by Marion Nestle

Currently browsing posts about: Dairy

Mar 1 2024

Weekend reading: the ironies of drinking fluid milk

Anne Mendelson.  Spoiled: The Myth of Milk as Superfood.  Columbia University Press, 2023 (396 pages).

 

I am an admirer of Anne Mendelson’s books and did a blurb for her Chow Chop SueyBut this one is over the top—original, compelling, brilliantly written.

Driving this book is a question I’ve not heard asked before, at least not so directly: Why and how did the consumption of fresh liquid milk (“drinking-milk”)—as opposed to fermented dairy products—become framed as a nutritional necessity?

Her question derives from some basic facts about cow’s milk and its industrial production:

  • Once cow’s milk leaves the udder, it is easily contaminated with pathogenic bacteria.
  • Most adults have stopped making the enzyme that digests the sugar lactose in milk and can’t drink it without getting unpleasant digestive systems.
  • To produce milk safely requires complicated and expensive industrial processes.
  • The cost of milk production exceeds the price people are willing to pay for it; dairy farming is a losing proposition even with taxpayer subsidies.
  • Industrial milk production is hard on cows and pollutes the environment.

Why are we even doing this?  For this, she blames 19th and 20th century European and American doctors who thought the ability to digest lactose normal, nutritionists (calcium!), and the USDA (3 servings a day!).

She is not against eating dairy foods when they are fermented.  These, yogurt and the like, are much safer.  Friendly bacteria split the lactose along with producing acid that destroys pathogens.

You don’t have to agree with all her points to appreciate how well they are argued.

To wit:

[The book] argues that influential nutritional theories about fresh and fermented milk took a disastrously wrong turn in the eighteenth century.  The reason is that the founders of modern Western medicine had no way of understanding the genetic fluke that allowed them, unlike most of the world’s peoples, to digest lactose from babyhood to old age.  In other words, today’s mega-industry stemmed from a lack of scientific perspective.  That lack turned the one form of milk that is most fragile, perishable, difficult to produce on a commercial scale, and economically pitfall-strewn into a supposed daily necessity for children and, to a lesser extent, adults.  [pp x, xi].

No other food product is as staggeringly difficult and expensive to get from source (in this case, a cow) to destination (milk glass on table) in something loosely approximating its first condition.  If one existed, it would be treated as an astounding luxury. [p. 1].

Mendelson takes deep dives into the history of dairy use, dietary recommendations, industrial production, and government dairy policy.  In attempting to teach about the Farm Bill, I was defeated by Milk Marketing Orders, the formulas used by the government to set price support levels required to be paid by “handlers” (milk processors) to dairy producers in different areas of the country.  I could not find anything about this in the index, alas, but I loved what she says about them on page 205.

These formulas gradually became as abstruse, and as unintelligible to anyone outside a small charmed circle, as anything in the bad old days before the federal government stepped in.  Far from abolishing the buyer’s market, they trapped farmers selling fluid milk within the marketing order system in endless struggles to wring enough out of handlers to recoup production costs….What I do understand is that as the postwar era advanced, the sheer incomprehensibility of producer-handler milk price schemes again became an endless frustration to dairy farmers, above all those trying to make a living within the marketing order system for drinking-milk.

One final irony:

Nothing is going to dislodge supermarket drinking-milk from its towering economic importance.  It is certain to continue along the track of expansion, consolidation, and increasingly complex technological infrastructure that it has pursued for almost three quarters of a century.  Big Milk is going to become Bigger Milk.  Its absurdities are also sure to become more entrenched.  The greatest of these is the plain fact that Americans are drinking less milk while dairy farms are producing more of it.

A personal comment: The book triggered a memory.  I once visited a school lunch program in Barrow (now Utqiaġvik), Alaska.  Inuit children were served the standard USDA lunch, which requires half-pint cartons of milk.  I did not see any of them drinking it.  The untouched cartons were discarded.  The milk was not only culturally inappropriate, but wasteful.  All food in that part of North Alaska has to be flown in on airplanes.

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Jan 17 2024

Some thoughts about dairy checkoff programs

Jerry Hagstrom’s Hagstrom Report, to which I subscribe, often has information I would not otherwise see.  Here’s one example.

He reported that USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service finally released its analysis of dairy checkoff programs, supposedly due annually by law.  No reports were published from 2020 through 2022.

Some members of Congress complained in a letter to Secretary Vilsack.  That worked.

See: Report to Congress on the Dairy Promotion and Research Program and the Fluid Milk Processor Promotion Program, 2020 Activities.

It makes interesting reading (to me, at least).

Checkoff—officially, research and promotion—programs tax commodity producers and use the funds for marketing purposes.  The programs are mandated and managed by USDA, but paid for by commodity producers (conflict of interest, anyone?).

Two Dairy Checkoffs exist.

  1. The Dairy Research and Promotion Program (the Dairy Checkoff), funded by dairy producers and dairy importers to maintain and expand domestic and foreign markets for fluid milk and dairy products. The program collected $346.8 million in assessments in 2020.
  2. The Fluid Milk Processor Promotion program, also known as the Milk Processor Education Program (MilkPEP), is funded by fluid milk processors and “is designed to educate Americans about the benefits of fluid milk, increase milk consumption, and maintain and expand markets and uses for fluid milk products in the contiguous 48 States and the District of Columbia.” This program collected $85.7 million in assessments in 2020.

What is this about?  At one glance:

On the other hand, dairy consumption as a whole—mainly because of cheese and butter—is going up.

The report says that for every dollar spent on generic marketing, the industry gets roughly $3 in return.

Checkoff programs raise lots of questions about whether the USDA should be sponsoring these kinds of marketing efforts for a small number of foods, and why the government should particularly promote consumption of dairy foods (or beef, for that matter), given concerns about their environmental impact, if nothing else.

The Agricultural Marketing Service is quite clear about its objectives: to promote consumption of U.S. agricultural products, no matter what they are.

The dairy industry must want these efforts to continue; it sees the decline in fluid milk consumption as a problem.

Given concerns about the waning health of Americans, the role of dairy checkoffs—and the USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service—could use reconsideration.

Oct 9 2023

Industry funded study of the week: Cheese prevents dementia!

It was hard to miss this headline in Dairy Reporter: “Cheese intake could lower risk of dementia, study suggests.”

No kidding?  I wonder who paid for this?

To its credit, the article did full disclosure:

The study was conducted as part of broader research commissioned by Japanese dairy major Meiji Co., Ltd. and part-funded by the company.

I went right to it.

The study: Kim H, Osuka Y, Kojima N, Sasai H, Nakamura K, Oba C, Sasaki M, Suzuki T. Inverse Association between Cheese Consumption and Lower Cognitive Function in Japanese Community-Dwelling Older Adults Based on a Cross-Sectional Study. Nutrients. 2023; 15(14):3181. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu15143181

Purpose: “We investigated whether cheese intake is associated with lower cognitive function (LCF) in community-dwelling older adults.”

Method: “This cross-sectional study included 1503 adults aged over 65 years. The analyzed data were obtained through face-to-face interviews and functional ability measurement.”

Results: Cheese intake, along with usual walking speed and calf circumference to be significant factors associated with LCF.

Conclusions: Cheese intake is inversely associated with lower cognitive function.

Funding: This study was funded by the Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development , the National Center for Geriatrics and Gerontology, and Meiji Co., Ltd.

Conflicts of Interest: “This study was conducted as a part of the ‘Epidemiology study of the relationship between dairy products intake and cognitive function’ commissioned by Meiji Co., Ltd. T.S. holds the position of Commissioned Research Chair, and H.K. is a member of the Commissioned Research group. K.N., C.O., and M.S. are employees of Meiji Co., Ltd. The other authors declare no conflict of interest. The funding sponsors had no role in the execution, analysis, or interpretation of the data or the writing of the manuscript.

Comment: Meiji Holdings Co Ltd (Meiji) 

is a manufacturer and distributor of dairy products, confectionery, and nutritional products. The company’s product portfolio comprises milk, yogurt, cheese, ice cream, chocolates, and gummy candies. The company also provides beauty supplements, protein products, nutritional products, vaccines, antibacterial agents, and generic drugs. The company markets its products under Meiji, Essel, Oishii Gyunyu, DepromeL, Reflex, Kaju Gummy, Kinoko no Yama, Galbo, Amino Collagen, Savas, Sycrest, Streptomycin, Kanamycin, Depromel, and Metact brand names…Meiji is headquartered in Chuo-Ku, Tokyo, Japan.

Five of the authors work for the company.

Does eating cheese reduce the risk of dementia?  You read the paper and decide.  I think you can’t make this stuff up.

Jun 2 2023

Weekend reading: the loss of small dairy farms

I’m just getting to this report from Food and Water Watch: The Economic Cost of Food Monopolies: Dirty Dairy Racket

Food & Water Watch took a look at what’s happening to the U.S. dairy industry.  Its conclusions are not surprising if you have been following these trends.

  • Big dairies have driven out small.  Only about 30 percent of all U.S. milk is produced on family-scale farms.
  • Dairy is not profitable.  “Thanks to the gutting of federal supply management policy,” overproduction and increased production costs gave caysed milk prices to plummet.
  • Consolidation doesn’t help.  Three dairy coops control 83 percent of milk sales: DFA (Dairy Farmers of America), Land O’ Lakes, and California Dairies, Inc.).

Here’s one comparison: Dairy association CEP salaries as compared to dairy farmer income.

The next Farm Bill could help fix some of this by:

  • Restoring supply management
  • Stopping proliferation of factory dairy farms
  • Reforming the farm safety net
  • Setting fair prices
Apr 17 2023

Industry-funded study of the week: whey and muscle strength

I give high praise to NutraIngredients.com for doing full disclosure in the title of an article: “Industry study concludes whey promotes muscular strength and endurance, independent of diet.”

Whey protein supplementation promotes muscle mass increase and selective increases in muscular strength and endurance from resistance exercise, independent of dietary influence, according to a new industry-funded study.

I looked up the study.

The Study: Effects of Whey Protein Supplement on 4-Week Resistance Exercise-Induced Improvements in Muscle Mass and Isokinetic Muscular Function under Dietary ControlChae-Been Kim Jong-Hoon Park Hyoung-Su Park 2Hye-Jin Kim 2Jung-Jun Park   Nutrients.  2023 Feb 16;15(4):1003.   doi: 10.3390/nu15041003.
Purpose: to investigate the effect of whey protein supplementation under dietary control on improvements in muscle mass and function following resistance exercise training.
Method: Thirty-two men were randomly assigned to a whey protein supplementation group taking whey protein isolate (PSG, n = 17) and a placebo group (CON, n = 15). Participants were provided with three meals per day corresponding to the estimated individual daily energy intake. The supervised resistance exercise program was conducted 60 min per day, six days per week, for four weeks.
Conclusion: whey protein supplementation enhances resistance exercise-induced increase in muscle mass and overall muscular strength and endurance, independent of dietary influence.
Funding: This research was funded by Maeil Health Nutrition Co., Ltd.
Conflicts of Interest: The authors declare no conflict of interest.
Comment:  Maeil Health Nutrition is a Korean company which makes and sells dairy-based sports supplements like the one used in this study.  Two of the authors (the ones with 2 ) work for this company.  They have obvious conflicts of interest.  
I won’t bother to dissect the details of the study except to note that the placebo group was taking a supplement with 20 fewer grams of protein per day.
Mar 23 2023

Milk Marketing Orders: an attempt to understand the system

According to USDA,

Federal Milk Marketing Orders (FMMOs) establish certain provisions under which dairy processors purchase fresh milk from dairy farmers supplying a marketing area. ..A marketing area is generally defined as a geographic area where handlers compete for packaged fluid milk sales…Federal orders serve to maintain stable marketing relationships for all handlers and producers supplying marketing areas, thus facilitating the complex process of marketing fresh milk.

USDA has a brochure on how the program works.

FMMOs establish monthly uniform prices paid to farmers by first classifying milk by its end use. The FMMO then pools the value of that milk and shares that value among the farmers participating on that marketing order. Pooling allows farmers to receive the uniform price of all milk in the pool regardless of what end product their milk was used for. In this way, pooling makes a farmer’s payment independent of how the milk was used.

Got that?

Here are the current milk marketing regions:

I have to confess that Milk Marketing Orders are beyond me, but I am trying .  I understand the basics.  They are supposed to do three things: (1) establish minimum prices paid to dairy farmers, (2) ensure payments are accurate and timely, and (3) provide market information.

To try to understand how this works, I subscribe to AgriPulse News (“Providing balanced coverage of the food, fuel, feed, and fiber industries”).

From AgriPulse, I learned:

After more than two years of discussion and more than 130 meetings, the National Milk Producers Federation Board of Directors unanimously endorsed a comprehensive plan to correct shortcomings exacerbated during the pandemic regarding pricing regulations for milk.

Among the proposed changes, NMPF called for a return to the “higher of” Class 1 mover that was changed in the last farm bill.
NMPF also recommended that USDA update make allowances and review them every two years. Make allowances are based on estimates of what it costs to convert a hundredweight of raw milk into commodity dairy products such as cheese, butter, whey and nonfat dry milk.

NMPF plans to submit its proposal to USDA for a hearing and a potential producer referendum on the order’s modernization yet this year. The International Dairy Foods Association previously said it would request a hearing only on the make allowances request.

I looked at the comprehensive plan.  Here are NMPF’s requested changes to the Federal Milk Marketing Order System:

  • Returning to the “higher of” Class I mover;
  • Discontinuing the use of barrel cheese in the protein component price formula;
  • Extending the current 30-day reporting limit to 45 days on forward priced sales on nonfat dry milk and dry whey to capture more exports sales in the USDA product price reporting;
  • Updating milk component factors for protein, other solids and nonfat solids in the Class III and Class IV skim milk price formulas;
  • Developing a process to ensure make-allowances are reviewed more frequently through legislation directing USDA to conduct mandatory plant-cost studies every two years;
  • Updating dairy product manufacturing allowances contained in the USDA milk price formulas; and
  • Updating the Class I differential price system to reflect changes in the cost of delivering bulk milk to fluid processing plants.

For starters, what is a “Class I mover?”  For this, I need help.

The USDA classifies milk into four categories:

CLASS I – Milk used for beverages including eggnog and ultra-high temperature (UHT) milk.

CLASS II – Milk used for soft products. This includes cottage cheese, ricotta cheese, pot cheese, Creole cheese, milk shake and ice milk mixes, frozen desserts, aerated cream, frozen cream, sour cream, half-n-half, yogurt, custards, puddings, pancake mixes, batter, buttermilk biscuit mixes, infant or dietary formulas packaged in hermetically sealed containers, candy, soup and bakery products for general distribution to the public including sweetened condensed milk used for manufacture of aforesaid products, and fluid cream or any product containing artificial fat or fat substitutes that resemble fluid cream.

CLASS III – Milk used in the manufacture of cream cheese and other spreadable cheeses, and hard cheese of types that may be shredded, grated, or crumbled. It also includes plastic cream, anhydrous milkfat, and butteroil.

CLASS IV – Milk used to produce butter, any milk product in dry form and evaporated or sweetened condensed milk in a consumer-type package.

But a Class I mover?  I cannot find a definition, although I can easily find examples of how it’s used.

The Federal Milk Marketing Order (FMMO) advanced Class I base price hit another eight-year high in March, but the change in the Class I mover formula implemented in 2019 reduced what might have been an even higher price paid to producers.

Announced by the USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service on Feb. 16, the March I base price is $22.88 per hundredweight (cwt), up $1.24 from February 2022 and $7.68 more than March 2021. It’s also the highest since November 2014.

At $3.12 per cwt, the difference between the advanced Class III skim milk pricing factor ($10.59 per cwt) and the advanced Class IV skim milk pricing factor ($13.71 per cwt) grew substantially. That means producers will see a negative impact using the “average-of plus 74 cents” Class I mover compared to the old “higher-of” formula.

Based on Progressive Dairy calculations, the Class I mover calculated under the higher-of formula would have resulted in a Class I base price of $23.67 per cwt, 79 cents more than the price determined using the average-of plus 74 cents formula. That difference is up from 51 cents per cwt in February.

I give up.  If anyone can explain this to me, please do.

This is what you are up against if you want to understand why milk prices are rising at grocery stores.

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Feb 28 2023

The FDA rules on plant-based milks: a caving in pleasing nobody

At long last, the FDA revealed its proposed decision about whether plant-based milks can be called milk.

As the FDA puts it:

This draft guidance, when finalized, will represent the current thinking of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA or we) on this topic. It does not establish any rights for any person and is not binding on FDA or the public. You can use an alternative approach if it satisfies the requirements of the applicable statutes and regulations.

What this is about

Simple.  The dairy industry does not like concoctions made from soy, almonds, cashews, macadamias, oats, peas, or other such plants to get to be called “milk.”  It argues that they are not as nutritious as milk and will confuse consumers into thinking they are the same.  Most surveys show that the public understands the difference quite well and has reasons for choosing plant-based alternatives that may or may not have anything to do with nutrient contents (think: animal welfare, dairy fat, environmental protection, industrial production, or what have you).

This puts the FDA in the awkward position of trying to please the public and the dairy industry at the same time.  Its solution to this dilemma is to invoke nutritionism (the use of nutrients to stand for the whole food):

  • Plant-based milks can use the word “milk” (the dairy industry doesn’t like this)
  • But they have to say which nutrients they don’t have as much of (producers of plant-based milks don’t like this).

What this will look like

The FDA says this is a voluntary, non-binding recommendation.

In case that’s too small to see:

Really, people who buy plant-based dairy alternatives are not at nutritional risk and don’t need to be told about single nutrients in products that have a great many.  This is an out-and-out caving in to the dairy industry’s fears that plant-based alternatives will further cut into milk sales at a time when milk sales are declining.

It puts plant-based milk manufacturers at risk of lawsuits if they use Milk without confessing nutritional weaknesses (for an excellent discussion of this liklihood, see Elaine Watson’s account in AgFunderNews.  She quotes lawyer Rebecca Cross:

the draft guidance, “is actually quite shocking, as it treats plant-based milks unlike any other food product.  If finalized, the guidance should not survive a First Amendment challenge.”

She added: “Although the recommended nutrient statements are not mandatory—or finalized—the draft guidance here may, unfortunately, result in frivolous class actions [plaintiffs would claim brands are misleading reasonable consumers if they choose not to make the nutrient statements recommended in the guidance]. The FDA should recognize this as well, but it seems they have unfortunately succumbed to dairy industry pressure.

So it seems.

My opinion, for whatever it’s worth: The FDA should permit plant-based milks to be called milks.  They are what they are and most people should have no trouble telling the difference between them and dairy milk.

For the record, I like dairy products.  But the dairy industry is a mess (overproduced, increasingly consolidated, fighting public health and animal welfare concerns) and needs to get its act together.  The FDA is not helping it get there with this decision.

Sep 14 2022

Product innovation of the week: Cannabis ice cream

I learned about this from a newsletter I subscribe to, Dairy Reporter (this is why I subscribe).

Consumers can now taste a new cannabis-infused ice creams made by Boston’s Emack & Bolio’s in collaboration with cannabis operator MariMed.

The ice creams are vegan, no less.

Two vegan flavors – Cup O’ Coffee Chip and Chocolate Sunny Days – have already debuted, and a dairy line is arriving ‘in two weeks’, DairyReporter understands…“Our R&D team pays close attention to consumer trends and food categories that make sense to consider infusing with cannabis,”​ a MariMed spokesman said. “Ice cream has seen enormous growth, particularly craft ice cream.”

They are sold only in Massachusetts for now.​

“MariMed was looking to partner up with an ice cream company to develop products using their full spectrum cannabis oil and CBD,”​ Emack & Bolio’s founder Robert Rook told DairyReporter. “We both wanted great tasting product, with clean ingredients infused with the best full-spectrum cannabis oil.

Yum?

I tried to find ingredient lists for these products, but all I could find was a press release.

I wrote and asked for them.

Stay tuned.​