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October 21, 2020 28 mins

You're familiar with those "Got Milk" commercials. You've seen the billboards a hundred times. Those milk mustaches seemed innocuous enough. What you may not have considered is how Americans have been coerced into believing milk is an essential part of our healthy diet. We discuss how milk is the perfect microcosm for the many maladies plaguing our corporate food system. Currently, in the US an estimated 2.7 million - 3.7 million gallons of US milk is dumped every day as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. We investigate why. Join us as we uncover the politics rife in the US food systems, the everlasting systemic problem of money shaping policy, and how the joint actions of industry and government lead to the creation and perpetuation of health disparities. Andrea Freeman, author of The Unbearable Whiteness of Milk: Food Oppression and the USDA helps us navigate this landscape.

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Speaker 1 (00:00):
M got milk. You're familiar with those commercials. You've seen
the billboards hundreds of times. Those milk mustaches seemed innocuous enough.
But what you may not have considered is how we've
been coerced into believing that milk is an essential part
of a healthy diet. On today's episode, we discuss how

(00:22):
milk is a perfect microcosm for the mini maladies plaguing
our corporate food system, from deep pocketed lobbyists, in adequate
school lunches, nutritional racism, and the relationship between the milk
industry and fast food companies. In other words, we're talking
about the everlasting, systemic problem of money shaping policy today.

(00:44):
On point of origin, it's spoiled milk. So I started
looking at racism and food policy about fourteen years ago

(01:07):
when I was a student at UC Berkeley Law School,
and I first focused on fast food, and of course,
a major component of fast food is milk. That's Andrea Freeman.
Andrea is a professor of law at u C Berkeley
in California, and her scholarship interrogates the intersection of critical

(01:27):
race and class theory, with a particular focus on matters
of food policy, health, feminism and consumer credit. Her article
to explore her pioneering theory of food oppression, examining how
food related law, policy, and government action disproportionately harm marginalized communities.

(01:48):
And what fascinated me about milk as I researched more
and more. First, I was surprised to learn that milk
is actually not a nutritious, healthy food, right. That a
lot of myths around that. But I think most people
know from our personal physical experiences that milk is not

(02:08):
a great product for us. But then a lot of
research has come out showing that not only is it
not nutritious, but it it's harmful and it has no
health benefits. Right, And so a lot of people hold
on to the myth that, for example, milk is important
for calcium, but the calcium and milk comes from the
grass that cows eat, So it's not actually from the milk.

(02:32):
It's using a cow as an intermediary for getting something
that you could get directly yourself. Right. That was the
first myth buster. But then I'm always looking at where
racism plays into any kind of policy, and milk is
something that recently has received some attention as being a

(02:56):
symbol of white supremacists, but it's also something that has
symbolized white superiority and white supremacy for at least a
hundred years. So learning that, I started to make connections
between the way that white supremacists claim milk as a
symbol of their own superiority and the way that the U.

(03:20):
S t. A. Pushes milk and the covert ways that
it promoted, and I started to see that as somewhat
insidious and a racial justice issue that is not at
all well known. I want to back up to the

(03:46):
relationship between milk and white supremacy. I think many people
will be surprised to hear that there is a relationship.
So can you say what some of those links are
that you found in your research? Absolutely, so it became
a little bit more well known when chia le both

(04:07):
had an art installation in Queens and New York where
a group of neo Nazis crashed this anti Trump art
installation chugging big jugs of milk with naked shirts where
they allowed the milk to just flow over them and
started talking about how they opposed a vegan agenda right,

(04:29):
which really is clearly a code word, And at the
same time some of the very prominent white nationalists started
using a glass of milk as an emoji in their
Twitter names. So they began publicly signaling something that has

(04:49):
long been an obsession by white supremacists, who look at
UM studies that show which people in the world can
digest milk, right, and they see the ability to digest
milk which has we we actually look at the negative

(05:10):
and called lactose intolerance, which is what most people have
because it's actually unusual to be able to digest milk
past breastfeeding age. And but as with many things, the
white people are the ones who can do it the most,
and so that becomes the kind of normal baseline, right,

(05:32):
and anything that diverges from that, even though it's the
common thing, is seen as some kind of anomally right
and given this negative name of lactose intolerance. So the
white supremacist groups study charts of which people in the
world can digest milk and see this as a symbol

(05:53):
of their greater health, their greater strength right. UM and
that idea was first promoted in the nineteen twenties by
the National Dairy Council. By the Agricultural Association of New
York and pamphlets that explicitly associate arians and white people

(06:19):
who drink milk with the strongest, the most intelligent, the
greatest culture. Okay, so I think this is kind of strange,
But it turns out that milk, because of its whiteness,
has been used as a symbol of white supremacy in
social media and appears in pop culture and movies like

(06:43):
Jordan Peel's box office hit get Out when an enslaver
slowly SIPs a glass of milk. The depiction actually has
its origins in a nineteen twenties dairy pamphlet from the
U s National Dairy Council, which explains, quote the people
who have used liberal amounts of milk and its products,

(07:04):
meaning white people are progressive in science and every activity
of the human intellect. So basically, US dietary guidelines are
both racist and culturally insensitive. So I want to be

(07:26):
sure that I understand you correctly. You're saying the National
Dairy Council was tapping into an already existing relationship between
whiteness and purity in order to promote and sell milk,
and that this is in part due to the fact
that those who can digest the milk are most often white.

(07:47):
It's yeah to make money, right, So it's what has
motivated the industry and both all corporations and companies from
for time immemorial, right seeing the same thing. Now, this
is about money, This isn't about trying to promote health,
because we have so many medical and scientific papers and

(08:10):
research that demonstrate that drinking milk is harmful to help andrea.
At the time, in the nineteen twenties, we were still
on the outer edges of a mostly agrarian society. Was
the U. S Government interested in creating incentives for presumably

(08:34):
white land owning men and farmers, or were farmers taking
direction from what the National Dairy Council was promoting. So
that was around the time I believe that milk became safe, right,
because originally milk was responsible for many, many deaths, especially

(08:56):
of children, because we didn't have the technology for raization,
and we had the problem of trying to transport milk
from rural areas to urban areas in ways that wasn't safe.
So once the technology developed, then there was the idea
that it needed to be promoted and sold right to

(09:19):
support this industry that's always been really close to the
government and even in the first Farm Bill, which was
a response to the Great Depression, and then it's part
of the New Deal, right, the dairy industry was one
of the primary ones focused for the government to subsidize

(09:40):
two uplift, and so it's never really been subject to
regular market forces where supply and demand would dictate price
or availability. And as we've come to realize over time
how harmful milk is, there has been a lot of
rob and demand for milk, but the USDA has continued

(10:03):
to prop it up and the Farm Bill because of
the influence of the industry. And this is also related
to the consolidation of the industry, and what we saw
over time is a massive consolidation so that the idea
of what a dairy farmer is is not correct anymore.

(10:32):
This spring, at the onset of the pandemic in the US,
we heard stories about hundreds of gallons of milk being
dumped at precisely the moment when concerns about food scarcity
and security we're growing. How is it that while in
the midst of a crisis in the supply chain, corporations
were dumping in commodity is highly valued as milk, so

(10:52):
the issue is one of food distribution and food supply chains.
Right So, even though we have a lot of milk
being produced through the support of the government, right um,
we don't have the ability to package it in a
way that can reach individual consumers. So a very large
percentage of milk was going to institutions like schools. Um So,

(11:17):
the u s d A has a school lunch program,
a school meals program, and as part of that is
a special milk program. So one of the main ways
that USDA is able to get rid of the surplus
of milk that results from the agricultural subsidies is through schools.
Even though we know that milk consumption by students is

(11:40):
contributing to a lot of health problems, in particularly racial
health disparities and children, there is significant lobbying from the
milk industry. Lobbyists from the sector fall hard against the
Obama era reforms, which restricted schools from selling only non
fat flavored milks and which the dairy industry blamed for
a sharp decline. In two thousand eighteen alone, the International

(12:06):
Dairy Foods Association spent three hundred thousand a quarter in
lobbying on issues related to school lunches. So the closing
down of schools and hotels and other institutions is what
caused the need for a change in the way that

(12:26):
milk would be distributed. So the dairy farms did not
have a way to repackage their milk, you know, into
small containers that you could send to a food bank
or send to a grocery store. So this is what
led to the dumping of the milk because there were

(12:47):
just no way to get it to consumers or individuals.
That's a pivot that would take a lot of infrastructural
change that wasn't possible on such short notice. But let's
go back to the part about racial health disparities in

(13:11):
children in schools, because I remember I went to public
school and elementary school. I remember the little milk cartons,
you know, the chocolate milk UM and the regular milk.
I think it was even skim milk maybe. So you know,
the idea of milk being a part of um the
lunch diet is something that is kind of in eight,

(13:32):
you know, for for many of us. But when we
see as you're saying, that the the majority of the
country cannot actually process milk um and that the health
disparities of consumption are disproportionately affecting black and Brown's students.

(13:56):
And also we're just drinking less milk as a society.
So how is it that milk continues to find its
way into our lunch rooms when seemingly all of these
other factors would suggest that they don't really have any
business being there. The problem goes back to the dual

(14:18):
roles of the U. S t A. The Department of Agriculture.
So on the one hand, that agency is responsible for
promoting the dairy industry and other agricultural industries, and on
the other hand, it is responsible for the nation's nutrition programs,
and one of the main ones is this school of
lunch programs. So it's found this neat solution, right of

(14:41):
having such a large surplus of milk that is paid
for by the government and then becomes the responsibility of
the agency, and they have this need to get rid
of it in any way possible. And so because they
have the school lunch rooms program at their disposal, there
able to direct milk into schools and make an essential

(15:04):
part of the everyday diet. And that takes care of
their problems, and that is their priority over looking at
how it affects the health of public school students. So
the U. S d A has these dual functions, as

(15:25):
you've outlined, both to be the agency on record for
nutrition um but then also a promotional agency that needs
to help distribute milk that is paid for by the
United States government. So the milk that is paid for

(15:47):
by the US government, the funds for that come from taxpayers,
and those choices about the use of funds and the
amount of funds. Does that come from the Farm Bill? Yes, Yes,
subsidies are set by the Farm Bill. Dairy farmers are
the ones who will get it, and the bigger the farm,

(16:09):
the more money they'll get. Without the support from the
Farm Bill, probably most are a very large percentage of
the dairy industry would completely collapse. So I just read
that nine hundred dairy farms closed in and that's before
any of you know, the pandemic and the decrease that's

(16:30):
have been there. It's there's been I think a forty
year decline in milk sales. And so even though the U.
S d A is making best efforts to prop up
the industry, it's still failing. And so I think there's
a renewed interest in getting away from dairy, and that

(16:51):
is also very threatening to the industry, definitely going back
to that vegan agenda that you were talking about, right,
And there is a furious battle going on from the
dairy industry actually in the courts to try to stop
the use of the word milk for you know, substitutes

(17:12):
like almond milk or soy milk. Right. Um, they'd spend
a lot of resources on trying to fight that, arguing
that consumers don't understand the difference right between cow milk
and another kind of milk. So that's another interesting aspect
of what's going on now and what has been going
on for a while. Yeah, so they're they're trying to

(17:33):
both jam it up in court but simultaneously profit from
the boom. Of course, now that sounds more like good
old fashioned American capitalism. One of the ways that usc
A promote dairy is through a Dairy check Off program,
where it takes money from farmers for marketing. And one

(17:56):
of the main aspects of that marketing campaign in the
net work is to partner with fast food companies to
create and promote foods with higher milk content in them.
So classic example of that was the so it's called
the d M I during Management Inc. Marketing branch, and uh,

(18:19):
they worked with Dominoes to create a seven cheese pizza,
which that's a lot. That's a lot, and they paid
for it to debut at the Super Bowl. Okay, so
we know how much those commercials are worth. Um. And
so what they do is they collaborate with these companies

(18:42):
to try to create products that just have more cheese
in them. Okay, so you see the pizza hut crust
that's cheese filled in addition to the cheese on top. Right,
that's your government at work. Yeah, and then some of
the Taco Bello products that there's there's a range, right,
Almost all, maybe all of the major fast food companies

(19:04):
have worked with the U s c As marketing branch
to try to create and then sell these products. You know,
studies show that young people respond to that information. Right,
if you teach them about health, they're basically indifferent. But
if you teach them that fast food companies are trying
to use them for their own marketing, you know through

(19:26):
their snapchats in it, they get mad and they don't
want to do it. And I think we all feel
that way to some extent, right, And if we could
fully understand that what we interpret as choice, it's really
just about corporate profits. Yeah, and the two companies that
you just mentioned our owned by one large corporation young brands,
so that completely makes sense, especially when it feels like

(19:49):
every month virtually there's a new Taco Bell product with
some cheesy iterations. Another way that these things are all
tied together is fast food has very much infiltrated schools.
So if it's not your school cafeteria giving you the milk,
there may be what are called alternative foods in schools

(20:12):
which sell on campus fast food, right. And if not,
then what you're seeing is fast food logos all over schools,
like even on their school buses, on their school signs, right.
And fundraisers that take place go to McDonald's and support

(20:33):
you know, a percentage will go to your classroom. If
you win a competition in the school, then your reward
is some fast food right made ice cream. So really
every aspect of education has been infiltrated by dairy for
young kids. I wonder what degree the corporate investment in

(21:07):
our school system has in the luss to send the
children back to school in the pandemic. Everything about sending
kids back to school is about money and capitalism, right there,
There's absolutely every health reason not to do so. Things
were much better when we first decided to take kids

(21:27):
out of school than they are now. And there is
uh very clearly calculated estimation that a certain number of
kids and teachers will die. But it's worth it to
save the economy, right. So, I think what you're questioning
is what parts of the economy are pushing for them.
And I'm not in the room, so I don't know,

(21:50):
But it does make sense to me that Trump is
our fast food president. Right. He has demonstrated over and
over again his allegiance to that industry, and his administration
heavily supports a dairy industry in many ways, right, one
of them is through formula. And so it wouldn't surprise
me if those were part of the group of corporations

(22:14):
pushing to get people back in the schools. Andrea, let's
talk about baby formula. Can you expound a bit on
the Trump administration's role in prioritizing investment in more formula? Well,
some of the most surprising things I came across in

(22:36):
my research into formula. Was first of all, that the
US government is the largest purchaser of formula in the
United States, and that's through the WIG program. But they
spend more money on formula than anyone else and they
then get these kick back rebates from the industry that
allows them to actually run their program. So the formula

(22:58):
industry has inserted themselves and made themselves key to actually
having a functioning program. At the World Health Assembly, there
was a resolution proposed by Ecuador to promote breastfeeding, which
would seem to be fairly benign, but it was opposed
so strongly by the United States because of the formula

(23:20):
industry that the US threatened trade and aid sanctions against
Ecuador if it did not withdraw that resolution. Formula is dairy,
so by supporting that industry, the US is finding another
way to ensure, you know, a demand for milk. And

(23:41):
let's talk about how this disproportionately affects Black women and children.
So in the United States, black women breastfeed far far
less than any other women always have since slavery, and
at the same time have the highest rate of infant mortality,
which has also been consistent since slavery. And so there

(24:07):
It's obviously complex, because that's why I wrote a whole
book about it. But there are a number of factors
that range from you know, social pressure, to economic pressure,
to you know, the refusal to accommodate, the refusal to
provide any kind of resources for black women, medical racism,

(24:31):
and just a lot of really structural factors that are
dressed up as a preference for formula, which is not
at all true. And formula marketing is a big piece
of that. And so the book that I wrote, Scams,
is about the first marketing campaign for black women, which

(24:54):
took place because a a white doctor sold the rights
of the black identical quadruplets in the US to Formula
company to use in advertising. And it was the first
time that there was any advertising that wasn't just alcohol, cigarettes,
or beauty products directed to black families. And it's kind

(25:17):
of like the rest is history in terms of marketing
and the way that that also has played into these
dramatic health disparities that come from the disparity and breasting range.
From the moment I first encountered it, Andrea's research has
really stuck with me. I think about the persistence of

(25:37):
that ad campaign and those little twenty cent plastic bags
of milk that I and many others were served in
elementary school. And how after all these years, the milk
in those schools, like those commercials, continue to persist. Fortunately,
the mythology around its nutritional benefits have waned in by
all accounts, so too has our consumption. But when we

(26:01):
learned that our government continues to collude with the dairy
industry to make milk the default beverage in schools and
in processed foods, we should hold that with skepticism and
maybe even a little higher. See corporations who pay politicians
to make laws that use our tax dollars to subsidize

(26:22):
their operation is something I'd prefer our government try to
discourage and not indulge in as they currently are. But
as they say, the system ain't broken. It's working just
as it was intended to. I'd like to thank our

(26:45):
guests today, Professor Andrea Freeman. You can learn more about
this episode and Andrea's work at wet Stone magazine, dot com,
Backslash podcast, or on Instagram at wet Stone Magazine. That's
w H E T S T O in E Magazine.
We'll be back next week with more point of Origin,

(27:05):
Thanks for listening. We'd also like to thank our incredible
podcast producer Selene Glazier. Selene, you are the best. To
our editor and Whetstone partner and director of Video David
Alexander in London. Appreciate you, Dave. Thanks to our wet
Stone production intern Quentin le Beau, and last but not least,

(27:28):
my business partner Mel she who makes all things at
whet Stone possible. Thank you Mel. We'd also like to
thank our partners and production at I Heeart Radio to
Gabrielle Collins, our supervising producer and executive producer Christopher Haciotis.
We'll be back next week with more from the world
of food worldwide Point of Origin listeners. As you know,

(27:58):
rating and reviewing our podcast is the very best way
for more people to find out about our very important
work at Whetstone, so please, if you're able, we would
really appreciate a positive review in rating on Apple podcast
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