Why milk? Vegetables make more sense.
Milk is not a necessary foodstuff. Creating labelling standards for high-quality milk and letting the market do its job would be the most-reasonable outcome.
(Free market food production will end up industrially produced, because that's how you minimize costs and maximize profits. I, for one, don't want to live in a country like that and will vote for laws that help prevent it happening.)
Post-war Americans prioritised price. So the market made industrial food. (There was also the influence of World War II’s military-oriented factories pivoting to peacetime production.) The situation is not the same today.
There is demand for non-industrially produced food among those who can afford it. For those who can’t, I find it morally disturbing that those of us who can afford it want to tell them what they can and cannot buy. If a low-income person decides to spend their food voucher on industrially-produced cheese so they can use the surplus on fruits and vegetables (or pizzas), that’s their choice.
In any case, if the goal is less industrially-produced cheese, our subsidy regime accomplished that inefficiently.
I'm sorry for your feeling of disturbance. I can't help your sense of righteous indignation, but I don't believe free markets always deliver superior results to democracy.
That only works if there are no carry-on effects of their eating habits (i.e. subsidized health costs, etc). If we can reduce those carry-on costs by forcing the purchase of healthier options, then the system is more sustainable.
Add to that the fact that food subsidy programs are not intended to be a lifestyle -- they're supposed to be there to help people in times of need, a crutch to help them between jobs, not a solution to their joblessness. In other words, there should be some motivating factor to become self-sufficient.
I don’t think basic milk vouchers is a good idea, but basic veggies is even worse.
Even though modern fruit and vegetable farming systems are highly industrialized, relying on vast monocultures, fertilizers, pesticides, and tillage practices that require heavy machinery and plenty of fuel, they still produce more calories per input than beef and pork.
Most views are 2x - 4x people fed per acre from plants versus meats, with milk and eggs splitting the middle.
That said, even our current ‘lacto ovo vegetarian’ compromise diet is likely not sustainable.
True, but irrelevant. I never said anything about meat. Since the advent of agriculture until modernity, most humans ate very little meat, this is definitely true.
> Most views are 2x - 4x people fed per acre from plants versus meats, with milk and eggs splitting the middle.
True, but irrelevant as well. Not only I never said anything about meat, but the discussion here is about milk vs. vegetables. Plants today are better yields in terms of calories per acre due to fertilizers being abundant, pesticides being available, and cultivars having been improved for better yields. However, it is irrelevant for the discussion at hand, because the plants that are better than milk are corn, soy, etc., not vegetables.