 50 percent since July 2008. In the meantime, the top dairy processors have recently announced 2009 first quarter earnings that are up from the same period last year. The top processor, Dean Foods, reported their first quarter earnings are more than double that of last year thanks in part to the plunging price Dean pays to its milk producers.

Under Section 608c (18) of the Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act of 1937, the Secretary of Agriculture is required to adjust the price of milk paid to farmers to “reflect the price of feeds, the available supplies of feeds, and other economic conditions which affect market supply and demand for milk and its products.” Farm Aid urges Secretary Vilsack to use this power to immediately institute a set price for milk that reflects the cost of production, keeping dairy farmers on their land.

“The U.S. has a tradition of local and regional milk distribution, making dairy farmers a base for strong local and regional economies. The loss of these farms will reduce spending in small businesses, investments in banks and shrink the community tax base. If we lose a third of our dairy farms in the next few months alone, imagine the impact on these economies by year’s end.” said Carolyn Mugar, executive director of Farm Aid. “As our independent family dairy farmers go out of business, our milk supply gets more consolidated by giant confinement dairies that do not contribute to our local economies or act of stewards of the land like our family farmers do.”

The petition can be accessed by going to www.farmaid.org/dairyfarmers

Following Parke's lead, I would like to disclose that I am (proud to be) interning at Farm Aid. Cross posted from Epicurean Ideal.

"Industrial Livestock at the Taxpayer Trough"

The Campaign for Family Farms and the Environment (CFFE) today released a report by Elanor Starmer, entitled "Industrial Livestock at the Taxpayer Trough: How Large Hog and Dairy Operations are Subsidized by the Environmental Quality Incentives Program":

The Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) was approved by Congress in 1996 with the backing of many family farm and conservation-focused organizations. Designed to provide cost-share and incentive payments to agricultural producers to address resource concerns on their farms, it has been used over the years by thousands of farmers nationwide to make environmental improvements that benefit the land and their communities.

The 2002 Farm Bill opened up EQIP for use by industrial livestock operations, which house thousands of animals and generate massive quantities of manure. They often lack sufficient farmland on which to apply animal waste or make irresponsible management decisions in applying it, generating air or water pollution; the burden of addressing the pollution often falls on public services or community members living near the operations. When Congress made EQIP funds available to these operations in 2002, stakeholders worried that it would further subsidize an environmentally destructive method of production and that the share of funding available for the program’s original targets – small and mid-sized operations – would be diminished.

The 2002 Farm Bill also severely restricted public access to information about the size of EQIP contracts and the practices that they fund. Moreover, the administrator of the program, USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, lacks the funding and mandate to track EQIP payments by the size of livestock operation receiving them. As a result, even though animal waste is now a priority issue for the program, there is no way for the public or policymakers to know how industrial operations are using the funds or to assess whether EQIP is subsidizing their expansion.

This report uses the limited data that is publicly available to investigate the use of EQIP by industrial hog and dairy operations nationally and in the states of Minnesota, Iowa, and Missouri. It finds that nationwide, these operations receive far more than their fair share of EQIP funding.

Although industrial hog operations comprise only 10.7% of all hog operations nationally, they receive an estimated 37% of all EQIP contracts to the hog sector. In contrast, mid-sized hog farms represent roughly 15% of all operations but receive only 5.4% of EQIP hog contracts.

Similarly, the report finds that industrial dairies make up only 3.9% of all dairy operations nationally, yet they receive an estimated 54% of all EQIP dairy contracts. Meanwhile, mid-sized dairies, which account for 13% of all dairies nationally, receive only 7% of EQIP dairy contracts.

This report estimates that between 2003 and 2007, roughly 1,000 industrial hog and dairy operations have captured at least $35 million per year in funding through the EQIP program....

While EQIP continues to be used by many livestock and crop producers to carry out environmentally beneficial practices, a disproportionate share of funds now flows to highly polluting livestock operations. This is a fundamental flaw in the policy and may jeopardize the goals and long-term effectiveness of the program. Moreover, the program suffers from a lack of oversight and insufficient record keeping. As a result, it lacks public accountability.

What if checkoff programs were voluntary?

An interesting article in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics this May used experimental data from an economics laboratory to address the following question: what would happen if legal concerns prevented commodity checkoff programs from using the federal government's power of taxation to collect mandatory payments from producers?

It is generally assumed that advertising budgets for campaigns such as "Beef. It's What's for Dinner" and "Pork. The Other White Meat" would collapse if the producer payments were voluntary. The article by Kent Messer, Harry Kaiser, and William D. Schulze points out that certain clever types of auctions might enhance contributions even if they were voluntary.

For example, under a plan called the "provision point mechanism" (PPM), producers would offer voluntary payments, but they would only really have to pay if the total voluntary payments exceeded a fairly high threshold. If the threshold is not reached, everybody gets their money back, and the advertising campaign never happens. This mechanism seems to generate higher contributions than traditional voluntary payment plans do.

As an aside, readers of this blog will not be surprised that I disapproved of this paragraph:

One might question the social importance and magnitude of under-provision of advertising for generic commodities. However, contrast the public health impacts from the types of foods associated with the majority of branded advertising, such as soda, beer, chips, and candy, to the types of foods that now benefit from mandatory generic advertising, such as fruits, vegetables, nuts, chicken, pork, beef, and milk. Not only do the generic commodities comprise the key nutritional elements of the United States Department of Agriculture food pyramid but these commodities also tend to be low in fat and salt (in comparison to branded snack foods and restaurant meals) and represent the bulk of what might be called the components of a healthy diet. If generic advertising for agricultural commodities collapses because mandatory programs are declared unconstitutional, the "Dancing Raisins" will be gone and the vast majority of ads for snacks will be for chips, cookies, and candy. Given important health problems such as obesity, juvenile diabetes, and osteoporosis, the under-funding of generic commodity advertising has serious public health consequences.

Years of previous coverage here (and here) cast doubt on the claim that checkoff advertising is largely consistent with federal dietary guidance. The dancing raisins comparison is misleading, since a tiny fraction of checkoff advertising is for fruits and vegetables, while much of the funding is for high fat beef and pork and cheese. I don't think there even is a federal checkoff program for raisins. Raisins are not mentioned in Becker's CRS report (.pdf). Perhaps those ads were from a California state level board? If you believe that the checkoff programs are mostly about skim milk, not cheese, you've been hoodwinked by the public relations. I am not sure where the "low fat" comment came from -- federal dietary guidance gives greatest importance to saturated fat rather than total fat, and the products covered by checkoff programs are disproportionally high contributors to saturated fat in U.S. diets, compared to foods not covered by checkoff programs. And, how could lower checkoff advertising possibly lead to obesity? This is a very, very bad paragraph.

I think the agricultural economics literature on checkoff programs would be stronger if it were less baldly apologetic on their behalf.

What is in the federal government's dairy advertising report?

USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) is required to give a report to Congress each July, explaining the activities and budget of the federal government's fluid milk and dairy checkoff advertising programs, sponsors of the "Got Milk?" slogan, the "Milk Mustache" ads, and the "Real Seal."

Last year's report, which was finally made public in October 2006, emphasized the government advertising program's use of dairy weight loss claims, which are controversial in nutrition science circles and are not consistent with the government's own Dietary Guidelines for Americans. The weight loss claims were especially odd when set against the dairy programs' heavy promotion of high-fat cheese through marketing collaborations with restaurants such as Pizza Hut.

Just a few months later, the Federal Trade Commission contacted USDA to raise questions about this advertising message, and USDA agreed to discontinue the high-calcium weight loss marketing. The campaigns have many other good messages they could use instead, such as the possible role of low-fat dairy in protecting against weak bones, but their marketing research had shown consumers to be especially responsive to weight loss messages.

It will be interesting to read how AMS describes these developments in the July 2007 report. While July is long past, the report is not yet being shared with the public. AMS folks tell me it is "still in Departmental clearances."