Political Ecology of the World Food System

Food Policy

Political Ecology of the World Food System

"While warning about fat, U.S. pushes cheese sales" by Michael Moss

According to Michael Moss' article "While warning about fat, U.S. pushes cheese sales" from the New York Times, the U.S. government is sending profoundly mixed messages about the consumption of cheese to the American public. Dietary advice is confusing when it is solicited even from objective research studies, but the government has further complicated the public's ability to comprehend how to eat right by simultaneously trying to promote better public heath while bolstering the economic interests of dairy producers. The article notes how an organization called Dairy Management, a creation of the United States Department of Agriculture, actually encouraged the fast food corporation Domino's to create a new pizza with extra cheese, to bolster the pizza chain's flagging sales. While the public gobbled up the new offering, the new pizza was high in both calories and saturated fat, which promotes obesity, heart disease, and other lifestyle illnesses.

Dairy Management's agenda to promote cheese is ironically rooted in the fact that consumption of regular-fat milk is down and consumption of low-fat milk has increased. To use up the excess milk fat, the public is being urged to consume more cheese. The Obama Administration has been urging restaurateurs to offer healthier options; Dairy Management is urging them to offer more cheese-laden products, to use up a surplus product that the American public is more than willing to gobble up in the form of cheese. Along with obesity rates, consumption of cheese has drastically increased in America since the 1970s. "Americans now eat an average of 33 pounds of cheese a year, nearly triple the 1970 rate. Cheese has become the largest source of saturated fat; an ounce of many cheeses contains as much saturated fat as a glass of whole milk" (Moss 2010:1).

The policies advocating healthy choices of the First Lady and other branches of the federal government, such as the FDA and the Health and Human Services Department, are blatantly contradicted by the policies of the Agriculture Department's Dairy Management. Dairy Management's primary goal is to encourage restaurants to offer more high-fat dairy products, and for the American consumer to desire them. It also orchestrated the creation of a Taco Bell quesadilla with "average of eight times more cheese than other items on their menu," which was noted in a report by the Agriculture Department, praising Dairy Management's 'good work' (Moss 2010:1).

There is a clear conflict of interest between the consumer interests the USDA supports and the objective science available about how to improve public health. The public, no matter how hungry it may be for accurate information, is subjected to confusing messages to eat less high-fat dairy while simultaneously finds itself bombarded by restaurant propaganda promoting tasty-looking cheese dishes. And Dairy Management launched a four-year advertising campaign that cost millions of dollars" promoting the notion that people could lose weight by consuming more dairy products," presenting the facts as if they were products of disinterested scientific research despite the fact that no other studies, even those conducted by Dairy Management itself supported this finding (Moss 2010:1).