Episode transcript:
Sound of goats, bells, farmer calling goats
Rachel: My lungs are full of fresh air and my shoes are covered in poo. We're out in the open Bulgarian countryside. We've driven about an hour and a half outside of Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria. Can you tell me why we are standing here with all of these goats?
Sam: Well, we are here because we're doing an episode about… milk.
Rachel: But we already told everybody that this podcast is NOT a podcast about milk.
Sam: That's true. The podcast is not about milk, but this episode is going to be about milk.
Rachel: eh, ok…
Music - Triple Tension by Zhivko Vasilev
Phone ringing
Montage: "развален телефон", "Chinese whispers", "telefono senza fili", "telephone", "kulaktan kulağa", "Stille Post", "испорченный телефон", "téléphone arabe", "głuchy telefon", "Russian scandal", "Don't drink the milk"
Dial tone
Rachel: What do you associate with milk?
Music – Pale Moonlight 3
In the Old Testament, the promised land is referred to as "a land flowing with milk and honey." And you know our galaxy, the "Milky Way"? Well according to Ancient Greek mythology, it was formed when divine breast milk spilled across the heavens. Legend also has it queens like Cleoptatra and Elizabeth I used to bathe in milk, because they thought it would keep them looking young and fresh.
Milk is so often associated with youth and innocence. And yet…
Clips from: A Clockwork Orange, Inglorious Basterds, and No Country for Old Men
"[Oh, sheriff! We just missed him! We gotta circulate this on radio.] All right. But what do we circulate? Looking for a man who has recently drunk milk?" // (In French) "Then milk is what I prefer. [Very well.]" // "The Korova Milk Bar sold milk plus. Milk plus vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom, which is what we were drinking. This would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of the old ultra-violence."
Music - Theme for Villain
Rachel: In films like No Country for Old Men, Inglorious Basterds, or A Clockwork Orange, - it's the baddies, the villains, who chug the white stuff. So maybe there are a few more surprises hidden in the story of this everyday drink…
I'm Rachel Stewart and this is Don't Drink the Milk, a show about little-known stories of familiar things that have traveled around the world – by force, by chance, or by choice. And, just for today, we really are talking about milk.
In this episode we have caves of cheese, a colonial Caribbean throwback and milkfluencers in Times Square, but our starting point is science. And who better to bring us up to speed than our very own science nerd and super producer, Sam…
Sam: Ok so the thing that sparked the idea for this episode is lactose tolerance: our ability to drink milk. The thing is that all adult humans everywhere used to be lactose intolerant, every single one. Nowadays up to ⅓ of people are lactose tolerant, so still not a majority. But that one-third of people can drink milk, comfortably. And Rachel, I think we should find out if you're one of them. Remember when I made you spit into that test tube a million times a few weeks?
Rachel: Yes, I do.
Sound of spitting Rachel taking DNA test
Rachel: So, I got something in the post today. Okay, so I've got some kind of plastic container and some instructions. I know this is about milk and lactose tolerance, but I feel like I'm about to find out who my real dad is. Ok, so I've got to hold this spit sample tube and then I have to spit up until the black line. That's so much spit! Oh my god, are they joking? Okay, here goes. Mmm, I remember this trick that my music teacher used to tell me that if you bite your tongue, it makes you salivate more. So here I go. (Sound of tap tap) And that's it! That's me in a test tube.
Sam: The results are in…
Rachel: I'm nervous.
Sam: Rachel, you're lactose tolerant.
Rachel: Yay, someone give me a milkshake! Does this mean I have a superpower?
Sam: Well, kind of! Lactose intolerance, or "lactase non-persistence" to use the super science-y term, is when you can't break down lactose, which is the sugar in milk. So you, on the other hand, can do that!
Rachel: Woo hoo!
Sam: Now, all milk - from humans and animals - has lactose in it – except, fun fact: some fin-footed mammals, so things like fur seals, sea lions and walruses. So, I guess we could ALL drink their milk if you can figure out how to milk a walrus.
Rachel: Mmm… I'll pass.
Sam: But milk is intended for babies, right? And babies have this enzyme that allows them to break down lactose. But once you've been weaned off of breastmilk as a child, our bodies stop producing this enzyme.
Rachel: But I'm not a baby, so why do I have this enzyme?
Sam: That can be traced back to a genetic mutation that occurred a very long time ago, probably somewhere in central Europe...
Music - Secret of the Lake 2
Sam: It's a few thousand years ago, in the Bronze Age. You’re living in a little community in these forested Bulgarian hills, mostly just doing your best to get enough food to survive. You’ve got some domesticated animals.
Sound of goats, cows
Sam: And you’ve started drinking milk from these animals, which has some real benefits…
Mark Thomas: milk is effectively a super food in terms of its nutritional composition.
Sam: That's Mark Thomas, an evolutionary geneticist at University College London.
Mark: I mean it’s got almost the perfect balance of nutrients, so milk is a very good source of uncontaminated fluid. I mean it’s relatively pathogen free compared to, for example, river water or well water and so on.
Sam: Uncontaminated fluids with lots of nutrients - great! Plus, there's none of the ups and downs of seasonal crop harvests. Milk is there for you all year round. But… when you start to drink this stuff, it makes you a bit gassy, sometimes you get diarrhea.
Sound of stomach rumble
Sam: Overall, it's pretty uncomfortable. Your neighbor has figured out how to make cheese and yogurt though, which is a little better for digestion, as it has less lactose, so fewer nasty side effects. But then… your community gets a disease.
Sound of screams/wails
Medical care wasn't the best in those days. And since everyone’s sick or dealing with a relative who is, there's no one to make the easier-to-digest cheese or yogurt. You turn back to milk as a vital source of calories. And with that comes the diarrhea…
Sound of feeling sick
…making you increasingly dehydrated. At which point, you die.
Music ends
Rachel: Oh, wow, ok…
Sam: Sorry. But the thing is, not everyone in the village dies. Some people have a genetic variant, allowing them to drink milk without the digestion problems, so they survive.
Rachel: Oh, so this is essentially like natural selection?
Sam: Exactly. Mark and his colleagues believe disease and famine were the drivers of this mutation spreading. And this is a pretty big deal:
Mark: This is the most strongly selected single gene trait to have evolved in Europeans in the last 10,000 years.
Rachel: And this all started in Bulgaria?
Sam: Well, Mark says we can't be THAT precise. While some of his earlier research pointed to the Central Balkans or Central Europe, as we've learned more about migration during this time period, it actually has made it even trickier to know for sure where this popped up.
Mark: To me that's not interesting. What's interesting is where and when natural selection favoring that genetic variant started.
Sam: And there's something else we should note too, as this genetic mutation starts taking off across Europe…
Sarah Tishkoff: So, my lab identified three mutations in Africa that arose independently from the most common mutation that occurs in Europeans.
Sam: I mean, isn't human evolution a crazy cool thing?! So, you've got different mutations popping up in Europe and in eastern and northern parts of Africa, all doing the same thing - helping adults consume milk!
That's Sarah Tishkoff, by the way, a Professor of Genetics and Biology at the University of Pennsylvania. She also pointed out that there's an issue with modern day DNA databases though.
Sarah: There's a major bias towards studying non-Africans in human genetic studies and roughly 80% of the individuals included in these studies are of European ancestry. About 10% are of Asian ancestry, about 2% or less are of African ancestry. And the majority of those studies would be in African Americans in the US, not amongst the very genetically diverse groups that live in sub-Saharan Africa.
Rachel: So, we may not even know all the milky mutations out there?
Sam: Yeah, there's probably still a lot to learn. But since we do have quite a bit of information on European DNA, we know the European variant particularly took hold in Northern and Western Europe. To the point where as much as 95% of people of British or Scandinavian descent have this European variant, which Rachel, looking at your DNA here, you are 82% Scottish and 18% Irish.
Rachel: Ah, making me very lactose tolerant?
Sam: Very likely to be, yes. Which you are. And then as you go South and East across Europe, lactose tolerance decreases. But that doesn't necessarily stop people in those places from eating dairy.
Rachel: Ah we definitely noticed that in Bulgaria - which is pretty much as southeast as you can go in Europe. They were obsessed with dairy - it's a huge part of their culture. Our assistant producer Rayna was actually born in Bulgaria, so she gave us the low down on the local love of dairy...
Sound of grocery store sounds - refrigerator doors opening, wheeling carts
Rachel: Ok, here's the dairy section. Okay, definitely need some yogurt, because you've been going on about yogurt the whole time.
Rayna: Yeah, of course, we need yogurt, definitely. We can take this one, I know this from my childhood, so I like this.
Rachel: And we definitely need some cheese.
Rayna: Yeah, sure. That's why we're in Bulgaria!
Rachel: Okay, but this white cheese is enormous. I wouldn't, I wouldn't be able to eat that in a month.
Rayna: No, we eat this in one day. One family, one day. [It's huge!] Of course.
Sound of grocery store sounds - beeps, cashier checkouts
Sound of yogurt foil lid being opened
Rayna: Okay, so this here is typical Bulgarian yogurt. And we eat a lot of yogurt. There was a time where I ate like, three pots of yogurt every day, like for the morning, midday, and in the afternoon.
Rachel: And what exactly is so special about Bulgarian yogurt? Like, why does everyone make such a fuss about it?
Rayna: First of all, it contains specific bacteria that is native to Bulgaria here. Very good for your gut, for your immune system, for your liver, for everything. This is a medicine. We call it medicine. We eat it, we drink it, we put it on our skin when we are sunburned. When we go to the villages in Bulgaria, you see people making their own yogurt. And I can remember my granny, we had sheeps, we had cows. And I always remember one sentence, she said, 'don't jump on the bed,' because the milk, she's pouring actually milk into glasses - bottled glasses, and then putting one or two spoons of old yogurt and then these are covered in blankets or a pile of clothes because they need a kind of a temperature. I don't know what kind of a temperature, but it should be warm, and it should stay like this for hours and then it becomes yogurt...
Rachel: Because it's fermenting?
Rayna: Yes.
Sound of yogurt lid
Rayna: Okay. Oh, this is a nice one. It's a very, very good consistency, you know?
Rachel: Okay, I'm going in with a spoon… Ooh. Okay, that's really tangy, but I really like it. …It's really refreshing, actually. I feel healthier already.
Music - Jumpara Dobrogea 4
Sam: So, back to the gene mutation. As it spread and digestion improved, Europeans were just loving their dairy. And as we know, Europeans liked to spread themselves all around the globe too - can you guess what I'm getting at here?
Rachel: …maybe colonialism?
Sam: Oh yes.
Music - Strange Fruit 5
Sam: Let's head to the Caribbean. Our destination: Trinidad & Tobago. These two islands not far off the coast of Venezuela are the perfect location to explore colonialism's milky legacy.
Merisa Thompson: Milk really started to arrive with the arrival of colonialism. But if we go back in history, originally the islands were populated by Amerindian peoples, and so the original sort of indigenous inhabitants of the islands didn't consume milk.
Sam: That’s Merisa Thompson, a lecturer in Gender and Development at the University of Birmingham in the UK. She wrote a paper called Milk and the Motherland. And when I was speaking to her, she was back in Trinidad for research.
Music - Troubled Heritage 3
Merisa: So, there's a very small indigenous population existing in Trinidad today, but largely the original population was decimated by the changing colonial ways and colonial violence.
Harbor sounds
The Caribbean nation was first colonized by the Spanish in 1498 when one Christopher Columbus rocked up on its sandy shores. The islands switched hands many times between the Spanish, French, Dutch and the British.
Merisa: But really the Spanish were the first to start to introduce cattle into the islands. Agriculture was really like a key part of colonization. So, cattle's really fundamental to agriculture and European agriculture in particular. So, it would've been seen as really part of that sort of reorganization of what they see to be unruly land.
Sound of cattle
Sam: European colonizers believed they needed to "tame" what they saw as unruly lands by making them look more like Europe. They completely reshaped local landscapes, which often had disastrous, long-lasting impacts on the environment, not to mention the people and their ways of life. As part of this effort, colonization helped spread cows and milk consumption around the world. That legacy can still be seen today actually. For example, the once British colony of New Zealand is now the world's top exporter of milk. But back to Trinidad in the 19th century, which by this point is also a British colony.
Merisa: The planters who were the owners of the sugar plantations, they sort of brought with them their European metropolitan tastes. So, they would've been importing dairy for their own use. But as we moved towards abolition…
Sam: In anticipation of the end of slavery, slave owners were worried about not being able to buy more enslaved people. So, what did they do?
Merisa: So, it became more important to rather than keep buying new labor, to keep the labor that you have more healthy and to move towards reproducing labor.
Sam: They pushed enslaved people to have more babies. Babies born into slavery. One aspect of this was switching babies off of breastmilk and onto cow's milk as soon as possible.
Merisa: So they would be trying to decrease the breastfeeding time to keep women in the fields longer and to make them available to reproduce, so that's when we really started to see the colonial administration starting to put in rules that organize breastfeeding, fertility, marriage, conjugal relations, and all sorts of things like that.
Sam: In most British colonies, slavery was eventually abolished in 1834. Indentured servitude was still allowed. For the next 70 years or so, nearly 150,000 indentured servants came over from India.
Merisa: Many of them would've been Hindu. So, they have their religious veneration of the cow. Cow’s milk and purity is used symbolically in part of religious ceremonies. So that brought with it a new milk culture in a sense to Trinidad, on top of the layering of already what had been happening in terms of the intersection between European cultures, African cultures, and indigenous cultures here.
Sam: Remember those connections between religion and milk? In Hinduism, the Universe is a sea of milk and it's churned into butter by the gods. But despite all this effort to bring dairy to these Caribbean islands, cows aren't exactly suited to the tropics and later in the 20th century, the dairy industry in Trinidad and Tobago dwindled. These days you mainly get long-life or powdered milk in the supermarkets.
Merisa: …and a lot of that is produced by Nestle and also, various global companies. And then if you move into the cheese aisles, you'll see that all of the cheese is pretty much imported still. So, there's a really interesting, colonial sort of hangover and inheritance there that a lot of these products are still imported and extremely expensive as well. They're some of the most expensive items in the supermarket.
Music - Ciénaga Y Pantano
[Trailer for Cautionary Tales]
Sound of making and pressing cheese
Rachel: Back in Bulgaria, fresh dairy is still very much in demand.
Dimitar translated by Rayna: More and more people want to buy his production, so this production is never enough for the people that want to buy it.
That's Rayna again - she's translating for Dimitar Vitanov, an accountant-turned-dairy-farmer. We've joined him on this fresh morning in the Bulgarian countryside for a spot of cheese-making. We're in a small room on the farm with Dimitar and his father. They're standing over what looks like a big metal bathtub, as they strain a pale mixture with a cheesecloth...
Sound of making cheese, liquid coming out
…the excess liquid is running off into a giant bucket.
Dimitar's father explains that even this liquid doesn't go to waste - it'll be used to feed other livestock and make izvara, which is something similar to cottage cheese.
Sound of moving to the barn
Rachel: In the small barn where he milks the goats, Dimitar tells us that the way they farm is not about squeezing every last drop out of the goat. You take a sustainable amount and then the goats trot out the back door to the large yard to feed their young with the remaining milk.
Dimitar translated by Rayna: So, the main difference is that the goats, each morning they're going into the mountains and in the evening they're coming back. So, they're not all the time here like in the big, industrial dairy farms or production farms. And they eat up to 800 different leaves during the day, you know, like there's so many different vitamins and so many different minerals that they eat and not like in an industry, where they got the food from, I don't know, ready-food. And this is the big difference.
Music - Radio Bulgaria 4
Rachel: That's one side of milk we haven't touched upon yet - sustainability. I actually stopped drinking cow's milk a few years back and switched to oat milk for environmental reasons.
Sam: Yeah, I often opt for oat milk as well.
Rachel: Ok, so I know cows aren't great when it comes to climate change, but how bad is it exactly?
Sam: Cows produce methane when they fart and burp. But methane is this super potent greenhouse gas. About 83 times worse than carbon dioxide. And the more cows we have, the more methane is released. But beyond the methane issue, it also just takes more resources to raise livestock than it does a bunch of oats. That all adds up to the point where livestock accounts for almost 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. That's almost as much as transportation!
Rachel: That's so high. I might be in a bit of a bubble, but so many people I know have switched to plant-based milk now. And even though dairy is big in Bulgaria, we spoke to plenty of locals who are drinking less milk for various reasons. And I mean we still got our oat milk cappuccinos pretty much everywhere.
Sam: Yeah, and we found that pistachio-almond-cashew milk at the grocery store, remember?
Rachel: Mmm that one was so good! So, it really does seem like a bit of a trend, right?
Sam: Well, yeah, the global picture is that sales of plant-based milk have been consistently increasing over the past five years and they're set to double in the next 5 years. The trend of drinking less cow's milk is especially strong among younger consumers - perhaps because of these environmental concerns: In the US, Gen Z bought 20% less milk last year than the national average. Which means milk - cow's milk - is looking for some good publicity.
Music - Urban Empire 3
Yvonne Zapata: So, my marathon schedule is quite the busy one. just running, strength training, tempo runs, speed, work, long runs, you name all the rest... Hi guys. So, my name is Yvonne Zapata, AKA, they call me MissOutsideeeeee in the running community of New York City. What I do is that I'm a runner and I'm an advocate for women who are Latina runners, um representing all plus sizes of women.
Sam: There's a campaign on TikTok and Instagram #gonnaneedmilk and it's trying to reach a younger market with influencers like Yvonne.
Yvonne: I was myself, which I loved. They represented me. And on Women's Day, they blasted it all over Times Square and it was such an awesome, amazing experience.
Sam: But like many young people, Yvonne's milk-drinking habits have changed.
Yvonne: When I was a little girl, I would always drink milk because, of course in high school, middle school and elementary school, there was always like milk, like strawberry milk, chocolate milk, you name it. That would be like your drink of the day. Just milk. I loved milk with cookies. I love milk with ice cream. Like I was such a weirdo when I loved milk. But later on, like I started to drink oat milk. Now I just drink oat milk, like here and there with my coffee, or I just have it in my cereal.
Sam: As for regular milk? Yvonne's pretty much given that up.
Yvonne: Because I feel like it would get full in my stomach and like, you know when you drink milk and you have something cheesy, you get gassy. Let's say if I was to go for a run, all the gas was just blown out. And I don't want that to happen when someone's right behind me.
Rachel: I love the honesty, but is she saying she's an ambassador for milk, but she doesn't like milk?
Sam: Yeah, it is a bit odd, but I think there's another cultural aspect here. Yvonne remembers celebrities of the 90s and early 2000s donning a milk mustache –
Yvonne: All these celebrities that I grew up on, like it was like, wow, like I remember seeing this as a little girl and now I'm on it?
Music - Sweet Sweet Poison 2
Sam: There have been some memorable and bizarre advertising campaigns for milk around the world over the years. But one of the most iconic was the "Got Milk?" campaign in the US. When I was a kid, this slogan was absolutely everywhere – billboards, school posters, magazines – with really famous people like Jennifer Anniston and Whoopi Goldberg sporting that emblematic milk mustache.
Rachel: I love that your celebrity references really reveal that you are a millennial.
Sam: Guilty. But here, I mean look at some of these –
Rachel: Oh, there's loads! Ok, I'm so bad with names, but let's see who I recognize. I think that might be Harrison Ford. Ooo the Olsen Twins! Tyra Banks rocking the mustache. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, AKA Sarah Michelle Geller. Ok, my personal favorite is Lauren Conrad from the Hills.
Sam: That's getting a little deeper into the 2000s US TV era.
Rachel: I think the bigger question is who wasn't in this campaign?!
Sam: Yeah, I mean this was something that celebrities wanted to be a part of and actively sought out. So, I grew up with this, and then I also grew up literally surrounded by milk – I'm from Wisconsin, the state known as ‘America’s Dairyland’ – it says so on our license plates. But still, I've always found it very odd that you would have an advertisement for a type of food, rather than you know, a specific brand or something. Like why would you just advertise: MILK?
Rachel: Mmm true, that is weird.
Sam: So, this got me wondering who was behind these ads and why?
Rachel: Ooo! Are we getting to the politics and money bit yet?
Sam: Yes, it's time.
Music - Ginger beer
George Frisvold: I'm old enough to remember the Milkman where people would like literally deliver milk as a separate product. Again, because of the perishability. You had separate stores in the United States that sold just milk and dairy products.
Sam: That's George Frisvold, a professor and economist at the University of Arizona. He's written about the U.S. Dairy Industry in the 20th and 21st Centuries. And the US has had some wild and counterintuitive policies over the past hundred years. So, at the turn of the 20th century, railroads, and then refrigeration and other technological advances like pasteurization make it possible to get milk to growing urban populations. At this point specialized dairy farms become a thing. And then two things happen: during the Great Depression many people just couldn't afford milk, but production never stopped. And during both World Wars, production was even ramped up to feed soldiers powdered and canned milk. But at the end of World War II, those farmers were producing way more than there was demand for back at home.
George: So, what started to happen in the post-world-war-two era was policies to support the price of dairy and dairy products. And what the government would do is it would announce basically a guaranteed price. And it would buy up dairy products to push up the price of fresh milk. The idea is okay, we're going to buy up these commodities. And we're going to store them when prices are low, and we'll put them on the market when prices are high. Well, for dairy products, you can't store it like bales of cotton or bushels of wheat. So, they would basically buy up cheese, or they'd buy up, you know, nonfat dried milk. But the problem was, if you guaranteed a very, very high, high price for farmers, they would produce a lot more because 'Oh, I have a guaranteed high price'. Also, if there's new technologies that will allow you to produce more per cow, it's like, 'oh, I'm going to adopt that because I have a guaranteed high price'. And so, every year, you would have overproduction of dairy products. And, you know, for listeners in the EU, you know, they had literally like mountains of butter…
Sound of "Ahhh…."
George: …that the governments were storing to prop up dairy prices in the EU and in the US, they had huge blocks of cheese that they couldn't fit in places because they didn't have enough refrigeration capacity. So, they were storing it in like cool underground caves.
Sam: So, you had caves of cheese basically?
Sound of glowing cave
George: Yes, we had caves of cheese and again, what do you do with all this cheese? They would make it available to lower income folks. You could go to like food banks or pantries and get, you know, big chunks of not great American cheese. At the same time, you started to have the school lunch program.
Sam: School lunches gave the government the chance to kill two birds with one stone: improve kids' nutrition and support dairy farmers. But…
George: Anytime you have two policies try to do one thing, it gets problematic.
Sam: And the US has very much tried to do both of these things. For over a hundred years, dairy has been a prominent feature of US Dietary Guidelines – Today, they still recommend 3 servings of dairy a day, despite studies that call this into question.
Walter Willett: Interestingly, I drank a lot of milk that was probably in the five servings a day growing up. Because that was part of Midwest culture, three servings a day was deficiency in the Midwest, but actually, I hardly ever drink milk now.
Sam: Walter Willett is a professor of nutrition and epidemiology at Harvard. He also is a former member of the National Academy of Medicine's Food and Nutrition Board.
Walter: Milk is beneficial for children for sure. But primarily, if it's coming from the mother. Milk consumption by adults is a really complicated issue. It's certainly not essential because many parts of the world – much of Asia, Africa, Latin America – don't consume milk at all, as adults. The main justification by the nutrition community has been that this is a critical source of calcium. While we do need calcium, the question is 'how much do we need?' And it's been interesting that countries with the lowest milk consumption where adults hardly drink milk at all, actually have the lowest fracture rates.
Sam: And in any case, we can get calcium from things like nuts, legumes, and particularly green leafy vegetables. Now, remember how some of the biggest dairy consumers are in Northern Europe?
Walter: That dairy centric diet has been related to more cardiovascular disease. Until fairly recently, Northern Europe had the highest cardiovascular disease rates in the world. But if we replace milk with healthy protein sources and replace the dairy fat with olive oil or rapeseed oil, that's going to be a step in a healthier direction, really moving more toward a Mediterranean-type dietary pattern.
Rachel: But wait, the US is still promoting three servings of dairy a day, and that's despite research showing that it's not actually all that healthy?
Sam: Well, their guidelines are backed up by some studies… but they almost always are funded by the dairy industry itself or the US sponsored program that's meant to promote the dairy industry.
Walter: Uh, there are very huge conflicts of interests that– the dairy production in the United States is promoted or supported by lots of different subsidies, and the dairy lobby is very powerful.
Sam: And it wasn't just in the US where this excess government dairy was getting pushed on people. The US started to send it overseas as well– here's George Frisvold again:
George Frisvold: And so, one of the things that came out of the 1940s and the 50s, you had foreign aid programs. And so, like nonfat, dried powdered milk was getting shipped to foreign countries, and it was pitched as an international aid, but it was also a price support program for dairy producers.
Sam: And this actually still happens - and not just from the US. Reporting in Politico in 2021 detailed how European milk producers were offloading excess, lower quality milk products to West Africa. This completely disrupted local dairy markets there in the process. And that's on top of the fact that — remember – most people around the world are lactose intolerant.
Music - Code of Love 3
Sam: Ok, we've made it to the 80s.
Sound of Reagan inauguration clip
Ronald Reagan: "The economic ills we suffer have come upon us over several decades. (Sound of TV static) In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."
Sam: President Ronald Reagan comes into office; his administration is looking for ways to cut government spending. Which meant dairy subsidies, and the cows themselves, were on the chopping block…
George Frisvold: In the 80s, they instituted what was called a dairy termination program. Which, you know, if you're thinking of like Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Terminator, unfortunately, you have it exactly right. The idea was they were paying farmers to basically slaughter their herds and turn it into, you know, like burgers, basically.
Rachel: They paid farmers to kill their own cows?!
Sam: Yes, because they don't have to pay the dairy farmers' milk subsidies. So, in the 90's, they shift course and try a less violent tactic:
Music - I'll Be There
Sam: MARKETING! In the US there are these things called checkoff programs for various agricultural products - things like beef or raisins or almonds. The way it works in the case of milk is dairy farmers have to pay a few cents for every 100 pounds of milk their cows produce into a central fund. That money goes toward research, product development, and marketing.
Rachel: Ah, so that answers your questions from earlier - that's why you have advertising for just 'milk' in general, rather than a brand.
Sam: That's why!
Milk ads montage -
"But I was working out, drinking milk, developing my muscles. By senior year, milk had made a difference… Milk. It does a body good." // "Once a month a scary witch haunts the town of Kent. Until one day she started drinking milk. And everything changed… The calcium in milk reduces the symptoms of pre-menstrual syndrome." // "You stop it! Stop it! Shiny hair. Part of another perfect day in Mootopia." // "Got milk?"
Rachel: What is going on?! They do not make adverts like that anymore. I don't even want to know what the budget was for that.
Sam: They're kind of like little mini movies, aren't they?
Rachel: And a little casual sexism thrown in there for good measure. They are clearly trying to push a health narrative there. So… did it work? Did more people buy milk after these ads came out?
Sam: Well sort of, sales of milk did go up a little bit in the 90's, but then started falling again. And also, milk is a really hard thing to convince people to buy more of:
George: Milk is what is called price inelastic, which means that if the price changes a lot, you still don't really change your consumption. Like I buy a gallon of milk every week, and I don't even look at what the price is. I guess if I went in, and they said, that's $100 then I'd blanch. But I don't even think about it, so if the price goes up, I'm gonna buy my gallon of milk a week. Now, if the price of milk fell, you know, through the floor, am I gonna buy two gallons of milk? Well, no, because what am I going to do with all that milk, it's gonna go bad, I'm not gonna drink it in time.
Sam: While milk consumption has gone down, the dairy lobby remains strong though and they've found sneaky ways to get us to eat more dairy in the US. The Dairy Checkoff Program we mentioned earlier, it worked with fast food chains in the 2010s to get more dairy onto fast food menus. So things like Dominoes Pizza putting 40% more cheese on their pizzas, a Burger King Burger with "two slices of American cheese, a slice of pepper jack and a cheesy sauce" and of course, Pizza Hut's stuffed crust pizza. Which I have to say, I do indulge once or twice a year.
Rachel: When I was in the US, I really noticed there was just cheese everywhere. But I had never thought the government was involved.
Sam: Yeah, we're back at that conflict of interest. Here's Walter Willett again:
Walter Willett: So, it's interesting that the Dietary Guidelines recommend against full fat milk. But their same Department of Agriculture is promoting high fat dairy consumption, a lot of it in the form of cheese through their Checkoff Program.
Sam: And that's why it could be seen as problematic – having the same government department responsible for making nutritional guidelines AND supporting the dairy industry. Interestingly, Canada has recently removed dairy as its own food group from food guidelines.
Walter: They put it in the group of other protein sources, which is a good place to put it. Again, because dairy isn't essential. And we certainly don't need the three servings a day that are being recommended strongly by the US guidelines. It's going to be very hard to do that politically in the United States, because the dairy lobby is so powerful.
Rachel: Wow, from mutating genes to political lobbies…
Sam: Yep, there's more to milk than meets the eye. So what are you going to take from all of this, Rachel?
Rachel: Hmmm. That milk will stop me behaving like a witch when I'm on my period? No, joking. I guess just a reminder that money is behind absolutely everything. What about you?
Sam: Well, in thinking about this episode, I found myself going back to the start and thinking about human evolution and what it took for our scrappy species to make it on this planet. For some people around the world, every calorie still counts for survival and milk might be an essential part of that diet. But for those of us living in places where we have access to plenty of food, I think it's probably worth switching away from milk or at least having a bit less - for our health and the planet's. It might even be necessary if we'd like to survive as a species for a few thousand more years.
Music - It's Raining In 7 by Zhivko Vasilev
Rachel: This episode was produced by Sam Baker. It was edited by Charli Shield. Special thanks to Zhivko Vasilev - who we actually saw perform live on our first night in Sofia. And who generously let us use some of his music for this episode. Our team also includes Rayna Breuer on fact checking, Julia Rose helping with archives and Chris Caurla. I'm your host Rachel Stewart.
If you have thoughts on this episode or ideas for future topics you'd like us to follow around the world, then get in touch at dontdrinkthemilk@dw.com, remember no apostrophe! We'll be back in 2 weeks…
Music fades out
Sam: Ok Rachel, I have an extremely nerdy song for you that comes from my high school days of being in Student Council.
Sam (singing, badly): Don’t gimme no pop, no pop, don’t gimme no tea, no tea, just give me that milk, moo moo moo moo, Wisconsin milk, moo moo moo moo. Give me a long milk! (And then you would say Chocolate)
Rachel: Chocolate!
Sam: Give me a short milk! (Skim)
Rachel: Skim!
Sam singing, Rachel joins in: Don’t gimme no pop, no pop, don’t gimme no tea, no tea, just give me that milk, moo moo moo moo, Wisconsin milk, moo moo moo moo.
Sam: Now I need to add a layer to this. So, when we get to the 'moo', you need to interlace your four fingers with your thumbs pointing down and then you turn the person next to you and they milk your thumbs as if they were udders.
Rachel: Ew!
Sound of cow 'mooo'
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