THE DAIRY INDUSTRY
Ever wondered why over ~75% of us can’t digest milk, despite the fact that it’s ingrained into so much of our food system and culture in the US?
It’s because we’re not actually meant to be digesting it (we’re not baby cows) — and because it’s been forced into our food culture by possibly the most extensive and forceful food campaigns in US history, sponsored by the government, who has for some time been in the pocket of the dairy industry, to turn a profit and to keep dairy sales artificially high because consumers weren’t (and still aren’t, seventy years later), buying enough dairy.
An extensive dairy campaign sponsored by the US government starting in the 1950s ingrained dairy into our culture through messaging claiming milk was the ultimate food (“milk: it does the body good”) messaging associating milk with purity and whiteness, completely made-up nutritional advice, and the National School Lunch Program, which forces schools to serve milk to students to generate an artificial consumer base — of YOUNG CHILDREN.
The issue is inherently racialized.
99% of dairy farmers are white. Would the government be as bent on generating artificial profit for dairy farmers if they were BIPOC? Yeah, we don’t think so either.
Dairy did not exist in the Americas until cows were brought over during colonization, and once they were, it was used as a tool of colonialism to subjugate native peoples.
Over 75 percent of people of color can’t digest milk because our ancestors weren’t digesting it, and (surprise) cows’ milk isn’t naturally digested by a non-cow body.
Yet despite this, the National School Lunch Program, a dairy industry x government collab dating back to the mid-1950s (and still going strong) has made it so that public schools are required to serve dairy milk, even in some situations at low-income schools where clean water isn’t available.
And yup, you guessed it: most low income schools are primarily BIPOC. The government knows this, by the way. And they also know most POC can’t digest milk.
Check out our videos to learn more.
