[[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

BEHIND THE ‘BUTTER BOARD’: HOW THE DAIRY INDUSTRY TOOK OVER YOUR
FEED  
[[link removed]]


 

H. Claire Brown
May 10, 2024
Grist.org [[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ A vast constellation of celebrities, from Kelly Ripa to the
McDonald’s mascot Grimace, have helped push dairy sales. _

Retro billboard of woman with glass of milk , Getty Images

 

For the past year and a half, you may have heard a lot about butter.
It started with a viral video of influencer chef Justine Doiron
carefully slathering two sticks of butter directly onto a wooden
cheese board, seasoning the thick layer with flaky sea salt and lemon
zest, arranging torn herbs and red onion across the surface, and
finally finishing the dish with flower petals and a drizzle of honey.
This was the butter board, a TikTok trend that quickly reached escape
velocity and was featured by The New York Times, CNN, and the Today
Show.

On high-end restaurant menus, the once-humble bread-and-butter course
snowballed into $38 tableside “butter service,” and 14-inch
cylinders of creamy, imported carved-to-order butter earned prominent
placement in restaurants’ open kitchens. By early March, New York
Magazine could declare that “butter has become the main
character.”

What accounts for butter’s spectacular renaissance in American
cuisine? According to the U.S. dairy industry, it’s their own public
relations campaign that started the spread. The industry marketing
group Dairy Management Inc., has claimed credit for the butter board
in industry press, because it paid Doiron as a sponsor at the time of
her video. While Doiron’s original butter board video did not
include an advertising disclosure — and, according to Dairy
Management, was not itself technically part of the partnership — the
chef posted a Dairy Management ad two days before her viral post and
was part of the industry group’s “Dairy Dream Team” of paid
influencers at the time. (Doiron did not respond to an interview
request, but Dairy Management told Grist that her contract has since
expired.)

Dairy Management, whose funding largely consists of legally mandated
fees collected from farmers, is one of a constellation of
government-supported dairy marketing groups that also includes the
Fluid Milk Board, a beverage-focused entity whose promotion arm has
paid Emily Ratajkowski, Kelly Ripa, Amanda Gorman, and more than 200
others to promote milk on social media. (The milk board also recently
sponsored a section in New York Magazine’s The Cut, focused on women
in sports.) In recent years, Dairy Management has partnered with
mega-influencer MrBeast at least twice, filming him as he toured a
dairy farm and paying him to promote a dairy-focused competition in
the video game Minecraft.

In perhaps dairy promoters’ biggest coup of last year, the
limited-run McDonald’s Grimace shake went viral after TikTok users
began crafting miniature horror films featuring the bright purple
beverage. Dairy Management has a longstanding partnership with
McDonald’s; beginning in 2009, it placed two dairy scientists at the
fast food chain to help incorporate more dairy into the menu. Less
than a decade later, 4 in 5 McDonald’s menu items contained dairy,
according to a Dairy Management board member. Dairy Management has
even funded research to help improve McDonald’s notoriously glitchy
milkshake machines.

“My hope is that farmers, when they see a new milkshake or a new
McFlurry at McDonald’s, that they know that it’s their new
product,” Dairy Management CEO Barb O’Brien said on a podcast in
December.

A spokesperson for McDonald’s told Grist that they could not
independently confirm the proportion of their offerings that contain
dairy due to variations in local menus, but added that the fast food
chain makes its own menu decisions. “Our partnership with [Dairy
Management] helps McDonald’s ensure the quality and great taste of
the dairy-based items on our menu, and deepen relationships with the
thousands of dairy farmers who supply milk, cream, butter, and cheese
to restaurants across the U.S.,” the company said in an emailed
statement to Grist.

Partnering with food companies to roll out products that contain
ever-escalating quantities of dairy is one of the industry group’s
tried-and-true strategies. In the last couple of years, Dairy
Management has partnered with Taco Bell to launch a frozen drink
mixing dairy with Mountain Dew and a burrito with ten times the cheese
of a typical taco. The organization also assisted with last year’s
rollout of pepperoni-stuffed cheesy bread at Domino’s and supported
marketing efforts for General Mills’ Oui line of yogurts.

Thirty years after the era-defining “Got Milk?” campaign —
itself a project of the California Milk Processor Board — the U.S.
dairy industry’s PR machine appears to be getting a second wind. The
point of all these efforts is straightforward: The dairy promotion
boards’ mission is to increase demand for their products. They spend
hundreds of millions of dollars, collected from farmers and milk
processors, on annual research and advertising in hopes of growing the
market for dairy domestically and abroad.

However, as dairy consumption and production continue to grow, so too
does the industry’s environmental footprint. In 2019, the EPA
estimated that U.S. dairy cattle emitted 1,729,000 tons of methane
each year, pollution roughly equivalent to 11.5 million
gasoline-powered cars being driven over the same period. A United
Nations report found that the dairy sector’s global greenhouse gas
emissions rose by 18 percent between 2005 and 2015.

Meanwhile, it’s not entirely clear that all these efforts are
helping the average dairy farmer. The number of U.S. dairy farms has
fallen by three quarters in the last 30 years, as farmers’ costs
rise and milk prices fluctuate. Many small and mid-sized dairy farms
have been driven out of business and farmers’ net returns fall below
zero year after year. In 2000, farms with more than 2,000 cattle
produced less than 10 percent of milk, but by 2016 farms of this size
were responsible for more than 30 percent of U.S. production. The
diverging trend lines have prompted some farmers to question whether
the focus on market growth above all else — which has been
accompanied by increasing climate pollution and the collapse of small
dairy herds — is still the best policy.

Ever since Congress passed the Dairy Act in the 1980s, farmers have
been required to pay 15 cents per hundred-weight of milk (equivalent
to a little less than 12 gallons) toward industry promotion programs
overseen by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, or USDA. Ten cents is
sent to local promotion entities and the remaining five cents go to
the national Dairy Board, which promotes all dairy products. (Eggs
have their own $20 million program.) Farmer contributions to the
national program totaled $124.5 million in 2021.

The Dairy Board in turn sends money to Dairy Management Inc. Milk
processors work under a similar structure, paying their own
assessments to the Fluid Milk Board, which works exclusively on
promoting a category that includes milk, flavored milk, buttermilk,
and eggnog. The Fluid Milk Board received $82.4 million in processor
fees in 2021. Its marketing arm is called MilkPEP.

In an emailed statement, a Dairy Management spokesperson told Grist
that “all dairy research, promotion content and information not only
complies with all regulations and standards, but also seeks to help
consumers make informed decisions about the foods they choose for
themselves and their families, including nutritious, sustainably
produced dairy.”

The financial structure of these efforts is complicated, but the end
result is that these programs, which are known to farmers as
“checkoffs,” bring in more than $200 million each year in the
dairy industry alone. As a result, the industry takes care to note its
accomplishments. For instance, in the first eight years the checkoff
of partnered with Domino’s Pizza, the average store increased its
cheese use by 43 percent.

Other promotional efforts, however, have amounted to slickly-produced
flops. Last year, the Fluid Milk Board hired actor Aubrey Plaza to
hawk “wood milk” in an apparent effort to lampoon plant-based milk
alternatives, which resulted in a formal complaint filed by a group of
physicians who advocate for plant-based diets. Another effort involved
a Board-funded website featuring Queen Latifah, which was devoted to
combating the seemingly fictional phenomenon of “milk shaming.”

Some recent industry-funded persuasion campaigns have been more
subtle. In 2021, the fluid milk checkoff sponsored a wellness weekend
for top editors from Bustle, New York Magazine, Marie Claire, and
others at a $750-per-night Hamptons resort where they participated in
workouts led by a celebrity trainer and “partook in milk-forward
meals.” Congressional disclosures indicate that the Fluid Milk Board
held USDA-approved advertising and marketing contracts with Vice Media
and Food52 in 2021. A spokesperson for MilkPEP told Grist that these
were branded editorial contracts to develop milk-inclusive recipe
content.

There’s some evidence that all this marketing has worked. A recent
USDA report delivered to Congress claimed that farmers earn $1.91 for
every dollar spent on “demand-enhancing activities” for fluid
milk, $3.27 for every dollar spent promoting cheese, and $24.11 for
every dollar spent boosting butter. An independent evaluation by the
Government Accountability Office in 2017 likewise found that, between
1995 and 2012, the fluid milk program returned $2.14 for every dollar
spent.

After decades of growth, per-capita U.S. dairy consumption reached an
all-time high in 2021, though fluid milk consumption has been steadily
declining since the 1970s. This presents formidable challenges for
climate action: Meat and dairy consumption is responsible for a full
75 percent of the country’s diet-related greenhouse gas emissions,
even though animal products account for only 18 percent of calories
consumed.

And even setting aside climate concerns, small-scale farmers worry
that this emphasis on demand growth might actually end up edging them
out of the market. They say that the checkoffs have unfairly benefited
a few big producers, supercharging their growth while driving others
out of the industry.

“[The checkoff is] set up to be entirely demand-side,” said
Wisconsin farmer and former Dairy Board member Rose Lloyd. “You’re
not allowed to talk about price, you’re not allowed to talk about
supply. It’s a wasted effort.”

Lloyd and her family maintain a herd of 350 cows, and while checkoff
assessments represent less than 1 percent of her revenue, she says she
feels like she’s paying to reinforce a structure that’s working
against her farm and her community. For example, she’s watched a
neighboring dairy farm quadruple in size to supply mozzarella to a
nearby factory that produces frozen pizzas. The local infrastructure
has struggled to contend with the waste produced by all those
additional cows.

“We have massive water quality issues,” she told Grist. “It’s
a real crisis right now on all the legs of sustainability:
ecologically, socially, economically.”

Some farm groups are holding out hope that they can persuade Congress
to pass a form of supply-management legislation that limits total milk
production, which they are pitching as a win-win for small-scale
farmers and the environment. If the government placed a cap on the
amount of dairy produced in the United States, the idea goes, such a
policy could theoretically ensure that a market exists for all the
dairy produced.

A similar model has functioned in Canada for decades. Each year,
annual dairy demand is forecasted based on the previous year’s sales
figures. The resulting estimate is divided among provincial boards,
which in turn distribute production quotas to individual farmers. In
exchange for promising not to market more milk than the quotas allow,
farmers are guaranteed minimum prices for their products — meaning
they’re somewhat insulated from the seasonal price fluctuations and
rising costs that plague their U.S. counterparts.

To maintain this delicate balance, Canada prevents an influx of cheap
imported milk using high tariffs. In part for this reason, the system
is not without controversy. Critics argue that the policy pushes up
dairy prices, and the quota licensing system can make it hard for new
producers to enter the market.

A woman herds cows inside a red barn

A farmer moves cows into a barn for their evening milking near
Cambridge, Wisconsin, in 2017. Scott Olson / Getty Images

Still, the system has enough admirers that some are hoping it will be
adopted in the U.S. Earlier this year, representatives from the
National Family Farmers Coalition, or NFFC, flew to Washington, D.C.,
to try to persuade legislators to adopt supply-management legislation
through their proposed “Milk from Family Dairies Act” in the next
Farm Bill. The bill would establish price minimums and quota-like
“production bases” for farmers. Farmers would have to pay
additional fees to export their product, and the policy would raise
import fees where possible.

Antonio Tovar, senior policy associate at NFFC, said the proposal has
garnered support from environmental groups who see supply management
as a means of reducing emissions from feed and trucking.

Nevertheless, Tovar is clear-eyed about the bill’s likelihood of
passage, at least in the near term. “I have to be honest with you,
I’m a little bit pessimistic about these proposals being included in
the next Farm Bill,” he said, citing Congressional gridlock and
limited political will to pursue the change. 

In the meantime, the dairy checkoff has set its sights on the export
market. Specifically, it’s promoting pizza — which one executive
called “a strong carrier for U.S. cheese” — in the Middle East
and Asia. In Japan, the checkoff and Domino’s launched a “New
Yorker” pizza topped with a full kilogram of cheese and served with
a packet of seaweed and maple syrup. The New Yorker was subsequently
rolled out in Taiwan.

Domestically, there are still some fast-food menu items that haven’t
yet been topped with a slice of American cheese or shaken with milk.
In a 2022 blog post, Dairy Management Inc., chair Marilyn Hershey
pointed out that 80 percent of the 2 billion chicken sandwiches sold
in the U.S. each year do not contain a slice of cheese.

The checkoff, she wrote, was engaging with Chick-fil-A, Raising
Cane’s, and McDonald’s to change that.

Correction: This story has been corrected to remove language
suggesting that dairy promotional groups engage in political lobbying.

Grist Weekly | The best of Grist’s essential climate reporting,
delivered straight to your inbox every Saturday.

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit portside.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 



########################################################################

[link removed]

To unsubscribe from the xxxxxx list, click the following link:
[link removed]