U.S.D.A.: To Market and Protect

Today's New York Times online features an excellent article on Dairy Management Inc., a marketing division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and its efforts to promote increased cheese consumption among American consumers. You may remember Dairy Management's successful "Got Milk?" campaign, which began in the early nineties and rapidly became a contender for the "most parodied advertisement of all time." Although the "Got Milk?" campaign has since faded into obscurity, the position of Dairy Management Inc. may be stranger and more ironic than ever before. Today the irony is this: at the same time that its dairy marketing division is attempting to increase the amount of milk and cheese eaten by Americans, the U.S.D.A. is one of the key participants in the Obama administration's anti-obesity campaign, which actively discourages excess consumption of foods high in saturated fat -- including milk and cheese.

Rarely does one find a single institution so neatly divided against itself, attempting to undo with one hand what it does with the other. From the Times: "Urged on by government warnings about saturated fat, Americans have been moving toward low-fat milk for decades, leaving a surplus of whole milk and milk fat. Yet the government, through Dairy Management, is engaged in an effort to find ways to get dairy back into Americans’ diets, primarily through cheese."

One question that springs to mind is this: Why does the federal government play a role in the marketing of dairy products to begin with? It may be that the root irony is not about health per se, but about the existence of a branch of the federal government tasked with both protecting consumers and selling to them.

For more info an Dairy Management Inc., see their official web page, some of their other marketing efforts here and here, and this scanty Wikipedia entry.

And enjoy this blast of cheesy goodness: http://www.ilovecheese.com.

Soda and Food Stamps

The New York Times reports this morning that New York State and the City of New York are petitioning to bar food stamp recipients from using their benefits to buy sodas and other sugary drinks. The request, filed with the US Department of Agriculture on Wednesday, would prevent people enrolled in the food stamp program from using their benefits to purchase the beverages for two years, with the possibility of a permanent ban to follow. You can read the full article here, and a Times editorial in support of the measure here.

The move comes on the heels of New York City's failed attempt to impose a tax on all sodas and sugary beverages earlier this year. You can read a Times article about the soda tax by the prominent food writer Mark Bittman here, and a New York Observer editorial in favor of the tax here. During the debates over the proposed soda tax, critics argued that the state and city governments were disingenuous in their claim that the tax was about the health of the citizenry, and that that tax was simply a way to replenish government coffers that had been depleted by the financial crisis. The current petition seems to lay that criticism to rest--or at least to suggest that if the money raised from taxation was a factor, the health of citizens was also a primary concern.

For a different and more complex take on these issues, see Christopher Bonanos' New York Magazine editorial "Taxa-Cola: Why Tax Soda that We Already Subsidize?" here. Bonanos takes issue with the proposed soda tax on the basis that the root of the problem is not consumer's desire for soda but the federal subsidies and other measures that make high-fructose corn syrup so cheap to begin with: "We pay federal taxes to make that can of Mountain Dew cheaper than it should be, encouraging us to buy it. Then we are scolded by public-health authorities for doing so. Then New York proposes another tax, to discourage us from buying it." In other words, according to Bonano, the tax is a small-scale, local attempt to fix a large-scale, national problem--and an attempt to fix that problem by focusing on individual consumers rather than the system that produces it in the first place. Although Bonanos is writing about the soda tax, it would be easy to extend his argument to the current effort to ban the purchase of soda with food stamps.

President Obama's Food Safety Working Group

This opinion piece from the Huffington Post raises some interesting questions about the depth of President Obama's Food Safety Working Group, and particularly whether the group will handle core issues such as the overuse of antibiotics in industrial agriculture and the rise of antibiotic-resistant infections. The article contains numerous links to sources on these issues.