Milk Money: Cash, Cows, and the Death of the American Dairy Farm

4. Milk Gone Wild

M i l k G o n e W i l d The American dairy industry is a sprawling, $150 billion per year business, with reams of statistics, charts, and graphs plotting every data point imaginable. Out of that noise, two signals rise to the surface: milk price and supply. They are closely related, of course, but treated very differently. Think of the two numbers as digital readouts on a wall in a control room, like one you’d find at a nuclear power plant. Under the digits showing the current milk price are an amalgamofdials,knobs,andswitches.Thesearethevariousfederal laws and subsidies, either exerting pressure on the price itself, or mitigating the price’s effects on farmers further down the line. But the readout showing milk supply is much more bare-bones. In fact, there are no external controls, no dials to turn or buttons to press. The amount of milk on the market is left to the whim of farmers and the innovations that corporations and land grant colleges can put into their hands. What that means, oftentimes, is that we just have too much milk. Morenumberscantellpartofthestory.In1944,theUnitedStates had 25.6 million dairy cows. Today, there are about 9 million. Those midcenturycowsmadeatotalof120billionpoundsofmilkperyear. The modern population pumps out 190 billion pounds. Since 1900, we’veincreasedannualper-cowmilkyieldfromroughly3,000pounds to 20,000 pounds—a nearly sevenfold rise. At the same time, even though the U.S. population has doubled in the past sixty years, per four 70 Milk Money capitamilkconsumptionhasdeclined.Andthatisdespitethevigorous efforts by the Got Milk? campaign. One effect of this overabundance of milk is that farmers’ margins are razor thin, leaving them increasingly vulnerable to the price swings that define the industry. Another effect is less obvious, but more weird. People are drinking less whole milk, and, at the behest of their doctor and the USDA, they’re drinking more skim and low-fat milk. This, in turn, has left a lotofexcessmilkfatonthemarket—therawingredientincheese.Insteadofgoingthroughthefrontdoor ,withaGotCheese?promotion, the USDA formed a subagency called Dairy Management Inc. (DMI) inthemid-1990stocovertlypushmorecheeseintothefoodsweeat. As the New York Times reported in November 2010, DMI more closely resembles a private corporation than a governmental entity. The chief executive of DMI, Thomas P. Gallagher, earned a salary of $633,475 in 2008, and two other officials made more than $300,000 each. In total, DMI has 162 employees. The budget for this marketing organ, whose goal is to put more saturated fat into American stomachs, tops $135 million per year, paid for largely by a mandatory charge to dairy farmers. Meanwhile, the budget for the USDA’s CenterforNutritionPolicyandPromotion,anadvocateofhealthful eating, is $6.5 million. Withtheseresources,DMI hasdevelopedsomespecificgoalsand helpedmanyfastfoodchainslaunchnewcheesierfoods.According to internal documentsobtainedbythe Times inaFreedomofInformation Act request, DMI wants to see more “cheese snacking fanatics ” and to increase cheese use in sandwiches and elsewhere. One wayitachievesthisistomakeAmericansthinkthateatingcheesecan help them lose weight. In a 2005 advertisement in People magazine, DMI declared that there’s “great news for dieters. Clinical studies showthatpeopleonareduced-caloriedietwhoconsumethreeservings of milk, cheese or yogurt each day can lose significantly more weightandmorebodyfatthanthosewhojustcutcalories.”Howisit that eating a food high in fat can cause a person to lose weight? Ask MichaelB.Zemel,anutritionistattheUniversityofTennesseewho Milk Gone Wild 71 in2004wroteTheCalciumKey:TheRevolutionaryDietDiscoveryThat Will Help You Lose Weight Faster. DMI paid Zemel for his research and promoted his book, since it was exactly the message they had been trying to send. DMI just didn’t want to look too deeply. Zemel told the Times that “precisely how dairy facilitates weight loss is unclear . . . but in part it involves counteracting a hormone that fosters fat deposits when the body is low on calcium.” Zemel,indeed,musthavetheonlykey,becauseotherresearchers working around the same time weren’t able to access his wondrous land of cheese-based weight loss. One of them was Jean HarveyBerino , chairwoman of the Department of Nutrition and Food Sciences at the University of Vermont. Her research, which was also supportedbyDMI,foundnoevidencetocorroborateZemel’sclaim. Another person who couldn’t find the key: Dr. Jack A. Yanovski, an obesity unit chief at the National Institutes of Health. Still, since 2006 DMI has stated that “the available data provide strong support for a beneficial effect of increased dairy foods on body weight and body composition.” Scientific fact, it seems, all depends on whom you believe. While aiming at Americans’ heads, DMI also targets their stomachs . Since the late 1990s, DMI has been working with restaurants such as Pizza Hut, Domino’s, Wendy’s, and Taco Bell to...