A recent push for products with increased amounts of dairy ingredients has swept America. Some items have made their ways onto menus quietly, without drawing much attention to their dairy components – the reconfiguration of Domino’s cheese-to-pizza ratio is a good example - while others have prided themselves on their incorporation of dairy in their make-up – Burger King’s Cheesy Breakfast Potatoes, just one of many breakfast foods that have amped up the dairy. And, of course, there’s the onslaught of Taco Bell’s “cheesy” Mexi-American items that have become a central component of their menu.
(This post is part of a three-part series addressing the recent rise in dairy products and promotion and the ethical and health repercussions of this increase.)
While cheese has been a ‘staple’ in the Standard American Diet (1) for quite some time – there have been “double cheeseburgers” and “cheese lover’s pizzas” at restaurants for decades, the amount of cheese that companies are putting into their products is not necessarily the result of American demand but of government influence. The source? Dairy Management Incorporated.
Dairy Management is the marketing creation of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). The same USDA that has been pouring money into a federal anti-obesity campaign centered around promoting a decline in consumption of the very foods that Dairy Management is promoting. According the New York Times, the USDA declined to comment for an article which ran on Nov. 6th entitled “While Warning About Fat, U.S. Pushes Cheese (2)." However, officials did state that, “dairy promotion was intended to bolster farmers and rural economics, and that its oversight left Dairy Management’s board with “significance independence” in deciding how best to support those interests.”
The independence that Dairy Management is able to exercise, however, comes from levies imposed on dairy farmers and the USDA itself. (The Times, for comparative analysis, also noted that the USDA’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion has a total budget of $6.5 million while Dairy Management receives $5.3 million for overseas dairy promotion ALONE.) Additionally, though the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture must approve Dairy Management’s contracts and advertising campaigns, the unit also functions as a company, employing 162 skilled product developers and marketing experts, including the research and communications branch National Dairy Council.
If you visit the Dairy Management website, you’ll see links to a few familiar marketing strategies, among them the Got Milk?, 3-A-Day, and BodybyMilk campaigns that have barraged consumer’s sensory receptors through television, magazine, and radio advertisements. You’ll also come across a few sites that aren’t media-savvy and relevant.
Innovate With Dairy might be the most interesting. According to the website, “America’s dairy producers created DMI to help increase demand for their products by promoting how dairy adds the difference in nutrition, taste, functionality and convenience.” The Innovate With Dairy website serves to provide producers with tips to incorporate dairy into their products in order to “add value in lots of different ways, helping you create and position new or improved products, processes and packaging.”
Individuals browsing the website can click and choose which ingredients they’d like to use and the potential applications for those ingredients in order to concoct a new, dairy-infused product. There are hundreds of options and possibilities and many of their descriptions are noteworthy. “Persuade children and teens to eat their vegetables by appealing to the all-American love of pizza” one tag reads and encourages the production of cheese dips for carrots and celery.
In fact, one company has already capitalized on this idea and begun marketing it as part of their cafeteria food line. In a story run by National Public Radio on Nov. 8, Alison Aubrey reported that Hidden Healthies was being distributed at Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia to a high approval rate among students (3). However, according to the story, “What the kids don’t seem to notice is that isn’t your standard nacho dip. Pureed into the cheese are a bunch of vegetables.” Aubrey herself supports the decision to “hide” the healthy aspect of these new foods as “[Middle-schoolers] are notoriously picky eaters, and rejecting foods that adults insist are good for you is part of growing up.”
What Aubrey doesn’t talk about in the article is the fact that, by “hiding” the healthy aspect of these foods in a smothering of USDA encouraged cheese, the children are not becoming educated on what it means to eat healthy. Instead, they see the nacho dip as something akin to the other unhealthy foods they eat regularly (cheese-loaded pizza, which will be discussed in Part 2 of this series) and do not understand the benefits of the vegetables being “hidden” from them.
In short, what makes the new dip appealing is the cheese, an addition that works dualistically for the USDA’s dairy campaign: if students equate tasty food with cheese, they’re going to want more food with cheese in it; if students accept these foods simply based on the fact they taste good, it becomes irrelevant if they’re good them, setting them up for a life where taste outweighs healthiness.
Taste, it seems, is important to all consumers, not just children. Most marketing strategies, in fact, appeal simply to taste rather than benefits. David Just, a researcher who co-directs the Cornell Center for Behavioral Economics in Child Nutrition, was quoted by NPR as saying, “If you think something is going to taste really good – if you’ve been told by others that it tastes good – you build that into your head when you eat it.” Of course, such psychological manipulation is in his job description. Just has a new grant from the USDA to encourage kids to make “healthier choices” through the use of “subtle psychological nudges.”
Interestingly enough Just cites chocolate milk as a prime example of “subtle nudging” for school children. As many younger children prefer the taste of chocolate milk, they’ll grab a carton of that in the lunch line instead of white milk. However, Just suggested simply putting the chocolate milk behind the white milk as a way to nudge students from choosing it. The rational? It works. However, yet again, it doesn’t tell children why they shouldn’t be guzzling chocolate milk – they just, out of habit, begin drinking it less without realizing it. Convenience, a factor often cited by adults for as to why they don’t make healthy choices, is also a part of school children’s decision making process.
However, Just’s example of chocolate milk is worth nothing most importantly because it high-lights the countless contradictions that the USDA is currently creating. While individuals such as Just have been hired by the USDA to help create “healthy changes” in the diets of young Americans, marketing campaigns created by the USDA funded Dairy Management are promoting the very products its researchers are disavowing.
As part of the BodyByMilk campaign, an advertising strategy created by the USDA funded Dairy Management Inc that targets young athletes, chocolate milk has seen a “resurgence” and is being hampioned as the ideal post-work drink for athletes. In fact, the BodyByMilk website features superstars such as Apollo Ono as spokespeople for the benefits of drinking chocolate milk: “Its protein and carbs refuel exhausted muscles, while fluids and electrolytes rehydrate and help replenish what’s lost. Plus, it has the added bonus of other nutrients, like calcium and vitamin D to keep bones strong.”
If children are unknowingly receiving mixed messages about what to eat and not to eat without receiving any guidance about why, they’re left just as uneducated as they were before Dairy Management and the USDA stepped in with their contradictory influence. Such reckless, and harmful, tactics set children up for a lifetime of uneducated food choices based upon taste and convenience.
Of course, this could just be the underlying goal of the USDA: if children are ‘nudged’ into their food choices by committees, researchers, and professionals they don’t even know exist, they will continue these practices throughout their life, perpetuating the unnerving cycle of blindly consuming food promoted by the government so that the government’s economic interests are satisfied, even if the consumer’s health isn’t.
1: Singer, Peter and Jim Mason: “The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter.”
2: Moss, Michael. “While Warning About Fat, U.S. Pushes Cheese.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/us/07fat.html)
3: Aubrey, Allison. “Stealth Health: Nudging Kids Toward A Better Diet.” (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130732347)
Photo credit: briancromer.com
ugh isnt stuff like that hard to read?? its sad because most people really BELIEVE that dairy is so healthy and good for you.
ReplyDelete