Hey friends,
Last week, we talked about the origins of Big Milk and how milk became so ingrained into our society. This week, we are talking about how milk has inundated our school systems, beyond the cartons of milk that are included with every school lunch.
You see, after the 70s, there was a big low-fat craze that started (and continued in perpetuity, but I digress), and milk sales were crashing. So much so that a new semi-governmental agency was created by Congress: Dairy Management Inc. (DMI). The DMI was overseen by the USDA and created just to increase the sales of dairy. Each dairy farmer contributes to the budget based on the amount of dairy produced, and in turn, it has become the largest promotional board under the USDA (of which there are like 20-ish).
What the hell does this board do? It literally works to sell more milk through marketing efforts.
Yep, it funded the infamous Got Milk? campaign and, more recently, it funded ads with Aubrey Plaza and Mr. Beast making fun of alternative milks, saying they aren’t cool. Hey! That’s Weird! But don’t worry. It gets a lot weirder.
The DMI basically accepted its fate when it comes to milk sales and has pivoted to other dairy products.
Yep, milk consumption might be down, but Domino’s and Taco Bell are working harder than ever to increase our dairy consumption. The loaded grilled cheese burrito? 10X more cheese than a regular taco from Taco Bell used to contain.
And don’t get me started on pizza day at school. Domino’s literally works with the US Government to provide pizza that’s extra cheesy to kids to increase dairy consumption. In a leaked internal memo from The Lord and Lady of the Cheese (not making this up), they worked with the USDA and Dairy Management Inc. to increase the amount of cheese they were putting on pizza by creating stuffed crust.
The “Summer of Cheese” promotion it developed with Pizza Hut in 2002 generated the use of 102 million additional pounds of cheese, the department reported to Congress.
“More cheese on pizza equals more cheese sales,” Mr. Gallagher, the Dairy Management chief executive, wrote in a guest column in a trade publication last year. “In fact, if every pizza included one more ounce of cheese, we would sell an additional 250 million pounds of cheese annually.”
They literally invented stuffed crust pizza to prop up Big Dairy and asked the USDA to help sell pizza at schools. On top of all of this, the DMI is using farmers’ money to “aid in the development” of “cheesier” menu items at fast food chains.
So much so that when McDonald’s started working on their coffee menu, DMI offered to help them in exchange for them not carrying alternative milks. You literally can’t get soy or oat milk at McDonald’s because Big Milk helped them develop their iced coffee…
Next Week: I’m talking about alternative milk, how it’s impacted dairy, and what DMI is doing to fight back.
(Also, heads up, there’s a lot more content here than I expected, so the Milk saga is going to go on for a little longer.)
Want to know more about milk? Have questions? Want me to include something else in my research? Reply, and you can literally help formulate what I talk about in the next two weeks.
Brenda replied a week or two ago and asked me if I thought oat and almond milk was really milk. We are going to get into that next week as well.
Creamily Yours,
Clebbie Debbie
