Dear John,

At this month’s Summer Olympic Games in Paris, the Olympic Committee and the city of Paris are making an enormous effort to provide healthy foods to the elite athletes and to the throngs of spectators to watch competition in its highest forms. Organizers have pledged that 60 percent of all food and beverages across all sites for the public will be plant-based, and 30 percent of the items at Athletes Village will be vegan.

What does that mean for animals?

It means fewer animals go through extreme confinement and other torments of factory farming. That’s the outcome when consumers reduce their intake of meat and milk and add more plant-based whole foods to their dietary regimen.

Please help the Center for a Humane Economy reduce suffering for millions of cows and other animals on factory farms by giving $10 today

I’ve told you previously about how factory farms immobilize breeding sows in the pig industry.

About the mass killing of baby male chicks in the egg industry.

About the exploitation of cows to make them produce unhealthy and enormous yields of milk—with annual output of milk at 25,000 pounds each, much of which goes to waste in school lunchroom garbage cans or poured out on farm fields because of the lack of demand.

That hyper-production of cows taxes their bodies, causing hip and foot problems, severe inflammation of their udders, and ultimately shortened lifespans.

We must remember that animals are at the center of animal agriculture. And every one of them deserves humane treatment, especially so because of what we ask of them.

Olympic athlete lobbies on Capitol Hill for better outcomes for animals, kids

A native of Shreveport, La., Kendrick Farris is a three-time Olympic weightlifter who joined me and the Center for a Humane Economy last week on Capitol Hill. We appealed to leaders in both houses of Congress to drop a “milk mandate” in the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) and give kids nutritious beverages that won’t undercut their health.

The Center for a Humane Economy also has teamed up with Switch4Good to back H.R. 1619 and S. 2943, the Addressing Digestive Distress in the Stomachs of Our Youth (ADD SOY) Act, which requires public schools to offer kids a plant-based milk option that meets USDA nutrition standards as part of the NSLP.

More than 200 organizations support the bipartisan, bicameral legislation, including the National Urban League, the National Rural Education Association, Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America, International Foundation for Gastrointestinal Disorders, Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Connection Team, American Soybean Association, and the Coalition for Healthy School Food.

“It just doesn’t make sense to put millions of cartons of milk on kids’ trays when the federal government knows full well that the product makes many of them sick,” said Farris. “I am thrilled that Rep. Troy Carter and Sen. John Kennedy, from my home state of Louisiana, are leading this effort to get government working better and smarter. Now it’s time for all federal lawmakers to get on board and offer kids a beverage option that makes sense for them and to stop this absurd waste of food and taxpayer dollars.”

The national milk mandate is not just bad for kids and cows, but, as Mr. Farris notes, it’s a drain on taxpayers. Every year, the federal government pays out $1 billion for cows’ milk to public schools across the country, denying the millions of kids who are lactose intolerant a nutritious beverage option. According to the USDA’s findings, 29 percent of the cartons of milk served in our schools are thrown into the garbage unopened, sending $300 million in tax dollars into the trash. Other milk is tossed after it’s opened, compounding the waste of both milk and tax dollars.

Between 70 and 95 percent of Black, Pacific Islander and Asian, Native American, and Latino individuals have a lactose sensitivity. In fact, the National Institutes of Health reports the majority of all people have a reduced ability to digest lactose after infancy, and lactose intolerance “is also very common in people of West African, Arab, Jewish, Greek and Italian descent.” Farris is Black and was not diagnosed with lactose intolerance until he was a teenager.

It also pains me to see the sacrifices that cows make in production only to see their milk thrown into the trash. We are grateful to Reps. Troy Carter, D-La., and Nancy Mace, R-S.C., and Sens. John Fetterman, D-Penn., and John Kennedy, R-La., for introducing legislation to deliver healthy nutritional choices in the lunchroom that will reduce our dependence on dairy milk from factory farms.

And it’s an inconsistent policy among our federal food-assistance programs. Children can obtain non-dairy options through the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children but not through the NSLP, which is a glaring contradiction in our federal nutrition assistance programs.

We can all agree that when we throw out milk because kids don’t want it, we subject cows to health sacrifices for no good reason at all. We waste our tax dollars and we leave kids hungry. Nobody wins.

I hope you’ll write your federal lawmakers today and ask them to cosponsor the ADD SOY Act.

And I also hope you’ll donate generously to Center for a Humane Economy and allow us to fight for all animals.

We’re fighting for cows and other animals housed on factory farms. For dogs and birds conscripted into sickening forms of entertainment such as animal fighting. For kangaroos turned into shoes for fashion. For beagles and primates used in needless and inhumane science experiments. And for so many other animals.

We depend on you to carry forward in these fights every day. And I thank you so much for caring about them all.

For all animals,

Wayne Pacelle President Center for a Humane Economy