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Let’s end Food Politics this year (this is the last post until January 6) with some more good news: USDA Builds on Actions to Protect Livestock and Public Health from H5N1 Avian Influenza

The Agriculture Department’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) today announced a new National Milk Testing Strategy (NMTS) requiring that raw (unpasteurized) milk samples nationwide be collected and shared with USDA for testing.  T

This new guidance, developed with input from state, veterinary and public health stakeholders, will facilitate comprehensive H5N1 surveillance of the nation’s milk supply and dairy herds, USDA said.

Testing will be mandatory.

• Producers will have to share raw milk samples, if asked
• Producers must provide epidemiological data to enable contact tracing of infected cattle
• Veterinarians and labs must report positive results to USDA

Great.  Now if USDA would only enact the same requirements for testing for toxic E. coli.

As food safety lawyer Bill Marler explains in Hey, RFK, your “Raw Milk Czar” has had a few E. coli issues:

A total of 11 people infected with the outbreak strain of E. coli were reported from 5 states…Of 11 people with information available, 5 were hospitalized and 2 developed hemolytic uremic syndrome, a serious condition that can cause kidney failure. No deaths were reported.

Raw milk, after all, is high on the list of foods Bill Marler won’t eat.

On that cheerful note, happy food politics holidays.  I will be back on January 6.

A reader, Katya Bloomberg, suggested I take a look at Bored Cow, “animal-free dairy milk” pumpkin spice flavored, no less.

Animal-free dairy milk sounds like an oxymoron.  What could this be?  Mostly, the website says what it does not contain.

So what’s in this?  The website doesn’t say, but Target’s does.

Ingredients: water, cane sugar, whey protein (from fermentation), sunflower oil, less than 1% of: cinnamon, vitamin a, vitamin b2 (riboflavin), vitamin b12 (cyanocobalamin), vitamin d2, citrus fiber, salt, dipotassium phopshate, acacia, gellan gum, mixed tocopherols (antioxidant), calcium potassium phosphate citrate, natural flavor.

An ultraprocessed drink, for sure, with 20 grams of sugar per 12 ounces.  The whey (the main protein in milk) is made by microorganisms, not cows. 

The process is called precision fermentation.  It involves 5-steps:

• Genetic modification of bacteria or yeast (the Bored Cow website says nothing about this)
• Cell growth
• Protein production
• Purification (centrifugation, homogenization, filtration)
• Whey production

How precise is the fermentation?

Iowa-based Health Research Institute (HRI) tested a Bored Cow product, which is described as “a milk alternative made with milk protein from fermentation instead of cows.” Using full spectrum molecular analysis technology, HRI found 92 small molecules in the product that are unknown to science, according to John Fagan, chief science officer at HRI.

Katya points out:

People are still largely confused and have no understanding what a bio-identical whey protein created by means of fermentation is. Largely though people also think that fermentation is good for health. Many vegans think this milk is vegan since it’s animal free, but it wouldn’t be a good choice for those on a plant based diet as it’s identical to actual cow milk protein. Not to mention that it’s a mix of protein with water and added oil which is hardly good for anyone… It’s a milk information war at its finest!!! Just keep confusing the consumer.

So how does this stuff taste?  I went to the Ithaca Target to look for it but could not find it.  If you can and try it, let me know.

I’m trying to make sense of the ongoing spread of bird flu to chickens, dairy cows, and an occasional person.

Bird flu, avian influenza, is (obviously) a viral disease in wild birds, but highly pathogenic strains can and do infect chickens, animals, and people.

It was considered sporadic and not much of a problem until we started industrial chicken production, crowding tens of thousands of chickens together in on huge barn.  Viruses can spread easily under those conditions.

Once bird flu gets into a chicken flock, the common practice is to—and here is one of my favorite euphemisms—“depopulate” the birds.

Or try another euphemism: The virus has “claimed” 2 million chickens in Texas.

“Culling” (another term) is expensive and cruel.  And taxpayers pay for it.

But now, to further complicate matters, bird flu has spread to at least 13 herds of dairy cows.

This is being attributed to contagion from migratory birds.  But milking and herd transport may also be responsible.

Bird flu has also spread to at least one person who worked with dairy cows.

Oh dear.  This has “spooked” cattle and dairy stock prices.

But there’s more: Scientists suspect bird flu may be responsible for widespread deaths of penguins in Antarctica.

This virus is causing lots of problems and I’d like to know a lot more about what is causing its transmission.

In the meantime, the CDC says the risk to humans is low, but people who work with chickens or susceptible animals should take precautions.

Masks and handwashing?  Always a good idea.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To wit:

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

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

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

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

One final irony:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two Dairy Checkoffs exist.

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

What is this about?  At one glance:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No kidding?  I wonder who paid for this?

To its credit, the article did full disclosure:

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

I went right to it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comment: Meiji Holdings Co Ltd (Meiji) 

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

Five of the authors work for the company.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I looked up the study.