December 11, 2024 • 40 mins
Stuffed crust pizza. Grilled cheese burritos. How did so much cheese get into so many things? On today's episode, we peel back the curtain on the Dairy Industrial Complex — AKA Big Parma.
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VERY SPECIAL CREDITS
On the Very Special Episodes podcast, we tell one incredible story each week. Follow Dana Schwartz, Zaron Burnett, and Jason English down a different rabbit hole every Wednesday.
Today’s Episode Was Written and Hosted by Very Special Guest Stars Ben Bowlin and Alex French
Producer is Josh Fisher
Editing and Sound Design by Chris Childs
Additional Editing by Mary Dooe
Mixing and Mastering by Baheed Frazier
Original Music by Elise McCoy
Show Logo by Lucy Quintanilla
Executive Producer is Jason English
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
Originals.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
This is an iHeart original.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
Welcome back to very special episodes. So glad you're here.
My name is Jason English. Today, Dana Zaren and I
have something extra very special in store for you. We
have two very special guest stars from elsewhere in the
iHeart Cinematic Universe. Our good friends Ben Bowlin and Alex
French are going to be taking the mic. This one
starts with a simple question, how the did cheese get in?
(00:36):
Everything from stuff Cruss Pizza to Got Milk ads to
that famous West Wing episode. These guys cover a ton
of ground. Ben and Alex are a great team. They'll
be back on this feed throughout twenty twenty five, popping
in here and there. We haven't recorded their next episode
yet or else I would end today's show with a
post credit scene, but I will give you one spoiler.
(00:59):
It starts in a waffle house. That's a food story
for another day. Today we're talking big Parma.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
The year is nineteen ninety five. Coolio has a massive
radio hit with Gangster's Paradise. Bruce Willis's Die Hard with
a Vengeance is king of the international box office. The
Internet is privatized, AOL and Prodigy usher forth the birth
of the information age. OJ is acquitted. The cheesecake factory
(01:31):
rapidly becomes one of suburban America's favorite kitchens, and on
every TV set. Donald Trump and his ex wife Havanna,
divorced for five years by then, are hawking mutant pies
for Pizza Hut. Do you really think this is the
right thing for us to be doingva? But dear people think,
let him talk. It's wrong, isn't it?
Speaker 2 (01:57):
But it feels so right?
Speaker 1 (01:59):
Then it's a deal. Yesa pizza the wrong way.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Cruss first, introducing stuff crust pizza from Pizza Hut with
a ring of cheese baked into a total thinner crust.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
You don't want to eat it the wrong way crust First,
I have the last size. Actually, you're only entitled to
half large.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
Just nine ninety nine, obesity was an epidemic.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
About one in five American adults was considered dangerously overweight.
In nineteen ninety five, heart disease was on the rise.
I mean what a time.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
Oh, I remember it well, Ben moving through the world
and a food induced stupor from a constant barrage of
gargantuan portions served up at popular casual dining chains. Yet
the stuff crust pizza creation was world changing, a watershed
moment in the history of stunt food and unnecessary anything
goes sort of gimmick that led to nothing good.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
Yeah, because pizza is already perfect sticking cheese in the crust, However,
it felt like it was bad.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
Tomak Love handles, oh chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
Alex, the list goes on. Pizza Hut rolled out stuffed
crust pizza to the public during Final four weekend with
a forty five million dollar advertising campaign.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
C Suite execs at The Hut hoped that the solution
for stagnant sales numbers was laying a necklace of mozzarella
cheese around the pizza crust perimeter and folding over the dough.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
Alan Huston, the chain's president and chief executive, told The
New York Times that the stuffed crust pizza represented the
razor edge of pizza dough technology and mozzarella management. The
recipe called for using a whopping fifty percent more cheese
than your typical pizza.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
And that stuffed crust pizza innovation wasn't cooked up by
Pizza Hut alone. They had help from a secret government agency,
a Queso Cabal, if you will, funded by the dairy industry,
with the express purpose of convincing the pizza huts and
Tacko bells of the world to use more milk products
in their food, no matter the expense nor the health
(04:06):
risks consumers, the sorts of Cretans who think it's okay
to load shredded taco blend and a garden salad.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
I'm Ben Bollett, I'm Alex French, and in this very
special episode, we peel back the curtain on the dairy
industrial complex, also known as Big Parma. Alex, you and
(04:35):
I have been in some pretty deep rabbit holes before.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
That's right. We created a show called Let's Start a Coup,
which is about a real pill named Smellley Butler who
just might have saved America.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
Yeah, yeah, true story. We sure did. And ever since
then we've been talking about other weird things. I'm always
learning new stuff about you. For example, you have never,
and this is true, drank a glass of milk.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
Not even once. Huh, not even chocolate or strawberry as
a kid. I escaped it by fanning a milk allergy.
Another fun fact I do not allow yogurt in my
house amazing.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
Like, I know you well and I still have a
hard time believing that. But regardless, it's safe to say
that you and I are both fans of cheese.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
Yeah, I would commit unspeakable crimes for a piece of
age parmesan, drizzled and honey. Anyway, not too long ago,
you reached out to me and our pal Jason English,
who's executive producer of the show, to ask a pretty
odd question.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
When did cheese get into everything? How am I am?
I crazy?
Speaker 2 (05:37):
Well, I don't think cheese is going to be our
deciding factor for that one, but this question did set
us on a journey. We started digging, and as we progressed,
the story just got stranger and stranger. I mean, I
believe we uncovered a cheese spiarracy.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
Right. So, in nineteen seventy five, the average American consumed
a little more than fourteen pounds of cheese per year.
In twenty nineteen, the average consumer in the United States
eight about forty point four pounds of cheese.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
And in twenty twenty two, according to numbers provided by
the Cheese industrial Complex aka Big Parma, Fromage consumption in
the United States set an all time high at nearly
forty two pounds per person, a half pound per person
increase over the previous year. That is an insane quantity
of cheese. Insane, I mean, just think about it. Forty
(06:31):
two pounds. That's two and a half slices of cheese
per person per day.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
And let's also consider there are scores of people who
don't dig on dairy at all, you know, vegans and
folks who, unlike you, are genuinely lactose intolerant.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Which leads me to wonder, with all those people eating
zero cheese, who's at the high end of the average.
Who are these people eating eighty pounds of cheese a year?
Eighty pounds? Rabbit holes band rabbit holes, Alex.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
And one day those same rabbit holes may themselves be
stuffed with cheese. You see, folks, cheese iswear these days,
Cheesy Gordidas, sides of caesu, stuffed crust, pizza, quesa lupas,
you name it. Things that were once cheeseless are now
drenched in the stuff. Not that I'm complaining, And.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
I'll tell you what. During a recent expedition to the
grocery store, it struck me that by far more square
footage and refrigerator space is dedicated to cheese and cheese
foods than any other product.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
And in the course of your journalism career, you've seen
tons of trends come and go. I'm sure you've seen
cheese trends or cheese filtration in ways that I've never imagined.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
Well, how far is too far? I mean, think of Brata.
One day, about a century ago, some guy said, hey,
let's put cheese in the cheese. So you and I
looked around and asked each other, how did we get here?
Does America just have an organic, insatiable demand for the stuff,
or is.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
There something smelly afoot?
Speaker 2 (08:07):
Maybe maybe this is all just the result of consumer
demand and companies giving people what they want, or just
maybe there is something stinky here, as stinky as an
old sock stuffed with limburger. To answer that question, to
really get our heads around big cheese, we have to
start with something else, the dairy industry, strapping ben there's
(08:29):
hidden history ahead. Okay, before we go any further, I
think we have to take a look at what cheese is.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
Oh yeah, all right, Alex imagine describing cheese to aliens,
or for that matter, describing it to anyone encountering cheese
for the first time. We'd be like, hey, uh, you
guys know milk, and they'd be like ew yeah, and
we'd say, okay, So we take this milk and we
curdle it and we press it together and get this
(09:09):
we salted solid milk. It's important to keep in mind
that people discovered this well before recorded human history, probably
in step with dairy and domestication. So this hypothetical conversation
is taking place more than seven thousand years.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Ago, and no one really knows who invented cheese. The
technique is that ancient. We do believe, like a lot
of inventions and discoveries, that ancient people stumbled across this
by accident.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
Classic human classic.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
From there, let's move forward through the rise of the
dairy all the way to the United States.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
Yeah, before Europeans arrived in the Americas, there wasn't really
any big dairy industry to speak of. Indigenous peoples fed
themselves through hunting, fishing, foraging, agriculture, all the hits. The
first cows arrived on the continent around the same time
Christopher Columbus made his second voyage in fourteen ninety three and.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
Spread across the continent soon after. In a very real way,
cattle were a tool of colonialism.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
Oh I dig it? What does that mean? Exactly?
Speaker 2 (10:15):
Well, think about it. Cattle changed the original landscape. Cattle
require land, and they also transform it their existence and
expansion in the America's pushed out native species. This doesn't
get mentioned often, but the animals Europeans brought over influenced
the area just as much as the humans. That's what
leads anthropologists like Rosa E. Faisik to write conquest worked
(10:37):
indirectly through bodies of cattle taking up more and more space.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
Yeah, and the US has always been in a kind
of situationship with cheese. Fans of the West Wing may
remember the old story about former President Andrew Jackson and
how he kept a ginormous block of cheese right there
in the White House. While the West Wing is great TV,
he took some liberties with the story.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
Yeah, the story really starts with Thomas Jeffer. Jefferson was
given a massive sixteen hundred pound cheese from Western Massachusetts
as a gift, and later when Jackson was elected, his
supporters were determined that Jackson should get every honor Jefferson
got up to and including a cartoonish hunk of cheddar cheese.
So it wasn't that Jackson necessarily loved cheese that much.
(11:25):
It was more like political theater.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
Oh oh, and the cheese on tour. Speaking of theater
before it arrived at the White House, Jackson's White House,
I mean, the cheese was displayed in Baltimore, New York,
and Philadelphia.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
Fast forward to Jackson's final party as president in eighteen
thirty seven. He has a blowout and allows everyone around
to scarf down as much of the presidential cheese as
they like.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
According to author Benjamin Purley Poor in his Reminiscences of
sixty Years in the National Metropolis, this was quite a scene, Poor.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Writes, four hours did a crowd of men, women and
boys hack at the cheese, many taking large hunks of
it away with them. When they commenced that cheese weighed
one four hundred pounds and only a small piece was
saved for the president's use, the air was redolent of cheese,
the carpet was slippery with cheese, and nothing else was
(12:22):
talked about at Washington that day, even the scandal about
the wife of the president's secretary of War was forgotten
in the tumultuous jubilation of that great occasion.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
That honestly sounds like a blast.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
You know, somebody took a nasty slip and fall in
that cheese slicked carpet.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
Cheese slicked carpet. There's a turtive phrase. It's also important
for us to note we're already seeing a narrative at play.
A lot of people believe this big block at cheese
was a purposeful symbol of democracy that had stood for
the common people, the tire, the poor, the hungry masses yearning.
Speaker 2 (12:59):
To add a little flavor to their crackers.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
Okay, come on, man, but yeah, you get the drift.
It's it's the kind of pru just cannot buy cheese,
or more broadly, dairy means democracy. Something about cheese was
seen as a unifying force. And this is not an
originally American idea either.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
In her book Milk, a local and global history professor
Deborah Vlenz notes Europeans sometimes felt the same way about cheese.
Everyone ate it, the wealthy ate it for digestion, and
the poorate it for hunger. But really, again, if we're
talking cheese, we're talking.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
Milk, and milk is a real pickle. Think about it.
It's expensive to create at scale. You have to have
the cows or the goats or the camels or whatever,
and you have to feed them and care for them,
and once you ensure they're healthy, you have to milk them.
And once you have the milk, eight clock starts ticking.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
Because milk is perishable, you have to process and package
and transport it all in a pretty narrow window of time.
And if you don't manage to get all those dairy
ducks in a row and sell the milk before it
goes bad, you're out.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
Of luck, and you're out of a lot of time, sweat,
and money as well. This is why for most of
human history milk production was a local, or at best
regional affair, and dairy has been with humans for a
long long time. Despite all the ways milk production can
possibly go wrong, it usually works. And we love it
(14:31):
when stuff works, we do.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
But Ben, let's just say you, me and our listeners
at home are all hypothetically dairy farmers way back.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
In the day.
Speaker 2 (14:40):
We'll call ourselves wholesome creams and kurds, all.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
Right, which time period are we talking.
Speaker 2 (14:46):
Let's go eighteen hundreds, so maybe our outfit needs to
be called yield creams and kurds, all right, I am
in Okay, So here we are. It's the eighteen hundreds,
and we've been going gangbusters on this whole milk thing.
Our cows are doing great, a little too great. In fact,
we've sold all the milk we can all around the land.
Our customers love us, but they can only drink so
(15:08):
much of the stuff. What do we do next?
Speaker 1 (15:11):
Well, we don't want to dump our hard earned dairy
down a hole in the ground, and we can't just
sit on it. We've spent so much time making this stuff.
I mean, yes, the cows are doing the real work.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
But you know what I'm saying exactly, we can't leave
this opportunity on the table. If we go wonder, we'll
be out of a job and there won't be milk
in the future when demand kicks back in.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
I think I see where you're going.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
Cheese, we transform our notoriously perishable product into something that
can sit for months years without spoiling, a popular food
for princes and peasants alike. We might even forego the
cheese making process ourselves. After all, it's the eighteen hundreds
and there are already well established cheesemakers and mongers.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
So if the demand for milk isn't there, we shift
toward a demand for cheese.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
It's a time trusted strategy. And here's the thing. People
have been doing this in the modern day. Make no mistake,
the US dairy industry is a juggernaut. It has a
lot of economic theft. It also ihs heavily on the
minds of policymakers. At various times in US history, the
dairy industry becomes a matter of national security.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
Yeah, and jokes aside. It's an odd relationship, isn't it.
I mean, the Constitution has no role for federal powers
to regulate farmers. And while there were a few exceptions
to this general vibe that free enterprise lack of regulation
was largely par for the course until about the nineteen thirties.
Speaker 2 (16:44):
This is where we enter one of the most pivotal
times in all of US history, the Great Depression.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
It's just a terrible You always say that, yeah, Alex,
it's just misleading. But granted you're onto something.
Speaker 2 (16:57):
The Great Depression doesn't refer to the happiness of the people.
Quite the opposite. Instead, it refers to the sheer magnitude
of misery felt by the country overall. Farmers were affected
as horribly as anyone else picture it. People are starving
in the cities. Droughts trigger the Great Oak migration.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
Yeah, Steinbeck's grapes of wrath didn't come from nowhere.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
And add to this, prices are going insane, Commodity indexes collapsed,
people in urban centers starve, clamoring for food, and farmers
are literally throwing away milk to shore up prices.
Speaker 1 (17:31):
Yeah, check out things like the infamous Wisconsin milk strikes
of nineteen thirty three. We were talking utter chaos. Something
had to be done.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
On multiple fronts. This is where we see the rise
of Roosevelt's New Deal, the sweeping legislation sought by Hooker
by Crook to save the US economy, and part of
that involved dairy subsidies. It was what we might call a.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
Bailout, most notably through something called the Commodity Credit Corporation,
created in nineteen thirty three expressly to stabilize port and
protect farm incomes and prices.
Speaker 2 (18:11):
The US survived the Great Depression, but the Commodity Credit
Corporation remained. It established a precedent and a trend.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
And these trends continue. Uncle Sam repeatedly supports the dairy
industry by purchasing surplus milk, just like our fictional milk
company yield wholesome creams and kurds. In the eighteen hundreds,
the US again and again finds itself in a corner.
They buy all this milk, this perishable product, to keep
(18:39):
people's jobs and an entire industry alive. And they don't
want that milk to go to waste.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
And this is where we see the rise of butterstock
piles as well as processed cheese. Think about the nineteen forties.
Just a few decades later, military kitchens were chalk full
of the stuff in World War Two. Thankfully this war
didn't last forever, but after nineteen forty five, the US
government again found itself in a tough spot. Without all
these soldiers doing well, it sounds weird to say it.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
Yeah, but without all these soldiers supplying the demand, yeah,
that's it.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
Really, Without that baked in demand, the US needed to
find another place to push all these products. We've entered
the era of public private partnerships. To put it simply,
cheese lobbies, increasingly powerful interests, organizations and trade groups. They
form a policy feedback loop. This is big Parma.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
Power begets power, right, So once you have one program
in place, it becomes as normalized as stuffed crust pizza,
and pulling that program back can be political suicide.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
Big Parma not only sought that money out, it did
so in ways that weren't always above board.
Speaker 1 (19:53):
Oh yeah, I see where we're going. Shout out to
our buddy Archibald Cox from back in the days of Watergate.
Our pal Cox didn't just investigate that June nineteen seventy
two break in the one that spelled doom, old tricky Dick.
Cox also looked into a bunch of other alleged crimes.
In fact, his task force focused largely on something they
(20:15):
called the Milk Deal, in which a handful of dairy
cooperatives bribed then President Nixon with hundreds of thousands of
dollars of campaign contributions, all in exchange for record breaking
subsidies and tighter import controls on foreign dairy products.
Speaker 2 (20:34):
So, for those of us playing along at home, what
does that mean? Then?
Speaker 1 (20:38):
It means simply put. They managed to make America say
we will sell you our milk, and we sure as
hell are not buying yours.
Speaker 2 (20:47):
This was only one chapter in a much larger story,
and in the wake of Watergate, a thing that was
easily forgotten, Uncle Sam scrambled back and forth to keep
the dairy industry going through the next few decades. The
history of dairy farming in the twentieth century is really
about labor. I mean, think about it. The creation of
cooperatives that set prices and then held strikes or boys
cots when they weren't treated fairly. When the supply of
(21:10):
milk drops off due to boycott's or droughts, everyone freaks out.
Think about the national dairy shortage of the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
Ooh, that's when all dairy product prices across the board
shot up by thirty percent.
Speaker 2 (21:22):
Right exactly. The government intervened, prices plummeted, and in came
President Jimmy Carter to make another bailout, pouring money like
milk you could say, into the industry. From nineteen seventy
seven to nineteen eighty one, this new policy put two
billion dollars of subsidies into massive milk.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
Which was great in the short term, but without sounding
like a dairy DeBie Downer. Was this an over correction?
Do we maybe push the pendulum too far?
Speaker 2 (21:51):
Yeah? This may be the case. Farmers knew they could
produce as much as possible. They were financially motivated to
do so because whatever wasn't sold the regular way would
end up being bought by the government at stabilized, predictable prices.
Speaker 1 (22:04):
Oh oh, I got a presidential voice for this picture.
It are follow over, our coads. We are Richard moult smirt.
Speaker 2 (22:17):
Man. Not bad seven out of time.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
You're a tough crowd man. But again we see the
old issue arise. Now the US has all this milk
with no real market demand for it, but they've paid
in full and don't want to be ass out on
the deal.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
Can we say that utterly like you're being utterly ridiculous?
Speaker 1 (22:35):
Okay, all right, fair enough, But you see the problem,
the dilemma of having all this milk. So what do
we do with it? We make cheese.
Speaker 2 (22:42):
That's right. It's the nineteen eighties and here we see
the rise of government cheese.
Speaker 3 (22:46):
Ah.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
Yes, government cheese bought and stored by the Commodity Credit
Corporation from earlier.
Speaker 2 (22:52):
And the public, to be clear, didn't necessarily love this idea.
Some folks in the US saw this as a slap
in the face. Think about it, You're going hungry and
your own government has this crazy stockpile of food.
Speaker 1 (23:04):
Yeah, I get it, you get it. We can all
stand that. As a result of public or perhaps manufactured outcry,
then President Ronald Reagan both cut the US food stamp
budget and rolled out government cheese for direct distribution back
in nineteen eighty two. Under the auspice of the USD eight.
This was touted as a panacea for hunger, sort of
(23:27):
a two birds with one breeze situation. Does that one?
Speaker 2 (23:31):
Does that work?
Speaker 1 (23:32):
Okay? So they're addressing hunger while also ensuring the continuation
of this industry.
Speaker 2 (23:38):
Again, we've got the supply, we find the demand. Reagan's
Agriculture and Food Act of nineteen eighty one both acknowledged
the massive stockpile of cheese and at the same time
decreed it would be distributed to the needy and nonprofit organizations.
Any state that asked would get thirty million pounds of cheese.
What take that, Jackson? This also guarantee that the US
(24:00):
would continue supporting big Parma.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
So it goes that. Same year, nineteen eighty one, the
second Mitary of Agriculture, John R. Block told reporters, referring
to all these pounds of cheese, he said, we've got
sixty million of these that the government owns. It's moldy,
it's deteriorating. We can't find a market for it, we
can't sell it, and we're looking to give some of
(24:24):
it away.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
We're off to the races here. Let's talk economy of scale,
which is just a fancy term meeting prices go down
when you have more output and better infrastructure.
Speaker 1 (24:35):
Yeah, that's why, for example, a single guy making shoes
by hand is almost always going to have to sell
his shoes for more than the big companies making thousands
of shoes every day.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
And we saw this with the US dairy industry. Back
in nineteen eighty seven, the median dairy farm had eighty
cows or fewer. Today it's about nine hundred. Economies of
scale have driven costs down and bolstered output.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
And on top of that, the average dairy cow is
producing more milk than ever. Thank you to some at times,
sinister decisions on breeding and diet. We've got government cheese,
we've got dairy products as cheese infiltrated as possible into
the military supply chain, and improvements in global trade mean
(25:21):
we can ship stuff fast, finding that ever elusive demand
in markets, countries and continents away.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
And this gets us to your original questions, how did
cheese get in everything? Why was the demand always there
or was it to some degree manufactured?
Speaker 1 (25:39):
Right, yeah, Alex, did big cheese win the game? Or
did someone rig it?
Speaker 2 (25:45):
I imagine saying rigged might put some people off spoil
their milk, soda.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
Say, but it's a valid question, and we can also
see why people might look askance at this. But at
the same time we can argue this is as Homer
Simpson would have said in Beginning Opportunities. We're taking dairy
products outside of the US. We're leveraging and nonprofits to
move milk and cheese around the world. Plus, of course,
(26:12):
with each step we're keeping domestic farmers in business, which.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
All sounds great until that global market collapses in ocean away.
The nation of China grappled with its own problems when
demand for dairy products in the Chinese market imploded, which
has happened several times, including just this year in twenty
twenty four, Yet again, Uncle Sam found itself in a pickle.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
Holy? Is this the part?
Speaker 2 (26:35):
This is the answer to the question sort of, Oh yeah.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
Alex, can we please do a little trade industry ad?
Speaker 2 (26:42):
I don't see why not.
Speaker 1 (26:44):
Real milk has eight times more protein than almond milk.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
Real milk has naturally occurring calcium.
Speaker 3 (26:49):
Almond milk doesn't amory, and it also only has two
percent almonds, which looks like this.
Speaker 1 (26:54):
What's the other ninety eight percent? Get real, get naturally
nutritious real milk. So that's bonkers, right? We got ads
for not a specific brand of a thing, just the
general idea of milk.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
And marketing groups for the general idea of milk had
already popped up pretty early in the twentieth century. There
are plenty of other examples as well, beef, pork, you
get it. For quite some time, the United States has
disguised national security through a proxy program of interdependent quasi
private industries attempting to extol the virtues of a given
(27:31):
product instead of telling the American public the truth. Come on, man,
this is my part.
Speaker 1 (27:37):
Yeah, it's just you know, people need to know, well,
are we doing the show? Absolutely, dude. We are the
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of this whole cheese thing, the Moulder
and Scully. I love it. I want to believe. Let's
go to twenty seventeen.
Speaker 2 (27:57):
Yeah, there were one point three billion pounds of cheese
and cold storage, and no small part due to two
separate federal announcements that the US would purchase something like
twenty million dollars worth of dairy surplus for distribution to
food pantries.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
Because we have to keep it.
Speaker 2 (28:14):
Going, because someone says we have to keep it going,
and that someone is the dairy farmers.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
It's crazy that you seriously have never drank a glass
of milk.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
Never, not at once. It's gross. Moving on, moving on.
In an August twenty sixteen letter, the National Milk Producers
Federation begged the USDA for one hundred and fifty million
dollar bailout. Ben, have you ever heard of Dairy Management Incorporated?
Speaker 1 (28:41):
Do I do I do a voice here? Or do
we just roll with it? All? Right?
Speaker 2 (28:45):
Fine, it's a soft move. You know about DMI. I
know about DMI, and we're both hoping you listening along
at home will learn a little bit about it too.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
Yeah. Yeah. Without getting into the milk weeds, folks, there
are trade organizations, a concentrated group of government and private
industry concerns, all actively working right now as we record
to make sure the production of dairy products meets some
sort of demand. And if we cannot find that demand naturally,
(29:15):
we will.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
We will make it an inherently American approach to the problem.
Speaker 1 (29:19):
And this is where we enter that story of dairy
management Incorporated. It's fair to say that a lot of
people have never heard of this.
Speaker 2 (29:27):
Group, which is a shame because they're one of our
key characters. DMI is a trade association funded through the
Dairy Promotion Program, which is in turn funded by government
regulations requiring dairy farmers to pay three dollars and thirty
one cents per metric ton on all milk produced and
marketed in the forty eight contiguous states. DMI is the
(29:47):
beating heart of Big Parma.
Speaker 1 (29:49):
And DMI was originally created by the US Department of
Agriculture way back in nineteen ninety five. Wheels within cheese wheels. Indeed,
this already sounds like a bunch of odd companies passing
money around, maybe on the slide, but to be fair,
they won't describe themselves as odd or sinister. We have
(30:12):
to remember there are no quote unquote bad guys in
the story.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
But have you noticed been that like in movies these days,
the only people who drink milk are like weird villains
and yes, little kids.
Speaker 1 (30:23):
Yeah, anyway, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:24):
I would absolutely describe the stuff crust pizza as a
crime against gastronomy.
Speaker 1 (30:28):
Yeah, what's that old line? History is written by the victors.
Speaker 2 (30:32):
And we're still in the turn of history here. We
reached out to multiple sources for answers at DMI. On
a phone call, I told the media relations flack with
the company that we wanted to learn about dairy as
an industry that innovates, about the history of DMI, about
their work with the big fast food chains, about the
got Milk campaign, and their response was a little, I
(30:53):
don't know, disingenuous, Dear Alex.
Speaker 1 (30:56):
Unfortunately, we don't have anyone who'd be a good fit
to answer questions on all the topics you mentioned you'd
like to include in this upcoming episode. Well, Alex, if
that doesn't sound like a clandestine cabal of cheese operatives.
I don't know what does we do know? DMI is
one of our most easily identifiable gosh. I don't want
(31:18):
to say culprits, but they're the collective protagonists for getting
cheese into more American food products.
Speaker 2 (31:25):
Yep. They've worked with McDonald's, Pizzahu, Wendy's, Taco Bell, you
name it. If there's a way of injecting cheese into something,
they've probably invented it.
Speaker 1 (31:35):
There's another thing all of us listening along need to know.
Why does this work so successfully? I would posit the
answer is found in evolution. Humans evolved to prize high
fat unctious food stuffs, and cheese fits the bill. But
Jesus definitely not perfect. Surprisingly enough, some of the most
strident criticisms of big Parma come from physicians, and.
Speaker 2 (31:59):
We have to be at front about this. Cheese is
an ancient art, but it does have some potentially dangerous
effects on your health. Obesity is an up in the
United States and abroad. Milk and other dairy products are
the top source of saturated fat in the American diet,
contributing to heart disease, type two diabetes and Alzheimer's. Studies
have also linkedairy to an increased risk of breast, ovarian
(32:20):
and prostate cancers. There's a whole bunch of good stuff
in milk, calcium, protein, vitamin D, for instance, But it's
not like dairy is the only source for those things.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
Yeah, and DMI in particular has a long history of
cheese filtration. By their own account, this organization works with
leading restaurant chains, grocery stores like Kroger, and food manufacturers
like General Mills, all of whom collectively invest hundreds of
millions of dollars in marketing efforts and advertising campaigns to
(32:52):
promote their dairy centric menu items.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
The McDonald's mcflurry, the five cheese mac and cheese at Dominoes,
a Grandma style pizza pizza hut that eliminated crust so
cheese could be piled all the way to the outer
margins of the pie.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
Yeah. Yeah, the result, folks, through these various and alex
I'm not yet calling it a proxy war. Through these
proxy entities, DMI has moved an astonishing seven point five
billion pounds of dairy. And you know what, man, this
is aggravating because I can't even get away with a
late fee at the library.
Speaker 2 (33:28):
We mentioned the high level version of this, Let's get
to the nitty gritty. These cheese drenched culinary Frankenstein's aren't
the result of organic supply and demand.
Speaker 1 (33:39):
Yeah. The more we learn about it, the less DMI
seems like a trade group, and the more it seems
like a think tank Rand corporation style, but with cheddar.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
One hundred percent. DMI employs a panoply of dairy scientists
working not just hand in hand, but on site with
like their own offices, at the headquarters of your favorite
fast food joints, eternally brainstorming new ways to inundate the
American and international diet with dairy product, cheese in particular.
Speaker 1 (34:11):
Yeah, and this is not just some kind of disturbing
campfire story, Alex. You actually did some digging into a
specific dairy scientist over at DMI. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:23):
Yeah, So, late one night I trilled the Internet looking
for evidence of DMI dirty work, and I stumbled on
this video of a cheese operative named Mike Seresi doing
an interview about his gig working in the Taco Bell
innovation kitchen.
Speaker 1 (34:35):
Alex, you're making it sound like you're about to unveil
the smoking gun that proves a global cheese spiracy.
Speaker 2 (34:42):
More like a smoking good eband the whole video was
a little off putting if I'm being honest, Sersi, is
this guy talking about how glorious it is being embedded
as a dairy operative in a top American food chain,
pumping what I would call harmful ingredients into foods so
that the dairy industry can turn bigger profits.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
At one point, the interviewer asked Sersi about some of
the winds he's had over the years. Ms.
Speaker 4 (35:07):
Mike Serising, I'm a dairy scientist with DMI. I have
been working in research and development for about fifteen years now,
mostly focused on dairy science, and I first joined DMI
back in twenty thirteen, where I had the amazing opportunity
to join the Taco Bell team on behalf of THEMI
working in their test kitchen and developing new products for
(35:28):
the menu. We've had some really great successful launches over
the year. Just a couple that come to mind is
the Ca Salupa that was a truly innovative product. It
was a cheese stuffshell had a massive media promotion behind it.
We actually had a TV ad that ran during the
Super Bowl, so that was just super exciting.
Speaker 1 (35:47):
Folks. We're an audio show, so it's important for you
to know. While Ceresi is saying all of these things
you just heard, a bunch of information cards are popping
onto the screen and the stats look bonkers. Before DMI support,
tacos contained about a quarter of an ounce of cheese.
Thanks to this partnership, new food items contain about five
(36:08):
to ten times more cheese.
Speaker 2 (36:10):
The discussion leads to the beverage category.
Speaker 1 (36:12):
Oh man, yeah, yeah, Alex. Have you ever had a
Pineapple Whip or the Baja Blast Kalauda?
Speaker 2 (36:18):
I have not, but I do know that Taco Bell
is owned by Pepsi Company and the Pineapple Whip was
their first dairy drink. But the way sor Recei talks
about the process of reverse engineering those drinks is kind of,
I don't know, alarming. Here he is again.
Speaker 4 (36:33):
We also have a new dairy dessert beverage that's testing
in market, which we're really excited about.
Speaker 1 (36:39):
I'm getting diabetes just thinking about this one. Surely it
was discontinued.
Speaker 2 (36:44):
You're correct. In fact, we could do an entire episode
on discontinued fast food products, but both the pineapple whip
and the grilled cheese burrito were one hundred percent the
result of DMI intervention. How do we get more dairy
in more things?
Speaker 1 (36:59):
You know, it's weird, isn't it? Just philosophically, it is
a bizarre proposition, creating demand demand where a natural demand
does not exist. I'll say it. It feels like a
good time for some serious questions.
Speaker 2 (37:14):
Yeah, you know, this is where I start to have
problems too, the idea of injecting cheese into something not
because it enhances the flavor or healthfulness of the food,
but because it drives up profits for the dairy industry.
In this way, Big Parma bears an alarming resemblance to
the tobacco or liquor industries. Knowing that you're creating a
product that's going to make people fat and sick and
(37:36):
doing it anyway. And at the same time, Big Parma
covers its cellulate pocked rear end to seem like you know,
the good guys by forming strategic partnerships with the Mayo
Clinic too, and I'm quoting here, improve public health and
advance dairies benefits, including the role full fat dairy may
play in cardiovascular and metabolic conditions. That's sort of like
(37:58):
you know, Exxon Mobile or British Petroleum claiming to do
good bye researching climate.
Speaker 1 (38:03):
Change the Mayo clinic. Huh, yes, Alex, there's got to
be a cheese and mayo joke in here somewhere, right.
Speaker 2 (38:10):
Yeah, we're talking about a serious thing.
Speaker 1 (38:12):
Then, Okay, okay, yeah, yeah, but what if it's like,
what if we do a thing where people buy mayonnaise
and cheese together? Gross, dude, I know, but I'm saying,
what if it's like you buy another condiment and they
just start putting cheese in there. Cat cheese up to
other examples.
Speaker 2 (38:29):
Then this is a very special episode. Okay, Okay, seriously, man,
you asked us to look into it, and we're doing
puns now at the end of a pretty damning investigation
into an extremely grave issue.
Speaker 1 (38:39):
All right, all right, yes, I hear you. Focus, all right, okay,
focusing and Justina side, Alex, I do understand what you're saying.
I'm still going to eat cheese though, like a lot
of it? Are you and I cool? I guess?
Speaker 2 (38:57):
I mean I would expect nothing less. And millions of
Americans have made the same choice including.
Speaker 1 (39:03):
Me agreed, and whether we're talking about fanatics or strict
vegans who don't need anything, they cast a shadow. It's
crucial to understand how a phenomenon like this occurs, and
perhaps more importantly, why, Alex, would you say it's fair
to call this a legit conspiracy.
Speaker 2 (39:23):
I'd say we should call it a chiefs spiracy.
Speaker 3 (39:32):
Very Special Episodes is made by some very special people.
This show is hosted by Danish Schwartz, Zaren Burnett and
Jason English. Today's episode was written and hosted by Very
Special guest stars Ben Bolin and Alex French. Our producer
is Josh Fisher. Editing and sound design by Chris Childs.
Additional editing by Mary Doo, mixing and mastering by Behead Fraser.
(39:58):
Original music by Elise McCoy. Show logo by Lucy Kintinia.
Our executive producer is Jason English. You'd like to email
this show, you can reach us at Very Special Episodes
at gmail dot com. To get more Ben Bollen in
your life, check out Stuff they Don't want you to
know or ridiculous history. Alex French's new company is called
feature Well Productions. You'll be hearing a lot from them
(40:22):
in the new year. We'll be back with the first
of our holiday episodes next week. Excited for that very
special episodes is a production of iHeart Podcasts.
Originals.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
This is an iHeart original.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
Welcome back to very special episodes. So glad you're here.
My name is Jason English. Today, Dana Zaren and I
have something extra very special in store for you. We
have two very special guest stars from elsewhere in the
iHeart Cinematic Universe. Our good friends Ben Bowlin and Alex
French are going to be taking the mic. This one
starts with a simple question, how the did cheese get in?
(00:36):
Everything from stuff Cruss Pizza to Got Milk ads to
that famous West Wing episode. These guys cover a ton
of ground. Ben and Alex are a great team. They'll
be back on this feed throughout twenty twenty five, popping
in here and there. We haven't recorded their next episode
yet or else I would end today's show with a
post credit scene, but I will give you one spoiler.
(00:59):
It starts in a waffle house. That's a food story
for another day. Today we're talking big Parma.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
The year is nineteen ninety five. Coolio has a massive
radio hit with Gangster's Paradise. Bruce Willis's Die Hard with
a Vengeance is king of the international box office. The
Internet is privatized, AOL and Prodigy usher forth the birth
of the information age. OJ is acquitted. The cheesecake factory
(01:31):
rapidly becomes one of suburban America's favorite kitchens, and on
every TV set. Donald Trump and his ex wife Havanna,
divorced for five years by then, are hawking mutant pies
for Pizza Hut. Do you really think this is the
right thing for us to be doingva? But dear people think,
let him talk. It's wrong, isn't it?
Speaker 2 (01:57):
But it feels so right?
Speaker 1 (01:59):
Then it's a deal. Yesa pizza the wrong way.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Cruss first, introducing stuff crust pizza from Pizza Hut with
a ring of cheese baked into a total thinner crust.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
You don't want to eat it the wrong way crust First,
I have the last size. Actually, you're only entitled to
half large.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
Just nine ninety nine, obesity was an epidemic.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
About one in five American adults was considered dangerously overweight.
In nineteen ninety five, heart disease was on the rise.
I mean what a time.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
Oh, I remember it well, Ben moving through the world
and a food induced stupor from a constant barrage of
gargantuan portions served up at popular casual dining chains. Yet
the stuff crust pizza creation was world changing, a watershed
moment in the history of stunt food and unnecessary anything
goes sort of gimmick that led to nothing good.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
Yeah, because pizza is already perfect sticking cheese in the crust, However,
it felt like it was bad.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
Tomak Love handles, oh chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
Alex, the list goes on. Pizza Hut rolled out stuffed
crust pizza to the public during Final four weekend with
a forty five million dollar advertising campaign.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
C Suite execs at The Hut hoped that the solution
for stagnant sales numbers was laying a necklace of mozzarella
cheese around the pizza crust perimeter and folding over the dough.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
Alan Huston, the chain's president and chief executive, told The
New York Times that the stuffed crust pizza represented the
razor edge of pizza dough technology and mozzarella management. The
recipe called for using a whopping fifty percent more cheese
than your typical pizza.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
And that stuffed crust pizza innovation wasn't cooked up by
Pizza Hut alone. They had help from a secret government agency,
a Queso Cabal, if you will, funded by the dairy industry,
with the express purpose of convincing the pizza huts and
Tacko bells of the world to use more milk products
in their food, no matter the expense nor the health
(04:06):
risks consumers, the sorts of Cretans who think it's okay
to load shredded taco blend and a garden salad.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
I'm Ben Bollett, I'm Alex French, and in this very
special episode, we peel back the curtain on the dairy
industrial complex, also known as Big Parma. Alex, you and
(04:35):
I have been in some pretty deep rabbit holes before.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
That's right. We created a show called Let's Start a Coup,
which is about a real pill named Smellley Butler who
just might have saved America.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
Yeah, yeah, true story. We sure did. And ever since
then we've been talking about other weird things. I'm always
learning new stuff about you. For example, you have never,
and this is true, drank a glass of milk.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
Not even once. Huh, not even chocolate or strawberry as
a kid. I escaped it by fanning a milk allergy.
Another fun fact I do not allow yogurt in my
house amazing.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
Like, I know you well and I still have a
hard time believing that. But regardless, it's safe to say
that you and I are both fans of cheese.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
Yeah, I would commit unspeakable crimes for a piece of
age parmesan, drizzled and honey. Anyway, not too long ago,
you reached out to me and our pal Jason English,
who's executive producer of the show, to ask a pretty
odd question.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
When did cheese get into everything? How am I am?
I crazy?
Speaker 2 (05:37):
Well, I don't think cheese is going to be our
deciding factor for that one, but this question did set
us on a journey. We started digging, and as we progressed,
the story just got stranger and stranger. I mean, I
believe we uncovered a cheese spiarracy.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
Right. So, in nineteen seventy five, the average American consumed
a little more than fourteen pounds of cheese per year.
In twenty nineteen, the average consumer in the United States
eight about forty point four pounds of cheese.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
And in twenty twenty two, according to numbers provided by
the Cheese industrial Complex aka Big Parma, Fromage consumption in
the United States set an all time high at nearly
forty two pounds per person, a half pound per person
increase over the previous year. That is an insane quantity
of cheese. Insane, I mean, just think about it. Forty
(06:31):
two pounds. That's two and a half slices of cheese
per person per day.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
And let's also consider there are scores of people who
don't dig on dairy at all, you know, vegans and
folks who, unlike you, are genuinely lactose intolerant.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Which leads me to wonder, with all those people eating
zero cheese, who's at the high end of the average.
Who are these people eating eighty pounds of cheese a year?
Eighty pounds? Rabbit holes band rabbit holes, Alex.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
And one day those same rabbit holes may themselves be
stuffed with cheese. You see, folks, cheese iswear these days,
Cheesy Gordidas, sides of caesu, stuffed crust, pizza, quesa lupas,
you name it. Things that were once cheeseless are now
drenched in the stuff. Not that I'm complaining, And.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
I'll tell you what. During a recent expedition to the
grocery store, it struck me that by far more square
footage and refrigerator space is dedicated to cheese and cheese
foods than any other product.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
And in the course of your journalism career, you've seen
tons of trends come and go. I'm sure you've seen
cheese trends or cheese filtration in ways that I've never imagined.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
Well, how far is too far? I mean, think of Brata.
One day, about a century ago, some guy said, hey,
let's put cheese in the cheese. So you and I
looked around and asked each other, how did we get here?
Does America just have an organic, insatiable demand for the stuff,
or is.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
There something smelly afoot?
Speaker 2 (08:07):
Maybe maybe this is all just the result of consumer
demand and companies giving people what they want, or just
maybe there is something stinky here, as stinky as an
old sock stuffed with limburger. To answer that question, to
really get our heads around big cheese, we have to
start with something else, the dairy industry, strapping ben there's
(08:29):
hidden history ahead. Okay, before we go any further, I
think we have to take a look at what cheese is.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
Oh yeah, all right, Alex imagine describing cheese to aliens,
or for that matter, describing it to anyone encountering cheese
for the first time. We'd be like, hey, uh, you
guys know milk, and they'd be like ew yeah, and
we'd say, okay, So we take this milk and we
curdle it and we press it together and get this
(09:09):
we salted solid milk. It's important to keep in mind
that people discovered this well before recorded human history, probably
in step with dairy and domestication. So this hypothetical conversation
is taking place more than seven thousand years.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Ago, and no one really knows who invented cheese. The
technique is that ancient. We do believe, like a lot
of inventions and discoveries, that ancient people stumbled across this
by accident.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
Classic human classic.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
From there, let's move forward through the rise of the
dairy all the way to the United States.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
Yeah, before Europeans arrived in the Americas, there wasn't really
any big dairy industry to speak of. Indigenous peoples fed
themselves through hunting, fishing, foraging, agriculture, all the hits. The
first cows arrived on the continent around the same time
Christopher Columbus made his second voyage in fourteen ninety three and.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
Spread across the continent soon after. In a very real way,
cattle were a tool of colonialism.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
Oh I dig it? What does that mean? Exactly?
Speaker 2 (10:15):
Well, think about it. Cattle changed the original landscape. Cattle
require land, and they also transform it their existence and
expansion in the America's pushed out native species. This doesn't
get mentioned often, but the animals Europeans brought over influenced
the area just as much as the humans. That's what
leads anthropologists like Rosa E. Faisik to write conquest worked
(10:37):
indirectly through bodies of cattle taking up more and more space.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
Yeah, and the US has always been in a kind
of situationship with cheese. Fans of the West Wing may
remember the old story about former President Andrew Jackson and
how he kept a ginormous block of cheese right there
in the White House. While the West Wing is great TV,
he took some liberties with the story.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
Yeah, the story really starts with Thomas Jeffer. Jefferson was
given a massive sixteen hundred pound cheese from Western Massachusetts
as a gift, and later when Jackson was elected, his
supporters were determined that Jackson should get every honor Jefferson
got up to and including a cartoonish hunk of cheddar cheese.
So it wasn't that Jackson necessarily loved cheese that much.
(11:25):
It was more like political theater.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
Oh oh, and the cheese on tour. Speaking of theater
before it arrived at the White House, Jackson's White House,
I mean, the cheese was displayed in Baltimore, New York,
and Philadelphia.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
Fast forward to Jackson's final party as president in eighteen
thirty seven. He has a blowout and allows everyone around
to scarf down as much of the presidential cheese as
they like.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
According to author Benjamin Purley Poor in his Reminiscences of
sixty Years in the National Metropolis, this was quite a scene, Poor.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Writes, four hours did a crowd of men, women and
boys hack at the cheese, many taking large hunks of
it away with them. When they commenced that cheese weighed
one four hundred pounds and only a small piece was
saved for the president's use, the air was redolent of cheese,
the carpet was slippery with cheese, and nothing else was
(12:22):
talked about at Washington that day, even the scandal about
the wife of the president's secretary of War was forgotten
in the tumultuous jubilation of that great occasion.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
That honestly sounds like a blast.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
You know, somebody took a nasty slip and fall in
that cheese slicked carpet.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
Cheese slicked carpet. There's a turtive phrase. It's also important
for us to note we're already seeing a narrative at play.
A lot of people believe this big block at cheese
was a purposeful symbol of democracy that had stood for
the common people, the tire, the poor, the hungry masses yearning.
Speaker 2 (12:59):
To add a little flavor to their crackers.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
Okay, come on, man, but yeah, you get the drift.
It's it's the kind of pru just cannot buy cheese,
or more broadly, dairy means democracy. Something about cheese was
seen as a unifying force. And this is not an
originally American idea either.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
In her book Milk, a local and global history professor
Deborah Vlenz notes Europeans sometimes felt the same way about cheese.
Everyone ate it, the wealthy ate it for digestion, and
the poorate it for hunger. But really, again, if we're
talking cheese, we're talking.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
Milk, and milk is a real pickle. Think about it.
It's expensive to create at scale. You have to have
the cows or the goats or the camels or whatever,
and you have to feed them and care for them,
and once you ensure they're healthy, you have to milk them.
And once you have the milk, eight clock starts ticking.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
Because milk is perishable, you have to process and package
and transport it all in a pretty narrow window of time.
And if you don't manage to get all those dairy
ducks in a row and sell the milk before it
goes bad, you're out.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
Of luck, and you're out of a lot of time, sweat,
and money as well. This is why for most of
human history milk production was a local, or at best
regional affair, and dairy has been with humans for a
long long time. Despite all the ways milk production can
possibly go wrong, it usually works. And we love it
(14:31):
when stuff works, we do.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
But Ben, let's just say you, me and our listeners
at home are all hypothetically dairy farmers way back.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
In the day.
Speaker 2 (14:40):
We'll call ourselves wholesome creams and kurds, all.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
Right, which time period are we talking.
Speaker 2 (14:46):
Let's go eighteen hundreds, so maybe our outfit needs to
be called yield creams and kurds, all right, I am
in Okay, So here we are. It's the eighteen hundreds,
and we've been going gangbusters on this whole milk thing.
Our cows are doing great, a little too great. In fact,
we've sold all the milk we can all around the land.
Our customers love us, but they can only drink so
(15:08):
much of the stuff. What do we do next?
Speaker 1 (15:11):
Well, we don't want to dump our hard earned dairy
down a hole in the ground, and we can't just
sit on it. We've spent so much time making this stuff.
I mean, yes, the cows are doing the real work.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
But you know what I'm saying exactly, we can't leave
this opportunity on the table. If we go wonder, we'll
be out of a job and there won't be milk
in the future when demand kicks back in.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
I think I see where you're going.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
Cheese, we transform our notoriously perishable product into something that
can sit for months years without spoiling, a popular food
for princes and peasants alike. We might even forego the
cheese making process ourselves. After all, it's the eighteen hundreds
and there are already well established cheesemakers and mongers.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
So if the demand for milk isn't there, we shift
toward a demand for cheese.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
It's a time trusted strategy. And here's the thing. People
have been doing this in the modern day. Make no mistake,
the US dairy industry is a juggernaut. It has a
lot of economic theft. It also ihs heavily on the
minds of policymakers. At various times in US history, the
dairy industry becomes a matter of national security.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
Yeah, and jokes aside. It's an odd relationship, isn't it.
I mean, the Constitution has no role for federal powers
to regulate farmers. And while there were a few exceptions
to this general vibe that free enterprise lack of regulation
was largely par for the course until about the nineteen thirties.
Speaker 2 (16:44):
This is where we enter one of the most pivotal
times in all of US history, the Great Depression.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
It's just a terrible You always say that, yeah, Alex,
it's just misleading. But granted you're onto something.
Speaker 2 (16:57):
The Great Depression doesn't refer to the happiness of the people.
Quite the opposite. Instead, it refers to the sheer magnitude
of misery felt by the country overall. Farmers were affected
as horribly as anyone else picture it. People are starving
in the cities. Droughts trigger the Great Oak migration.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
Yeah, Steinbeck's grapes of wrath didn't come from nowhere.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
And add to this, prices are going insane, Commodity indexes collapsed,
people in urban centers starve, clamoring for food, and farmers
are literally throwing away milk to shore up prices.
Speaker 1 (17:31):
Yeah, check out things like the infamous Wisconsin milk strikes
of nineteen thirty three. We were talking utter chaos. Something
had to be done.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
On multiple fronts. This is where we see the rise
of Roosevelt's New Deal, the sweeping legislation sought by Hooker
by Crook to save the US economy, and part of
that involved dairy subsidies. It was what we might call a.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
Bailout, most notably through something called the Commodity Credit Corporation,
created in nineteen thirty three expressly to stabilize port and
protect farm incomes and prices.
Speaker 2 (18:11):
The US survived the Great Depression, but the Commodity Credit
Corporation remained. It established a precedent and a trend.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
And these trends continue. Uncle Sam repeatedly supports the dairy
industry by purchasing surplus milk, just like our fictional milk
company yield wholesome creams and kurds. In the eighteen hundreds,
the US again and again finds itself in a corner.
They buy all this milk, this perishable product, to keep
(18:39):
people's jobs and an entire industry alive. And they don't
want that milk to go to waste.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
And this is where we see the rise of butterstock
piles as well as processed cheese. Think about the nineteen forties.
Just a few decades later, military kitchens were chalk full
of the stuff in World War Two. Thankfully this war
didn't last forever, but after nineteen forty five, the US
government again found itself in a tough spot. Without all
these soldiers doing well, it sounds weird to say it.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
Yeah, but without all these soldiers supplying the demand, yeah,
that's it.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
Really, Without that baked in demand, the US needed to
find another place to push all these products. We've entered
the era of public private partnerships. To put it simply,
cheese lobbies, increasingly powerful interests, organizations and trade groups. They
form a policy feedback loop. This is big Parma.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
Power begets power, right, So once you have one program
in place, it becomes as normalized as stuffed crust pizza,
and pulling that program back can be political suicide.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
Big Parma not only sought that money out, it did
so in ways that weren't always above board.
Speaker 1 (19:53):
Oh yeah, I see where we're going. Shout out to
our buddy Archibald Cox from back in the days of Watergate.
Our pal Cox didn't just investigate that June nineteen seventy
two break in the one that spelled doom, old tricky Dick.
Cox also looked into a bunch of other alleged crimes.
In fact, his task force focused largely on something they
(20:15):
called the Milk Deal, in which a handful of dairy
cooperatives bribed then President Nixon with hundreds of thousands of
dollars of campaign contributions, all in exchange for record breaking
subsidies and tighter import controls on foreign dairy products.
Speaker 2 (20:34):
So, for those of us playing along at home, what
does that mean? Then?
Speaker 1 (20:38):
It means simply put. They managed to make America say
we will sell you our milk, and we sure as
hell are not buying yours.
Speaker 2 (20:47):
This was only one chapter in a much larger story,
and in the wake of Watergate, a thing that was
easily forgotten, Uncle Sam scrambled back and forth to keep
the dairy industry going through the next few decades. The
history of dairy farming in the twentieth century is really
about labor. I mean, think about it. The creation of
cooperatives that set prices and then held strikes or boys
cots when they weren't treated fairly. When the supply of
(21:10):
milk drops off due to boycott's or droughts, everyone freaks out.
Think about the national dairy shortage of the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
Ooh, that's when all dairy product prices across the board
shot up by thirty percent.
Speaker 2 (21:22):
Right exactly. The government intervened, prices plummeted, and in came
President Jimmy Carter to make another bailout, pouring money like
milk you could say, into the industry. From nineteen seventy
seven to nineteen eighty one, this new policy put two
billion dollars of subsidies into massive milk.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
Which was great in the short term, but without sounding
like a dairy DeBie Downer. Was this an over correction?
Do we maybe push the pendulum too far?
Speaker 2 (21:51):
Yeah? This may be the case. Farmers knew they could
produce as much as possible. They were financially motivated to
do so because whatever wasn't sold the regular way would
end up being bought by the government at stabilized, predictable prices.
Speaker 1 (22:04):
Oh oh, I got a presidential voice for this picture.
It are follow over, our coads. We are Richard moult smirt.
Speaker 2 (22:17):
Man. Not bad seven out of time.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
You're a tough crowd man. But again we see the
old issue arise. Now the US has all this milk
with no real market demand for it, but they've paid
in full and don't want to be ass out on
the deal.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
Can we say that utterly like you're being utterly ridiculous?
Speaker 1 (22:35):
Okay, all right, fair enough, But you see the problem,
the dilemma of having all this milk. So what do
we do with it? We make cheese.
Speaker 2 (22:42):
That's right. It's the nineteen eighties and here we see
the rise of government cheese.
Speaker 3 (22:46):
Ah.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
Yes, government cheese bought and stored by the Commodity Credit
Corporation from earlier.
Speaker 2 (22:52):
And the public, to be clear, didn't necessarily love this idea.
Some folks in the US saw this as a slap
in the face. Think about it, You're going hungry and
your own government has this crazy stockpile of food.
Speaker 1 (23:04):
Yeah, I get it, you get it. We can all
stand that. As a result of public or perhaps manufactured outcry,
then President Ronald Reagan both cut the US food stamp
budget and rolled out government cheese for direct distribution back
in nineteen eighty two. Under the auspice of the USD eight.
This was touted as a panacea for hunger, sort of
(23:27):
a two birds with one breeze situation. Does that one?
Speaker 2 (23:31):
Does that work?
Speaker 1 (23:32):
Okay? So they're addressing hunger while also ensuring the continuation
of this industry.
Speaker 2 (23:38):
Again, we've got the supply, we find the demand. Reagan's
Agriculture and Food Act of nineteen eighty one both acknowledged
the massive stockpile of cheese and at the same time
decreed it would be distributed to the needy and nonprofit organizations.
Any state that asked would get thirty million pounds of cheese.
What take that, Jackson? This also guarantee that the US
(24:00):
would continue supporting big Parma.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
So it goes that. Same year, nineteen eighty one, the
second Mitary of Agriculture, John R. Block told reporters, referring
to all these pounds of cheese, he said, we've got
sixty million of these that the government owns. It's moldy,
it's deteriorating. We can't find a market for it, we
can't sell it, and we're looking to give some of
(24:24):
it away.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
We're off to the races here. Let's talk economy of scale,
which is just a fancy term meeting prices go down
when you have more output and better infrastructure.
Speaker 1 (24:35):
Yeah, that's why, for example, a single guy making shoes
by hand is almost always going to have to sell
his shoes for more than the big companies making thousands
of shoes every day.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
And we saw this with the US dairy industry. Back
in nineteen eighty seven, the median dairy farm had eighty
cows or fewer. Today it's about nine hundred. Economies of
scale have driven costs down and bolstered output.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
And on top of that, the average dairy cow is
producing more milk than ever. Thank you to some at times,
sinister decisions on breeding and diet. We've got government cheese,
we've got dairy products as cheese infiltrated as possible into
the military supply chain, and improvements in global trade mean
(25:21):
we can ship stuff fast, finding that ever elusive demand
in markets, countries and continents away.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
And this gets us to your original questions, how did
cheese get in everything? Why was the demand always there
or was it to some degree manufactured?
Speaker 1 (25:39):
Right, yeah, Alex, did big cheese win the game? Or
did someone rig it?
Speaker 2 (25:45):
I imagine saying rigged might put some people off spoil
their milk, soda.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
Say, but it's a valid question, and we can also
see why people might look askance at this. But at
the same time we can argue this is as Homer
Simpson would have said in Beginning Opportunities. We're taking dairy
products outside of the US. We're leveraging and nonprofits to
move milk and cheese around the world. Plus, of course,
(26:12):
with each step we're keeping domestic farmers in business, which.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
All sounds great until that global market collapses in ocean away.
The nation of China grappled with its own problems when
demand for dairy products in the Chinese market imploded, which
has happened several times, including just this year in twenty
twenty four, Yet again, Uncle Sam found itself in a pickle.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
Holy? Is this the part?
Speaker 2 (26:35):
This is the answer to the question sort of, Oh yeah.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
Alex, can we please do a little trade industry ad?
Speaker 2 (26:42):
I don't see why not.
Speaker 1 (26:44):
Real milk has eight times more protein than almond milk.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
Real milk has naturally occurring calcium.
Speaker 3 (26:49):
Almond milk doesn't amory, and it also only has two
percent almonds, which looks like this.
Speaker 1 (26:54):
What's the other ninety eight percent? Get real, get naturally
nutritious real milk. So that's bonkers, right? We got ads
for not a specific brand of a thing, just the
general idea of milk.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
And marketing groups for the general idea of milk had
already popped up pretty early in the twentieth century. There
are plenty of other examples as well, beef, pork, you
get it. For quite some time, the United States has
disguised national security through a proxy program of interdependent quasi
private industries attempting to extol the virtues of a given
(27:31):
product instead of telling the American public the truth. Come on, man,
this is my part.
Speaker 1 (27:37):
Yeah, it's just you know, people need to know, well,
are we doing the show? Absolutely, dude. We are the
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of this whole cheese thing, the Moulder
and Scully. I love it. I want to believe. Let's
go to twenty seventeen.
Speaker 2 (27:57):
Yeah, there were one point three billion pounds of cheese
and cold storage, and no small part due to two
separate federal announcements that the US would purchase something like
twenty million dollars worth of dairy surplus for distribution to
food pantries.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
Because we have to keep it.
Speaker 2 (28:14):
Going, because someone says we have to keep it going,
and that someone is the dairy farmers.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
It's crazy that you seriously have never drank a glass
of milk.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
Never, not at once. It's gross. Moving on, moving on.
In an August twenty sixteen letter, the National Milk Producers
Federation begged the USDA for one hundred and fifty million
dollar bailout. Ben, have you ever heard of Dairy Management Incorporated?
Speaker 1 (28:41):
Do I do I do a voice here? Or do
we just roll with it? All? Right?
Speaker 2 (28:45):
Fine, it's a soft move. You know about DMI. I
know about DMI, and we're both hoping you listening along
at home will learn a little bit about it too.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
Yeah. Yeah. Without getting into the milk weeds, folks, there
are trade organizations, a concentrated group of government and private
industry concerns, all actively working right now as we record
to make sure the production of dairy products meets some
sort of demand. And if we cannot find that demand naturally,
(29:15):
we will.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
We will make it an inherently American approach to the problem.
Speaker 1 (29:19):
And this is where we enter that story of dairy
management Incorporated. It's fair to say that a lot of
people have never heard of this.
Speaker 2 (29:27):
Group, which is a shame because they're one of our
key characters. DMI is a trade association funded through the
Dairy Promotion Program, which is in turn funded by government
regulations requiring dairy farmers to pay three dollars and thirty
one cents per metric ton on all milk produced and
marketed in the forty eight contiguous states. DMI is the
(29:47):
beating heart of Big Parma.
Speaker 1 (29:49):
And DMI was originally created by the US Department of
Agriculture way back in nineteen ninety five. Wheels within cheese wheels. Indeed,
this already sounds like a bunch of odd companies passing
money around, maybe on the slide, but to be fair,
they won't describe themselves as odd or sinister. We have
(30:12):
to remember there are no quote unquote bad guys in
the story.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
But have you noticed been that like in movies these days,
the only people who drink milk are like weird villains
and yes, little kids.
Speaker 1 (30:23):
Yeah, anyway, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:24):
I would absolutely describe the stuff crust pizza as a
crime against gastronomy.
Speaker 1 (30:28):
Yeah, what's that old line? History is written by the victors.
Speaker 2 (30:32):
And we're still in the turn of history here. We
reached out to multiple sources for answers at DMI. On
a phone call, I told the media relations flack with
the company that we wanted to learn about dairy as
an industry that innovates, about the history of DMI, about
their work with the big fast food chains, about the
got Milk campaign, and their response was a little, I
(30:53):
don't know, disingenuous, Dear Alex.
Speaker 1 (30:56):
Unfortunately, we don't have anyone who'd be a good fit
to answer questions on all the topics you mentioned you'd
like to include in this upcoming episode. Well, Alex, if
that doesn't sound like a clandestine cabal of cheese operatives.
I don't know what does we do know? DMI is
one of our most easily identifiable gosh. I don't want
(31:18):
to say culprits, but they're the collective protagonists for getting
cheese into more American food products.
Speaker 2 (31:25):
Yep. They've worked with McDonald's, Pizzahu, Wendy's, Taco Bell, you
name it. If there's a way of injecting cheese into something,
they've probably invented it.
Speaker 1 (31:35):
There's another thing all of us listening along need to know.
Why does this work so successfully? I would posit the
answer is found in evolution. Humans evolved to prize high
fat unctious food stuffs, and cheese fits the bill. But
Jesus definitely not perfect. Surprisingly enough, some of the most
strident criticisms of big Parma come from physicians, and.
Speaker 2 (31:59):
We have to be at front about this. Cheese is
an ancient art, but it does have some potentially dangerous
effects on your health. Obesity is an up in the
United States and abroad. Milk and other dairy products are
the top source of saturated fat in the American diet,
contributing to heart disease, type two diabetes and Alzheimer's. Studies
have also linkedairy to an increased risk of breast, ovarian
(32:20):
and prostate cancers. There's a whole bunch of good stuff
in milk, calcium, protein, vitamin D, for instance, But it's
not like dairy is the only source for those things.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
Yeah, and DMI in particular has a long history of
cheese filtration. By their own account, this organization works with
leading restaurant chains, grocery stores like Kroger, and food manufacturers
like General Mills, all of whom collectively invest hundreds of
millions of dollars in marketing efforts and advertising campaigns to
(32:52):
promote their dairy centric menu items.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
The McDonald's mcflurry, the five cheese mac and cheese at Dominoes,
a Grandma style pizza pizza hut that eliminated crust so
cheese could be piled all the way to the outer
margins of the pie.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
Yeah. Yeah, the result, folks, through these various and alex
I'm not yet calling it a proxy war. Through these
proxy entities, DMI has moved an astonishing seven point five
billion pounds of dairy. And you know what, man, this
is aggravating because I can't even get away with a
late fee at the library.
Speaker 2 (33:28):
We mentioned the high level version of this, Let's get
to the nitty gritty. These cheese drenched culinary Frankenstein's aren't
the result of organic supply and demand.
Speaker 1 (33:39):
Yeah. The more we learn about it, the less DMI
seems like a trade group, and the more it seems
like a think tank Rand corporation style, but with cheddar.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
One hundred percent. DMI employs a panoply of dairy scientists
working not just hand in hand, but on site with
like their own offices, at the headquarters of your favorite
fast food joints, eternally brainstorming new ways to inundate the
American and international diet with dairy product, cheese in particular.
Speaker 1 (34:11):
Yeah, and this is not just some kind of disturbing
campfire story, Alex. You actually did some digging into a
specific dairy scientist over at DMI. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:23):
Yeah, So, late one night I trilled the Internet looking
for evidence of DMI dirty work, and I stumbled on
this video of a cheese operative named Mike Seresi doing
an interview about his gig working in the Taco Bell
innovation kitchen.
Speaker 1 (34:35):
Alex, you're making it sound like you're about to unveil
the smoking gun that proves a global cheese spiracy.
Speaker 2 (34:42):
More like a smoking good eband the whole video was
a little off putting if I'm being honest, Sersi, is
this guy talking about how glorious it is being embedded
as a dairy operative in a top American food chain,
pumping what I would call harmful ingredients into foods so
that the dairy industry can turn bigger profits.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
At one point, the interviewer asked Sersi about some of
the winds he's had over the years. Ms.
Speaker 4 (35:07):
Mike Serising, I'm a dairy scientist with DMI. I have
been working in research and development for about fifteen years now,
mostly focused on dairy science, and I first joined DMI
back in twenty thirteen, where I had the amazing opportunity
to join the Taco Bell team on behalf of THEMI
working in their test kitchen and developing new products for
(35:28):
the menu. We've had some really great successful launches over
the year. Just a couple that come to mind is
the Ca Salupa that was a truly innovative product. It
was a cheese stuffshell had a massive media promotion behind it.
We actually had a TV ad that ran during the
Super Bowl, so that was just super exciting.
Speaker 1 (35:47):
Folks. We're an audio show, so it's important for you
to know. While Ceresi is saying all of these things
you just heard, a bunch of information cards are popping
onto the screen and the stats look bonkers. Before DMI support,
tacos contained about a quarter of an ounce of cheese.
Thanks to this partnership, new food items contain about five
(36:08):
to ten times more cheese.
Speaker 2 (36:10):
The discussion leads to the beverage category.
Speaker 1 (36:12):
Oh man, yeah, yeah, Alex. Have you ever had a
Pineapple Whip or the Baja Blast Kalauda?
Speaker 2 (36:18):
I have not, but I do know that Taco Bell
is owned by Pepsi Company and the Pineapple Whip was
their first dairy drink. But the way sor Recei talks
about the process of reverse engineering those drinks is kind of,
I don't know, alarming. Here he is again.
Speaker 4 (36:33):
We also have a new dairy dessert beverage that's testing
in market, which we're really excited about.
Speaker 1 (36:39):
I'm getting diabetes just thinking about this one. Surely it
was discontinued.
Speaker 2 (36:44):
You're correct. In fact, we could do an entire episode
on discontinued fast food products, but both the pineapple whip
and the grilled cheese burrito were one hundred percent the
result of DMI intervention. How do we get more dairy
in more things?
Speaker 1 (36:59):
You know, it's weird, isn't it? Just philosophically, it is
a bizarre proposition, creating demand demand where a natural demand
does not exist. I'll say it. It feels like a
good time for some serious questions.
Speaker 2 (37:14):
Yeah, you know, this is where I start to have
problems too, the idea of injecting cheese into something not
because it enhances the flavor or healthfulness of the food,
but because it drives up profits for the dairy industry.
In this way, Big Parma bears an alarming resemblance to
the tobacco or liquor industries. Knowing that you're creating a
product that's going to make people fat and sick and
(37:36):
doing it anyway. And at the same time, Big Parma
covers its cellulate pocked rear end to seem like you know,
the good guys by forming strategic partnerships with the Mayo
Clinic too, and I'm quoting here, improve public health and
advance dairies benefits, including the role full fat dairy may
play in cardiovascular and metabolic conditions. That's sort of like
(37:58):
you know, Exxon Mobile or British Petroleum claiming to do
good bye researching climate.
Speaker 1 (38:03):
Change the Mayo clinic. Huh, yes, Alex, there's got to
be a cheese and mayo joke in here somewhere, right.
Speaker 2 (38:10):
Yeah, we're talking about a serious thing.
Speaker 1 (38:12):
Then, Okay, okay, yeah, yeah, but what if it's like,
what if we do a thing where people buy mayonnaise
and cheese together? Gross, dude, I know, but I'm saying,
what if it's like you buy another condiment and they
just start putting cheese in there. Cat cheese up to
other examples.
Speaker 2 (38:29):
Then this is a very special episode. Okay, Okay, seriously, man,
you asked us to look into it, and we're doing
puns now at the end of a pretty damning investigation
into an extremely grave issue.
Speaker 1 (38:39):
All right, all right, yes, I hear you. Focus, all right, okay,
focusing and Justina side, Alex, I do understand what you're saying.
I'm still going to eat cheese though, like a lot
of it? Are you and I cool? I guess?
Speaker 2 (38:57):
I mean I would expect nothing less. And millions of
Americans have made the same choice including.
Speaker 1 (39:03):
Me agreed, and whether we're talking about fanatics or strict
vegans who don't need anything, they cast a shadow. It's
crucial to understand how a phenomenon like this occurs, and
perhaps more importantly, why, Alex, would you say it's fair
to call this a legit conspiracy.
Speaker 2 (39:23):
I'd say we should call it a chiefs spiracy.
Speaker 3 (39:32):
Very Special Episodes is made by some very special people.
This show is hosted by Danish Schwartz, Zaren Burnett and
Jason English. Today's episode was written and hosted by Very
Special guest stars Ben Bolin and Alex French. Our producer
is Josh Fisher. Editing and sound design by Chris Childs.
Additional editing by Mary Doo, mixing and mastering by Behead Fraser.
(39:58):
Original music by Elise McCoy. Show logo by Lucy Kintinia.
Our executive producer is Jason English. You'd like to email
this show, you can reach us at Very Special Episodes
at gmail dot com. To get more Ben Bollen in
your life, check out Stuff they Don't want you to
know or ridiculous history. Alex French's new company is called
feature Well Productions. You'll be hearing a lot from them
(40:22):
in the new year. We'll be back with the first
of our holiday episodes next week. Excited for that very
special episodes is a production of iHeart Podcasts.
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