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Dear friend,
It’s no secret that powerful animal-use interests — the industrial pork producers, the western ranching industry, and laboratory animal breeders, just to name a few — exert disproportionate control over federal agencies.
In political science terms, it’s called “industry capture,” and some federal agencies, such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), are experts at serving these masters rather than the general concerns of the American people. And when it comes to animals and their well-being, these industry groups generally don’t give a damn and generally treat any animal-welfare standards as a “regulatory burden.”
That’s why I say good riddance to the timber industry’s scheme of misdirection in blaming barred owls, rather than habitat loss, for the long-term decline in spotted owl numbers. I hope to tell you soon that the plan to kill 470,000 barred owls has been scuttled, and that $1.35 billion will not be wasted on such a reckless scheme.
Also in the West, the Bureau of Land Management has been captured by the ranching industry. There are 4.5 million cattle and sheep on BLM, and just 80,000 wild horses and burros, who are specifically protected under federal law. Yet, the ranchers say there are too many free-roaming equines, even though there are 40 cattle and sheep for every horse or burro on those lands. We can save $100 million a year by running more sensible and humane management of the wild horse and burro program — securing a savings of a billion dollars over the next 10 years.
But the dairy lobby is perhaps king when it comes to industry capture of government. The USDA funnels billions of tax dollars to producers in a dizzying array of support and commodity buy-up programs. Congress has partnered with the USDA for decades in this scheme.
Perhaps one of the most unsettling examples of government doing backbends to accommodate the most far-fetched wishes of the dairy lobby is the “milk mandate” in the National School Lunch Program.
Under the current NSLP, the government denies local school districts reimbursement for the costs of the entire breakfast and lunch offerings unless the school places cows’ milk on the trays of every student receiving nutrition assistance, whether the child wants the milk or not.
What’s astonishing is that this program operates even though as many as half of the 30 million kids getting this form of nutrition assistance are lactose intolerant.
The incidence of lactose sensitivity is especially high [[link removed]] among non-white ethnic groups, with up to 75% of Blacks, 65% of Latinos, and more than 90% of Asian Americans and Native Americans suffering the often-incapacitating effects of lactose sensitivity. The National Institutes of Health reports [[link removed]] that the majority of all people have a reduced ability to digest lactose after infancy, and lactose sensitivity “is also very common in people of West African, Arab, Jewish, Greek, and Italian descent.
This week, the Center for a Humane Economy has teamed up with Switch4Good to introduce the Freedom in School Cafeterias and Lunches (FISCAL) Act in both chambers of Congress. This bill does one simple thing: it requires public schools to offer kids a plant-based milk option that meets USDA nutritional standards as part of the NSLP.
What kind of crazy government program tries to force-feed millions of kids — whose alertness and concentration are required in a classroom learning environment — a food staple that makes them ill and sends them scurrying to the bathroom?
Would any food retail business survive if its food made half its customers sick? This is the antithesis of customer service, and it survives only because of political inertia and cronyism.
To remedy this unfairness and unwind a rigged food assistance program, more than 200 organizations support this bipartisan, bicameral legislation, including the National Urban League, the National Rural Education Association, the 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.
Given this widespread physical aversion to cows’ milk, it is no surprise that there is immense milk waste in the NSLP. According to the USDA’s own review, 29% of the milk cartons served in our schools are thrown unopened into the garbage. A 2017 study [[link removed]] focused on 60 schools in a medium-sized urban district concluded that “of the total milk offered to School Breakfast Program participants, 45% was wasted.”
Add all of that up and it amounts to $400 million a year in squandered taxpayer dollars. Over 10 years, that’s a misuse of $4 billion in government spending raised by taxing people like you and me.
And all for what? To train the palates of kids to keep drinking cows’ milk to benefit industry, not the kids. Yet despite eight decades of this collusion between industry and government, it’s not working. Consumption of fluid milk has declined by half in the last 40 years.
This program looks even more misguided when we understand the rigors of milk production for the cows themselves. In the years before the NSLP was created, an average dairy cow produced 3,621 pounds of milk a year, but an average cow is now generating an astounding 25,000 pounds, with some cows producing upwards of 30,000 pounds of milk a year.
That unbelievable level of production taxes the cow’s system and leads to shortened longevity and productivity, along with various health problems — from inflammation of the udders to foot and leg problems resulting from the massive body mass the cow must support.
Most of the “downed cows” who land at slaughterhouses are spent dairy cows, broken down because of their enormous mass and weakened condition resulting from bodies that have been called up to produce so much milk. Cows should not be put through intense production only to have their yield of milk tossed away.
Here’s a program that hurts kids and leaves them hungry. It wastes tax dollars by the bushel. And it dismisses the interests of the animals who are the generators of wealth in the first place.
So today, in the interests of government efficiency, basic fairness, and animal welfare, I hope you’ll write to your lawmakers and ask them to cosponsor the Freedom in School Cafeterias and Lunches Act (formerly the ADD SOY Act). [[link removed]]

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And I hope you’ll donate to Center for a Humane Economy because taking on a problem like this requires the best science, the strongest lobbying team, and serious-minded organizing. We are taking on one of the most pampered and powerful lobbying operations in the nation. [[link removed]]
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To win, we need your support.
For all animals,
Wayne Pacelle [[link removed]] Wayne Pacelle
President
Center for a Humane Economy
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