Brown Cows and Chocolate Milk
If you’ve spent any amount of time talking to farmers about consumers, you’ll often end up fielding complaints about how little the average consumer knows about how food arrives on their plate. This can take several forms, such as frustration about not knowing the role of gestation crates (to restrain the sow from stepping on her piglets) or conventional growers irritated about how consumers wrongly think organic food means there were no pesticides used in its production. But one of these gripes truly animates exasperation among farmers — that 7% of consumers think chocolate milk comes from brown cows.
This claim originates from the Innovation Center for US Dairy, an organization under the Dairy Checkoff, a government program that raises funds from the sale of dairy products to fund activities promoting the consumption of more dairy. They’re the group that was behind the famous Got Milk campaign. Other activities include working with pizza chains to help develop stuffed crust pizza in an effort to pack more cheese into every pie.
Checkoffs are established by Congress to support various commodity industries and are overseen by the Department of Agriculture but function more as industry associations. The rationale is that, since commodities are all basically the same, it is difficult for industries and farmers to market them; if one firm funds an advertising campaign or research activities, all others benefit even though they didn’t invest. Checkoffs can market to consumers, develop export markets, and fund research and education programs. However, they are barred from lobbying or supporting political campaigns. I’m not here to adjudicate whether checkoffs should exist or what rules should govern their activities, but I do want to get into the Dairy Checkoffs’ more unscrupulous activities.
The Dairy Checkoff is one of the more controversial ones. Recently, they made headlines with their Wood Milk campaign, where they released satirical commercials advertising a fake milk substitute supposedly made from wood, drawing comparisons to legitimate milk substitutes and trying to convince consumers to switch back to the “real thing.” Unfortunately for the dairy industry, this campaign may have violated federal law by taking a shot at another commodity category, which is explicitly banned under federal guidelines.
Which brings me back to the chocolate milk claim. The idea that 7% of consumers (22,750,000 people at the time when the claim was first circulated) comes from a supposed study conducted by the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy. I say supposed as this study was never published. And I’m not even saying it wasn’t published in a peer-reviewed journal. It wasn’t published anywhere, not in a scientific publication, industry report, or as a raw dataset. I assume that the key takeaways from the survey were sent out in a press release by the Innovation Center, but as of writing, there are no mentions of the study on their own website.
Reporting from the time this study was “released,” purport that it was a nationally representative survey of 1,000 Americans. One of the only pieces at the time critical of this survey I found was from The Conversation, which points out that the methodology behind survey design and execution is critical to ensuring a survey is truly representative, and questions need to be worded in a way that doesn’t confuse or bias the reader. Their article goes into excellent detail as to how these types of results can be engineered by survey designers.
The news media ate this up, repeating this bogus stat uncritically. This ranges from mainstream news organizations like NPR and the Washington Post to organizations you’d expect to be a bit more critical, like PETA. And, of course, this line ended up being repeated by other advocacy organizations like the Farm Bureau, who include it under a collection of “common” agricultural misconceptions.
If the survey had used rigorous and methodologically sound data collection techniques, why wouldn’t they have released the data or a proper scientific publication based on the study? They must have had trained experts who did all the leg work in performing this survey. Simply writing up their processes, putting together a few tables, and sending it to a journal wouldn’t be that difficult. Heck, just releasing it as a report is fine as long as the original questions and survey design are included.
I, for one, am personally inclined to completely dismiss this statistic as either engineered by survey designers or made up completely. I simply do not see any other reasonable explanation as to why they wouldn’t publish everything I outlined above. But I think this begs a deeper question. Why does the dairy industry desperately want us to think consumers are this dumb?
My pet theory is that a general perception that consumers are rubes who know nothing about agriculture helps farmers maintain a status quo that benefits themselves. How can a consumer who holds these idiotic misconceptions seriously demand farmers do something about nitrate pollution or dangerous herbicide use? How can voters who think that way have any business advocating for fewer farm subsidies?
I also don’t think this is simply external propaganda. It’s an internal mythology. The agriculture industry needs to believe that it is feeding the world, despite how much of our production goes to ethanol and corn syrup. They need to believe that agriculture is exceptional. Immune to regulation, free of expectations to reduce carbon emissions, and deserving of being showered with subsidies while they continue on as some of the richest people in America (yes, land wealth counts as wealth).
This is, of course, ridiculous. Agriculture is an industry like any other. Most farmers are hard-working and deserve to thrive. I want to see a thriving rural America where farmers get a fair cut for their harvest, where corporate power takes a back seat to workers, and insurance and conservation programs help farmers innovate without crashing rural economies. But you won’t get that by attacking consumers and upholding the status quo. It won’t happen until we start treating agriculture like a normal industry. And you definitely won’t get there by making up stories about chocolate milk.
What I’m Reading, Watching, and Listening to
Singapore in Colour: A fantastic art project where a large collection of photos from different neighborhoods in Singapore had their hues extracted to identify the color palettes of different parts of the city.
Searching for Maura: A haunting visual story of what happened to the body of a young Philippine girl who died at the St. Louis Worlds Fair. Not as an attendee but as an exhibit.
The Empty Chair - A moving narrative of hospitality and loss.
Building Old: An interesting story from a small farmer about the process of purchasing and moving a historic barn to their property.