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Welcome to Pretty Private with Eboné, the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free.
I'm Eboné, and every Tuesday, I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that will challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you.
every tuesday make sure you listen to pretty private from the black effect podcast network tune in on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you listen to your favorite shows got milk you're familiar with those commercials you've seen the billboards hundreds of times those milk mustaches seemed innocuous enough but what you may not have considered is how we've been coerced into believing that milk is an essential part of a healthy diet.
On today's episode, we discuss how milk is a perfect microcosm for the many maladies plaguing our corporate food system from deep -pocketed lobbyists, inadequate school lunches, nutritional racism, and the relationship between the milk industry and fast food companies.
In other words, we're talking about the everlasting systemic problem of money -shaping policy.
Today on Point of Origin, it's spoiled milk.
So I started looking at racism and food policy about 14 years ago when I was a student at UC Berkeley Law School and I first focused on fast food and of course a major component of fast food is milk.
That's Andrea Freeman.
Andrea is a professor of law at UC Berkeley in California and her scholarship interrogates the intersection of critical race and class theory with a particular focus on matters of food policy, health, feminism, and consumer credit.
Her articles explore her pioneering theory of food oppression, examining how food -related law, policy, and government action disproportionately harm marginalized communities.
And what fascinated me about milk as I researched more and more, first, I was surprised to learn that milk is actually not a nutritious, healthy food.
There are a lot of myths around that, but I think most people know from our personal physical experiences that milk is not a great product for us.
But then a lot of research has come out showing that not only is it not nutritious, but it's harmful and has no health benefits.
And so a lot of people hold on to the myth that, for example, milk is important for calcium, but the calcium in milk comes from the grass that cows eat.
eat. So it's not actually from the milk, it's using a cow as an intermediary for getting something that you could get directly yourself.
So that was the first myth buster.
But then I'm always looking at where racism plays into any kind of policy.
And milk is something that recently has received some attention as being a symbol of white supremacists, but it's also something that has symbolized white superiority and white supremacy for at least a hundred years.
So learning that, I started to make connections between the way that white supremacists claim milk as a symbol of their own superiority and and the way that the USDA pushes milk and the covert ways that it promotes it.
And I started to see that as somewhat insidious and a racial justice issue that is not at all well -known.
I want to back up to the relationship between milk and white supremacy.
I think many people will be surprised to hear that there is a relationship.
So can you say what some of those links are that you found in your research?
Absolutely. So it became a little bit more more well -known when Shia LaBeouf had an art installation in Queens in New York, where a group of neo -Nazis crashed this anti -Trump art installation, chugging big jugs of milk with naked shirts where they allow the milk to just flow over them and started talking about how how they opposed a vegan agenda, which really is clearly a code word. And at the same time, some of the very prominent white nationalists started using a glass of milk as an emoji in their Twitter names.
So they began publicly signaling something that has long been an obsession by white supremacists who look at studies that show which people in the world can digest milk, right, and they see the ability to digest milk, which has, we actually look at the negative and call it lactose intolerance, right, which is what most people have, because it's actually unusual to to be able to digest milk past breastfeeding age.
But as with many things, the white people are the ones who can do it the most, and so that becomes the kind of normal baseline, right?
And anything that diverges from that, even though it's the common thing, is seen as some kind of anomaly, right, and given this negative name of lactose intolerance.
So the white supremacist groups study charts of which people in the world can digest milk and see this as a symbol of their greater health, their greater strength.
And that idea was first promoted in the 1920s by the National Dairy Council, by the Agricultural Association of New York, and pamphlets that explicitly associate Aryans and white people who drink milk with the strongest, the most intelligent, the greatest culture.
Okay, so I think this is kind of strange, but it turns out that milk, because of its whiteness, has been used as a symbol of white supremacy in social media and appears in pop culture and movies like Jordan Peele's box office hit Get Out when an enslaver slowly sips a glass of milk.
The depiction actually has its origins in a 1920s dairy pamphlet from the U .S. National Dairy Council, which explains, quote, the people who have used liberal amounts of milk and its products, meaning white people, are progressive in science and every activity of the human intellect, end quote.
So basically, U .S. dietary guidelines are both racist and culturally insensitive.
So I want to be sure that I understand you correctly.
You're saying the National Dairy Council was tapping into an already existing relationship between whiteness and purity in order to promote and sell milk, and that this is in in part due to the fact that those who can digest the milk are most often white?
It's, yeah, to make money, right?
So it's what has motivated the industry and all corporations and companies for time immemorial, right?
And seeing the same thing now.
This is about money.
This isn't about trying to promote health because we have so many medical and scientific papers and research that demonstrate that drinking milk is harmful to health.
Andrea, at the time in the 1920s, we were still on the outer edges of a mostly agrarian society.
Was the U .S. government interested in creating incentives for presumably white landowning men and farmers?
Or were farmers taking direction from what the National Dairy Council was promoting?
So that was around the time, I believe, that milk became safe, right?
Because originally milk was responsible for many, many deaths, especially of children, because we didn't have the technology for pasteurization.
And we had the problem of trying to transport milk from rural areas to urban areas in ways that wasn't safe.
So once the technology developed, then there was the idea that it needed to be promoted and sold to support this industry that's always been really close to the government.
And even in the first farm bill, which was a response to the Great Depression and it's part of the New Deal, right?
The dairy industry was one of the primary ones focused for the government to subsidize, to uplift. And so it's never really been subject to regular market forces where supply and demand would dictate price or availability.
And as we've come to realize over time how harmful milk is, there has been a lot of drop in demand for milk.
But the USDA has continued to prop it up and the Farm Bill because of the influence of the industry.
And this also related to the consolidation of the industry.
And what we saw over time is a massive consolidation so that the idea of what a dairy farmer is, is not correct anymore.
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So what happened at Chappaquiddick?
Well, it really depends on who you talk to.
There are many versions of what happened in 1969 when a young Ted Kennedy drove a car into a pond.
And left a woman behind to drown.
There's a famous headline, I think in the New York Daily News, it's Teddy escapes, blonde drowns.
And in a strange way, right, that sort of tells you the story really became about Ted's political future, Ted's political hopes.
Will Ted become president?
Chappaquiddick is a story of a tragic death and how the Kennedy machine took control.
And he's not the only Kennedy to survive a scandal.
The Kennedys have lived through disgrace, affairs, violence, you name it.
So is there a curse?
Every week we go behind the headlines and beyond the drama of America's royal family.
Listen to United States of Kennedy on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
with guests like Corrine Stephens.
I've never seen so many women protect predatory men.
And then me too happened.
And then everybody else want to get pissed off cause the white said it was okay.
Problem. My oldest daughter, her first day in ninth grade, when I called to ask how I was doing, she was like, oh Dad, all I was doing was talking about your thing in class.
I ruined my baby's first day of high school!
And Slumflower. What turns me on is when a man sends me money.
Like I feel the moisture between my legs when a man sends me money.
I'm like, oh my God, it's go time.
You actually sent it?
Listen to the Good Moms, Bad Choices podcast every Wednesday on the Black Effect Podcast Network, the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you go to find your podcasts.
This spring, at the onset of the pandemic in the U .S., we heard stories about hundreds of gallons of milk being dumped at precisely the moment when concerns about food scarcity and security were growing.
How is it that while in the midst of a crisis in the supply chain, corporations were dumping a commodity as highly valued as milk.
So the issue is one of food distribution and food supply chains, right?
So even though we have a lot of milk being produced through the support of the government, right, we don't have the ability to package it in a way that can reach individual consumers.
So a very large percentage of milk was going to institutions like schools.
So the USDA has a school lunch program, a school meals program, and as part of that is a special milk program.
So one of the main ways that the USDA is able to get rid of the surplus of milk that results from the agricultural subsidies is through schools.
Even though we know that milk consumption by students is contributing to a lot of health problems and particularly racial health disparities in children.
There is significant lobbying from the milk industry.
Lobbyists from the sector fought hard against the Obama -era reforms which restricted schools from selling only non -fat -flavored milks and which the dairy industry blamed for a sharp decline.
In 2018 alone, the International Dairy Foods Association spent $300 ,000 a quarter in lobbying on issues related to school lunches.
So the closing down of schools and hotels and other institutions is what caused the need for a change in the way that milk would be distributed.
So the dairy farms did not have a way to repackage their milk, you know, into small containers that you could send to a food bank or send to a grocery store.
So this is what led to the dumping of the milk because there was just no way to get it to consumers or individuals.
That's a pivot that would take a lot of infrastructural change that wasn't possible on such short notice.
But let's go back to the part about racial health disparities in children in schools.
schools because I remember I went to public school and elementary school I remember the little milk cartons you know the chocolate milk and the regular milk I think it was even skim milk maybe so you know the idea of milk being a part of the lunch diet is something that is kind of innate you know for for many of us but when we see as you're saying that the the majority of the country cannot actually process milk and that the health disparities of consumption are disproportionately affecting black and brown students.
And also we're just drinking less milk as a society.
So how is it that milk continues to find its way into our lunch rooms when seemingly all of these other factors would suggest that they don't really have any business being there?
The problem goes back to the dual roles of the USDA, the Department of Agriculture.
So on the one hand, that agency is responsible for promoting the dairy industry and other agricultural industries.
And on the other hand, it is responsible for the nation's nutrition programs. And one of the main ones is this school lunch program.
So it's found this neat solution, right, of having such a large surplus of milk that is paid for by the government and then becomes the responsibility of the agency.
And they have this need to get rid of it in any way possible.
And so because they have the school lunchrooms program at their disposal, disposal, they're able to direct milk into schools and make it an essential part of the everyday diet.
And that takes care of their problem.
And that is their priority over looking at how it affects the health of public school students.
So the USDA has these dual functions, as you've outlined, both to be the agency on record for nutrition, but then also a promotional agency that needs to help distribute milk that is paid for by the United States government.
So the milk that is paid for by the U .S. government, the funds for that come from taxpayers, and those choices about the use of funds and the amount of funds, does that come from the Farm Bill?
Yeah, yeah. So the subsidies are set by the Farm Bill.
Dairy farmers are the ones who will get it.
And the bigger the farm, the more money they'll get.
Without the support from the Farm Bill, probably most or a very large percentage of the dairy industry would completely collapse.
So I just read that 900 dairy farms closed in 2019.
And that's before any of, you know, the pandemic and the decrease that's happened there.
There's been, I think, a 40 -year decline in milk sales.
And so even though the USDA is making best efforts to prop up the industry, it's still failing.
And so I think there is a renewed interest in getting away from dairy.
And that is also very threatening to the industry.
Definitely going back to that vegan agenda that you were talking about.
Right. And there is a furious battle going on from the dairy industry, actually in the courts, to try to stop the use of the word milk for substitutes like almond milk or soy milk.
They'd spend a lot of resources on trying to fight that, arguing that consumers don't understand the difference between cow milk and another kind of milk.
So that's another interesting aspect of what's going on now and what has been going on for a while.
Yeah, so they're, they're trying to both jam it up in courts but simultaneously profit from the boom.
Boom. Of course. Now that sounds more like good old fashioned American capitalism.
One of the ways that USDA promotes dairy is through a dairy checkoff program where it takes money from farmers for marketing.
And one of the main aspects of that marketing campaign and that at work is to partner with fast food companies to create and promote foods with higher milk content in them.
So classic example of that was the so it's called the DMI Dairy Management Inc.
marketing branch. And they worked with Domino's to create a seven cheese pizza, pizza, which that's a lot, that's a lot.
And they paid for it to debut at the Superbowl.
So we know how much those commercials are worth.
And so what they do is they collaborate with these companies to try to create products that just have more cheese in them.
So you you see the Pizza Hut crust that's cheese filled in addition to the cheese on top, right?
That's your government at work.
And then, some of the Taco Bell products, there's a range, right?
Almost all, maybe all of the major fast food companies have worked with USDA's marketing branch to try to create and then sell these products.
Studies show that young people respond to that information, right?
If you teach them about health, they're basically indifferent.
But if you teach them that fast food companies are trying to use them for their own marketing, through their Snapchats and that, they get mad and they don't want to do it.
And I think we all feel that way to some extent.
And if we could fully understand that what we interpret as choice is really just about corporate profit.
Yeah, and the two companies that you just mentioned are owned by one large corporation, Yum Brands.
So that completely makes sense, especially when it feels like every month virtually there's a new Taco Bell product with some cheesy iterations.
Another way that these things are all tied together is that fast food has very much infiltrated schools.
So if it's not your school cafeteria giving you the milk, there may be what are called alternative foods in schools which sell on campus fast food.
Right. And if not, then what you're seeing is fast food logos all over schools, like even on their school buses, on their school signs.
Right. And fundraisers that take place, go to McDonald's and support, you know, a percentage will go to your classroom.
If you win a competition in the school, then your reward is some fast food.
right maybe some ice cream so really every aspect of education has been infiltrated by dairy did you know using your browser in incognito mode doesn't actually protect your privacy take back your privacy with ip vanish vpn just one tap and all your data passwords communications browsing history and more will be instantly protected ip vanish makes you virtually invisible online use ip vanish Get IP Vanish on all your devices, anytime you go online at home and especially on public Wi -Fi.
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So what happened at Chappaquiddick?
Well, it really depends on who you talk to.
There are many versions of what happened in 1969 when a young Ted Kennedy drove a car into a pond.
And left a woman behind to drown.
There's a famous headline, I think, in the New York Daily News.
It's Teddy escapes, blonde drowns, and in a strange way, right, that sort of tells you.
The story really became about Ted's political future, Ted's political hopes.
Will Ted become president?
Chappaquiddick is a story of a tragic death and how the Kennedy machine took control.
And he's not the only Kennedy to survive a scandal.
The Kennedys have lived through disgrace, affairs, violence, you name it.
So is there a curse?
Every week we go behind the headlines and beyond the drama of America's royal family.
listen to United States of Kennedy on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast the OG's of uncensored motherhood are back and badder than ever I'm Erica and I'm Mila and we're the hosts of the Good Mom's Bad Choices podcast brought to you by the Black Effect Podcast Network every Wednesday historically men talk too much and women have quietly listened and all that stops here if you like witty women then this is your tribes with guests like Corinne Steffens.
I've never seen so many women protect predatory men.
And then me too happened.
And then everybody else wanted to get pissed off because the white said it was okay.
Problem. My oldest daughter, her first day in 9th grade, when I called to ask how I was doing she was like, oh dad, all I was doing was talking about your thing in class.
I ruined my baby's first day of high school.
And Slumflower. What turns me on is when a man sends me money.
Like, I feel the moisture between my legs when a man sends me money.
I'm like, oh my god, it's go time.
you actually sent it listen to the good mom's bad choices podcast every wednesday on the black effect podcast network the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you go to find your podcast for young kids I wonder what degree the corporate investment in our school system has in the lust to send the children back to school in a pandemic.
Everything about sending kids back to school is about money and capitalism, right?
There's absolutely every health reason not to do so.
Things were much better when we first decided to take kids out of school than they are now.
And there is a very clearly calculated estimation that a certain number of kids and teachers will die, but it's worth it to save the economy, right?
So I think what you're questioning is what parts of the the economy are pushing for that.
And I'm not in the room, so I don't know.
But it does make sense to me that Trump is our fast food president, right?
He has demonstrated over and over again his allegiance to that industry.
And his administration heavily supports the dairy industry in many ways, right?
One of them is through formula.
And so it wouldn't surprise me if those were part of the group of corporations pushing to get people back in schools.
Andrea, let's talk about baby formula.
Can you expound a bit on the Trump administration's role in prioritizing investment in more formula?
Well, some of the most surprising things I came across in my research into formula was, first of all, that the US government is the largest purchaser of formula in the United States, and that's through the WIC program.
But they spend more money on formula than anyone else, and they then get these kickback rebates from the industry that allows them to actually run their program.
So the formula industry has inserted themselves and made themselves key to actually having a functioning program.
In 2018 at the World Health Assembly, There was a resolution proposed by Ecuador to promote breastfeeding, which would seem to be fairly benign, but it was opposed so strongly by the United States because of the formula industry that the US threatened trade and aid sanctions against Ecuador.
if it did not withdraw that resolution.
Formula is dairy. So by supporting that industry, the U .S. is finding another way to ensure a demand for milk.
And let's talk about how this disproportionately affects Black women and children.
So in the United States, Black women breastfeed far, far less than any other women always have, since slavery and at the same time have the highest rates of infant mortality which has also been consistent since slavery and so there it's obviously complex because that's why I wrote a whole book about it but there are a number of factors that range from you know social pressure to economic economic pressure to, you know, the refusal to accommodate, the refusal to provide any kind of resources for Black women, medical racism, and just a lot of really structural factors that are dressed up as a preference
for formula, which is not at all true.
And formula marketing is a big piece of that.
And so the book that I wrote, Skimmed, is about the first marketing campaign for Black women, which took place because a white doctor sold the rights of the first Black identical quadruplets in the U .S. to a formula company to use in advertising.
And it was the first time that there was any advertising that wasn't just alcohol, cigarettes, or beauty products directed to Black families.
And it's kind of like the rest is history in terms of marketing and the way that that also has played into these dramatic health disparities that come from the disparity in breastfeeding rates.
From the moment I first encountered it, Andrea's research has really stuck with me.
I think about the persistence of that ad campaign and those little 25 cent plastic bags of milk that I and many others were served in elementary school and how after all these years the milk in those schools like those commercials continue to persist fortunately the mythology around its nutritional benefits have winged and by all accounts so too has our consumption but when we learn that our government continues to collude with the dairy industry to make milk the default beverage in schools and in processed foods, we should hold that with skepticism and maybe even a little ire.
See, corporations who pay politicians to make laws that use our tax dollars to subsidize their operation is something I prefer our government try to discourage and not indulge in as they currently are.
But as they say, the system ain't broken.
It's working just as it was is intended to.
I'd like to thank our guest today, Professor Andrea Freeman.
You can learn more about this episode and Andrea's work at whetstonemagazine .com backslash podcast or on Instagram at whetstonemagazine.
That's w -h -e -t -s -t -o -n -e magazine.
We'll be back next week with more Point of Origin thanks for listening peace we'd also like to thank our incredible podcast producer Celine Glacier Celine you are the best to our editor and whetstone partner and director of video David Alexander in London I appreciate you Dave thanks to our whetstone production intern Quentin Lebow and last but not least my business partner, Mel Shee, who makes all things at Whetstone possible.
Thank you, Mel. We'd also like to thank our partners in production at iHeartRadio, to Gabrielle Collins, our supervising producer, and executive producer, Christopher Haciotis.
We'll be back next week with more from the world of food worldwide.
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