As a general rule, foods that come from plants have fewer points of exploitation than foods that come from animals. This is not to suggest that growing fruits and vegetables, or processing them into a corn chip, doesn’t demand systematic exploitation, especially of those who pick our crops or sell them at a Super Wal-Mart. They do. It’s simply to acknowledge that such exploitation, when limited to plants, is more localized, less dispersed across the supply chain between producer and consumer, and, corn chips notwithstanding, possibly countermanded by the health benefits that come from eating plants.
Put differently, when we eat animal products, everyone from the animals to the people who consume them experience some level of exploitation. Human consumers are exploited because (again in general) animal products are less healthy than unprocessed plant-based food and, I think it’s safe to say, unhealthy food promoted as healthy is a certain form of exploitation. Moreover, there’s more room in animal products for the kind of sinister manipulation for which industrial producers are becoming infamous. Consider pink slime, horsemeat in beef, growth hormones and vaccines, fish flesh that’s not the advertised fish.
The shameless extent of that manipulation was recently confirmed by a petition to the FDA filed by the International Dairy Foods Association (IDFA) and the National Milk Producers Federation (NMPF). These rapacious organizations are seeking to, in their own words, “amend the standard of identity for milk and 17 additional dairy products.” This language is legalese for wanting to change the meaning of milk. Worse, these parties wish to do so in order to add “any safe and suitable sweetener as an optional ingredient.” The dairy industry, in other words, wants to seduce us into drinking more “milk”—a product that already demands immense suffering–by making that “milk” taste more like Coke.
I don’t readily subscribe to the commonly promoted idea that human consumers are passive pawns being controlled like marionettes by the food industry, nefarious as it may be. We have agency. We have information. We have free will. We can and should use these powers to think critically, make smart choices about the food we eat, and throw rotten tomatoes at the cretins who tell us Twinkies are just fine in moderation. There’s no reason we couldn’t all start eating plants and drive the industry as we know it into the landfill of history.
That said, too many consumers are either misinformed, willfully ignorant, or could care less. Or they’re kids. Whatever the case, they need a benevolent nanny to protect them because they are most vulnerable to corporate malfeasance. They need to be guarded from feckless producers capable of dumping aspartame (mentioned by name in the petition) into their milk (and sour cream!) and waking up in the morning with a clear conscience about their adulterating ways.
Part of that clear conscience comes from the rationalization that the milk industry is using to push their petition past a public not paying enough attention to fight back. The milk industry is arguing that milk with aspartame will improve our health. In a distortion of logic that blackens even the most optimistic heart, the IDFA and NMPF write, “the proposed amendments would promote more healthful eating practices and reduce childhood obesity by providing for lower-calorie flavored milk products.”
Sweetness, they claim, means more kids will drink more low fat milk. This is the reasoning behind the industry’s galling promotion of itself as a potential leader in battling childhood obesity. Note that the petition, although clearly stating this rationale, does not want this rationale revealed to the consumer. It wants to do something ostensibly good but insists on lying about it. And that, if nothing else, should make you cringe.
Under existing law, the addition of a sweetener would require the label to bear the term “reduced calorie” milk. IDFA and NMPF, however, don’t like that designation one bit, arguing, “nutrient content claims such as ‘reduced calorie’ are not attractive to children.” Instead, they simply want milk “labeled as milk without further claims so that consumers can ‘more easily identify its overall nutritional value.’” Forget aspartame. Got Orwell?
How does the milk industry get away with such prevarication? The strategy here is two-fold and requires a brief elaboration. The first step is to set a historic standard of quality so abysmal that adding aspartame to milk can be justified on pubic health grounds. The dairy industry has been churning out so much unfathomable junk for so many decades that we’ve become anesthetized to poor quality, so much so that, in the carnival that we call the grocery store, we’ve come to think of artificially sweetened milk a mild improvement on the average.
Second, there’s the willful elision of short-term and long-term health effects. Right now the FDA deems artificial sweeteners effectively harmless. They make this case on the failure of these “non-nutritional” sweeteners to cause acute disorders (which probably required millions of rats to eat their body weight in saccharine—hence my opening argument about points of exploitation).
To my knowledge, however, there have been no long-term studies of the chronic impact of digesting non-nutritive sweeteners in milk, but it seems perfectly reasonable to assume those effects could prove to be bad for human health. In allowing the former standard to replace the latter, the dairy industry is taking the most important page from the insecticide industry’s playbook. And we know how that turned out for consumers.
If there is a vegan-inspired takeaway point from this milky mess it comes from my opening observation that this form of deception is especially endemic to an industry whose profit lifeline ultimately comes from the exploitation of animals. I suppose what’s happening to cow’s milk could just as easily happen to almond milk (which is, of course, often sweetened), but with the end result being growing more almonds rather than stealing calves from their mothers, I’m not buying the comparison. In any case, if you agree, let the FDA know…
