America's Biggest Milk Producers Are Going Bankrupt
foodandwine.com
foodandwine.com
Gut feelings though.
For comparison, red meat consumption in the US has fallen 15% in the last 10 years and Tyson stock$ is near it's 5 year high.
Sure, he's humorous, but he's not offering his opinions except in the most general terms. He follows facts, not hype.
Carlson started his career as a journalist, working for right-wing publications.
Funny world we live in.
Tucker is right wing. He also has a very casual relationship with the truth.
Oliver is definitely to the left, but he also doesn't lie.
There’s like 10 different companies discussed on the first page itself, including the specific company here.
I mean, it’s all over mainstream media.
oh wow, I never heard of that happening before thanks for the tip.
Like I said, the movie itself would be more relatable if any possibility of the circumstances were relatable for a man. For women its practical to dream about a man choosing them for qualities they were born with while the man created every circumstance in their own life to obtain wealth and security before eventually decide to choose that woman, and that movie caters to that. It took me a while to figure out why certain romance movies were unappealing and predictably so between genders, and that's what it is.
I don't actually care about or mind the reality. The extent of my point is that watching depictions of it aren't interesting when no part of it is something you can dream about and have a chance of it happening.
Gender stereotypes may have some truth to them, but it’s far less than most people seem to think. Everything else being equal, most women would prefer to date attractive men and most men would prefer to date wealthy women.
Should businesses not be allowed to take on too much debt?
Why would I want a law to warp the market even further to protect pensions and these zombie companies?
Perhaps my observations reflect the sentiment of others and that's why bigger waves haven't been made, because we don't care about this slow motion trainwreck.
Lever up
A defined-contribution pension plan, where you end up actually owning the assets in question, is the only way to be sure that no one will shrink your pension in bankruptcy, or (for a public pension) reduce them by legislative fiat.
And more and more pension funds offer low-fee index funds than ever before. Praise Vanguard.
The whole scenario of giant global entities taking over agriculture and food services is probably the most obviously bad but ok things that will happen in my lifetime. We've declared dairy some sort of environmental catastrophe, to be replaced by cloudy water percolated through soy, almonds and similar products, which ultimately will roll up to 4-6 companies like Coke, Pepsi, Inbev, etc.
Assuming of course that you have actually saved over time and have picked appropriate assets to invest in.
Defined benefit plans have their problems--both the funding and the fact that they were historically designed around long-term employment at a single organization. But they do have the virtue of being a retirement income stream that requires no action on an employee's part.
ADDED: >no one will shrink your pension in bankruptcy
Except the market depending upon where you have invested your money
This risk is why Congress passed ERISA and created the PBGC, which nevertheless is at risk of failure itself, with its own projection for its insolvency being about 5 years out.
The problem is not defined benefit vs defined contribution really, it's that companies are not really required to fund defined benefit.
There are 1001 third party companies (normally insurers) who will happily underwrite a defined benefit scheme (so if the employer goes under the pensions are fine). But that would mean employers actually making pensions contributions that would actually fund the actual cost. Firms prefer to under pay the schemes. Depending on the scheme/firm/local-laws, that might be by just underpaying it, or by more cunning means like using the funds to buy company stock (so it looks like its funded on paper but you're just as screwed when the employer fails, Ironically this is what the federal government is doing with social security too) or by making optimistic assumptions (if I assume all workers die a week after retirement age and a 9% interest rate, final salary pensions need only cost me 5cents a head today! Can you prove I'm wrong?)
Unions (where they exist and have influence) also don't want to push this. Admitting the employer is unlikely to pay is a serious accusation that won't be proven for 20+ years. If you press hard and the employer DOES up their (real) contributions then that means you'll lose out somewhere else in the compensation package (so less health coverage or lower raises). Plus, If you get someone 1000 dollars more in 20 years, but 10 dollars less now, they won't thank you,they'll demand to know where there 10 dollars is!
This is also the reason politicians won't regulate harder: it would push firms to declare bankruptcy sooner (and the electorate punishes that, better let the problem worsen and hope its the next guys issue) and it would mean many firms withdrawing or cutting back their schemes. And again, people would rather have the promise of a good pension (that will likely never happen) than the certainty of a mediocre pension.
The key issue here is a mix of costs and people being strongly incentivised to lie about a cost now as the problem won't happen for decades.
The only advantage defined contribution has is that it is harder to cheat. But actually, defined benefit schemes are less risky and far more appropriate for the average dummy than defined contribution schemes.
Well, yeah because defined benefit actually makes some kind of commitment on what you're going to get, whereas defined contribution just tells you what you'll give, right?
I mean it's all in the name. DC is just "give us yer money and sure we'll do our best for you, as long as our fees are paid"....
The bigger problem is that unsophisticated investors may overly invest in risky assets that don't pan out or they don't invest at all/borrow against savings/etc.
Individual investors do have the option of investing in things like treasuries and annuities. Of course, in an economic collapse, all bets are off. But if you're willing to put up with low returns (maybe 3%), you can invest your money pretty safely.
DC retirement plans heap all correlated market risk on individual retirees.
Given that the risks of an underfunding are greater than an overfunding, that market returns are exogenous to the merits of any given retiree, and the goal is to supply adequate income to live on in retirement, the arguments in favour of a DB plan, a payment mandate by the employer, a government backing, and severe penalties for malfeasance, including clawbacks to investors and creditors of deadbeat employers, seems more than appropriate.
McClatchy just had pension trouble. So does my home state of Illinois. So does this company, apparently.
You seem to think it's possible to just magic a large-scale change in human behavior into existence. It isn't. I think DC+social security is a pretty fair compromise. You're never going to starve if you totally screw up. There's also Medicare to help pay medical expenses. So the worst-case scenario isn't awful. On the other hand, if you want a comfortable retirement with a nice house, travel, etc., you need to be a good steward of a DC plan.
I also think having people with a little more skin in the game (the stock market) will help to tamp down this tiresome class politics about how the 1% is screwing everyone over. Pensions are big investors, it's not fair that some investors (pensioners) get bailed out in a bad market environment, whereas others (DC plan participants) don't. Don't forget, pensions don't magically create money, they have to invest and rely on the whims of the market just like DC plan participants.
Plus, there are good DC plans. The better ones opt you into a target date retirement fund and automatically invest in a reasonable basket of securities so you don't have to figure it out yourself. Human Interest is a great example of a simple, no-frills plan I've seen. My wife's Schwab account is too complicated.
I get that DB might be better in theory but I fail to see how, given the constraints of reality, and human nature, and politics, we aren't going to get a repeat of the current DB fiasco over and over again. Just look at the incentives.
I like the fact that I have a DB plan from a prior employer but, as you say, I'm not sure it's a great fit for most situations moving forward.
The big issue here though is how to make either work for the average person? A defined benefit scheme where the employer is fiddling the books will fail. A defined contribution scheme where the management company is charging fat fees and pushing risky investments will fail. Can we really trust the majority of people with no financial acumen to tell the difference?
I feel like both require the user to swim with sharks right now...
Whereas DB, it seems like every place and in every time, there are always incentives to underfund, to cheat, to push liabilities around, to misrepresent them, to dump them on taxpayers. These things are closer to immutable human nature and won't change, IMO.
The bigger issue that is NOBODY can really afford to retire given how long people are living, escalating medical costs, and low rates of return. The DC people are just ahead of the DB folks in realizing this, because they're relying on bailouts there isn't enough money anywhere to fund. Illinois is a case in point.
If you tell people to shut up and pay and we'll assure the outcome, they can do that. Thats DB.
If you give people an "account" (even with good default investments), people have to manage that. They have to fill it up when they have a bad year, with actual cash from their current accounts. They have to ignore their brother in laws who put all the money in enron and made a bomb and tells you you're an idiot for sticking low fees. They have to pay attention and watch out for changes to fees or laws. And they have to start moving the money to lower risk items and plan 5+ years ahead to retire. And even then, that's just getting the index fund strategy right. The strategy may fail. They have to put money in when a market goes down and take it out when a market goes up.
I doubt very much that people will succeed at that. That's the core flaw in the DC model.
Personally I think that sort of work is better done centrally.
The obvious solution is simply to get rid of the laws that allow and encourage corporations and courts to collude in stealing employee pensions.
As to why it’s not illegal... there’s both the realpolitik “who are friends with congresspeople” as well as the wonky “how do you make it illegal? It’s just combining a lot of elements of capitalism”
The way you make it illegal, of course, is preventing stuff like directors being able to get paid big bonuses for buyouts (basically bribes to accept LBOs), by properly classifying such movements as stealing assets from the company
Which is which (and when since they switch roles sometimes) is a matter of opinion not fact. You can't really regulate that any more than you can arrest people for being "bad"...
If this is an issue for you, vote in members of Congress who care about this. There's an election coming up this year. Your representative in the house will be on the ballot, and maybe one of your senators. Please find out where the candidates on your ballot stand on this issue.
Many of them are incredibly poorly run. Bad hiring practices, little/no investment in operations or process, etc.
All I'm saying is, you have to look case by case at what's going on. Sometimes the PE firm does basically loot the business. In others, entrenched management has been there decades with little board or investor oversight, is performing way below the rest of the industry, and really does need a swift kick in the ass.
Don't rush to blame the PE guys here anyway. Everyone knows Americans are drinking much less milk, they probably bought it at a deep discount knowing they might not be able to turn it into a successful business, and that bet failed.
Finance is famous for making people sitting at their desks all day waiting to get a deck at 11AM to put in logos with the correct resolution.
Can you name me the 10th-best PC operating system maker? No, you can't, because there isn't one. Whereas I'm sure the management practices of a typical small-town pizza shop aren't great.
I'll grant that perhaps companies get lazy if they're monopolies but that doesn't last forever. I just think it's silly to suggest that companies in cutthroat, competitive industries are less high-performance than average, smaller firms.
The only thing that has changed is that PE has managed to take some cues from VCs and mount a PR campaign aimed at techies and other new-money types to make it seem like the industry isn’t as vulturistic as it has always been. And techies and new-money investors believe them. Because it’s easy to believe the wolf until he kills you or leaves you for dead.
I can't overstate the degree to which all the different industries in New York socially overlap. The degree of separation between someone who works in technology, media, finance, publishing and advertising is 0 or 1. Those relationships become marriages, friendships, acquaintances, people sitting next to you at charity dinner.
Perhaps most critically the Times is a family owned business, the owners are billionaires, the current owner is also it's publisher. They have no interest in poking around the fundamental mechanics of how rich people operate in this country.
Shiny stories of fraud or insider trading or whistleblowing? Absolutely. But questioning the core mechanics of capital, especially capital centered in New York operates would never happen.
Not KKR.
In 1995, Borden was acquired for $2 billion by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR), which proceeded to sell off pieces of the company to various buyers. Washington, D.C.-based ACON Dairy Investors, LLC purchased the company in 2017.
https://www.bevnet.com/news/2020/borden-dairy-co-files-for-b...
[Edit]
Not sure whether the twitt narrative is correct. From mundane wiki looks like KKR tried to right the sinking ship..
Borden suffered significant losses for the period 1991-1993...In deep financial difficulty, Borden was bought out by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR) in 1995. KKR increased the pace of divestiture, but was unable to right the company... In 1997, KKR focused the company solely on its pasta and pasta sauces lines. But the new strategy failed as well..
Private equity firms aren't all just corporate raiders of the 1980s that certain politicians try to spin them as.
That's not to say that small towns selling off public services to them is a good idea. Or any other public/private partnership bullshit that is sold as 'free markets' when its the mostly just politicians and their wealthy connections being complete vultures creating things that are nothing like markets.
The book "King of Capital" has a really good overview of the history of private equity:
https://www.amazon.com/King-Capital-Remarkable-Schwarzman-Bl...
I don't want to be acquired by them, but I have much more respect for shops like Thoma Bravo that act as operators and acquire strategically for portfolio companies that places like Bain, for example.
There are a lot of bad players or stupid businessmen and politicians in municipalities who have given it a bad name by making dumb exploitative deals. Which I do not condone or wish to defend.
But PE has still done a lot of good turn arounds and has been proven via plenty of data to be a net-gain in terms of its economic contribution to society, saving plenty of jobs and American companies that were headed for certain death.
Companies within all industries always vary in quality, but I think it's silly and dangerous to define entire industries merely by a small group of it's worst players - like the way people have been trying to pin the entire Silicon Valley industry to Ubers and Theranos, or Google/FB acting poorly, despite is otherwise countless success stories.
This sort of thinking, political spin, and media coverage is what creates destructive gov policies aimed at the few small minority of big bad guys but often ultimately just harms the other 90% of mostly harmless good guys with needless hoop jumping or straight up banning of otherwise useful contributions to society (which there have been countless examples of such self-destructive - but of course well intentioned - policies driven by similar emotional reactionaryism).
PE has been a punching bag for a long time. My only wish is that it is done rationally and using an evidence based approach. Politics has a habit of stirring up hysteria with stuff like this, disconnecting it from the reality on the ground, which LBOs and PE certainly has a longstanding legacy of, which you can see thoroughly in this thread. It's hardly new. But yes of course it is an industry notorious for its leeches and one that should be treated carefully, not with white gloves.
Just remember the worst stories take up 90% of the headlines, the countless successful ones often happen quietly, or in less read retrospectives or books. The stuff that rarely tops Reddit or HN, so it's easy to assume that all companies doing LBO are evil blood sucking monsters if you don't pay close attention.
A huge fraction of increased profitability comes from the fact that interest payments are tax deductible while dividends aren't, so LBOs artificially reduce costs. Rearranging debt obligations can break free up cash by dodging severance and retirement expenses. And the ability to recoup losses via unsustainable, high-margin practices encourages PE firms to pursue riskier turnaround approaches, then brag about their success rates while failing to acknowledge that their failures are often more damaging than gradual, non-PE-driven ones.
"Alive or dead" may be easy to measure, but the impact on people isn't binary; PE tactics for raising the survival rate largely come at the cost of worse outcomes in both cases. And the cases where PE is straightforwardly beneficial are usually the least-troubled firms, where it's acting more like investment and tax reduction.
So I look up the company on wikipedia and Borden Dairy is a processor & distributor, not a producer.
Furthermore, "employee pension obligations" being cited as a primary cause of bankruptcy without any more details raises a red flag for me. This article sounds more like they're reporting on the press release of some kind of corporate raiders than journalism.
Maybe the most insidious side effect of transition to 401k was tricking people without pensions that somehow pensioners are unfairly compensated.
It's easy to thumb your nose and say "well that's the company's problem", but what it does illustrate in a more general sense is that counterparty risk is very real, especially in underfunded pensions. While pension plans have a large amount of money saved, the reality of the situation is that part of a pensions mechanics look like a claim on a company's future earnings. That's what grinds my gears about pensions, there's a lot more risk than people think, and it's foolhardy to assume the employer assumes all the risk in theory or practice.
The best thing about the transition to 401ks imo was that it made it abundantly clear that there is a large amount of risk in funding retirement. The downside is yes, companies made it clear they were no longer willing to assume any of that risk themselves.
Pensioners should accept the looting or chronic under funding because something something balance sheets?
That's how it works in other countries like Canada. It's relatively easy and failsafe if well implemented, I really don't understand how it can be legal for a company to access the fund like in the story.
It's a shame so many of them are so badly managed/corrupted though. As usual, most stories about pension failing are about gross mismanagement (not paying into the plan as required) or corruption (drawing into the plan innapropriatly).
a) missing employer contribution to the fund on every paycheck b) mismanagement of the fund
The second point can be very varied and only limited by imagination, from embezzlement to government action. I've seen laws passed in the past passed about being able to take a loan on certain public pension funds without interest, which shows the complete lack of understanding about how these pensions are supposed to work and the actuarial math behind it.
In practice, this would probably be messy, very costly, and extremely unlikely to happen.
But yeah, probably trying to get out of pension liabilities.
If you remember that the "best" leaders from a stock investor (or greedy owner) perspective are psychopaths (lack empathy), and these people actually look really great on paper (lower costs, no/little immediate impact on profits), it's not surprising.
Not exactly, if the company is willing to go so far as bankruptcy / reincorporation... how will any previous contracts with whatever insurance company last through that?
It’s true that 401(k)s also have this feature, however many employees prefer the defined benefit a pension provides over managing their own returns and the temptations associated with managing money. The core issue is really poor US regulation over any specific issue with pensions.
PS: The swap to 401k’s in the US is mostly about cost savings. Companies can simply reduce their contributions without much if any backlash. Meanwhile, third parties profit from managing 401k’s and therefore market them heavily.
The employer pays into the account at whatever rate is required to fully fund retirements. The insurance company manages those funds. If the employer goes bankrupt, the funds are not accessible by raiders/PE firms.
A defined benefit plan is (nominally) funded by the employer with little or no input from the employee at time of investment or distribution.
A 401k is funded by the employee, with the employee managing contribution level, fund investment, and eventually distributions.
They're only the same, if by same you mean "retirement plans". The details are substantially different.
The only bit that's different is the self-management of assets, of which many companies are happy to do, increasingly for lower and lower fees. 0.2-0.3% being common which I bet goes toe-to-toe with good pension managers.
They really aren't that different.
If the insurer can earn 6%, and takes 1% of that, then if an employer wants to offer an employee a $50k/year pension, they need to pay in $1M before the employee's retirement to fully fund it. Over an expected 40-year career, if that employee was basically making $50k/year in take-home pay the whole time, adjusted for inflation, the pension cost would add $25k/year.
Actually, the cost to fund it would be a bit less, as the pension usually ends when the pensioner and their spouse die, so not a true perpetuity. The insurer calculates the expected time from retirement to death, and discounts the up-front cost by the current value of all those payments that won't be made after the beneficiaries die. This works out better the more pensioners can be averaged out in a big pool, which is why big insurers have an advantage in offering these sorts of financial products.
But no matter how you slice it, defined-benefit plans, if fully funded by incremental contributions with each paycheck, add significantly to labor costs, especially when the insurers can't get good investment returns. The lower the return, the more the plan costs. And the higher the return, the more the insurer tends to take for itself.
The 401(k) reduces the pension cost to the employer by capping it at a lower percentage of employee take-home pay, and furthermore dumping all the market risk onto them.
Completely different. Defined benefit has always been better for the laborer, insofar as the company can keep its promises. Defined contribution is better in cases where the employer is untrustworthy or the employee can invest wisely such that they can get the same returns as the insurer, but without taking a cut off the top--as one might get with no-fee, broad-market index funds.
Through it all, the MBAs, the corporate raiders, the bankers would say (and still say) they're just improving the efficiency of these companies.
If it gets wiped out, what happens to those people? Getting by on social help, food stamps and super basic healthcare through rest of their lives?
And "super basic healthcare" might actually be overstating the case.
(Although I just looked, and apparently Maersk's move was specific to a UK division; perhaps this is another case where UK law sits halfway between the US and Europe? https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/2831055/...)
It's certainly not common, and rules were immediately changed to prevent this from happening again.
The employer doesn't have access to it unless it's the pension of the single owner of the company. In that case: it's your money, and you can fuck it up if you like. But allowing other people to fuck up your pension is considered to be a terrible idea.
There are a lot of reasons for that switch: it saves on the administrative headaches of having pensions from several companies, it encourages private retirement savings (because it's "matching"), it saves companies money (because many people don't contribute), and it lets companies keep predictable finances (because it's an investment paid up front, not a lifetime or fixed-dollar obligation). But on the employee side, a lot of the reason people with bargaining power accept it is that they trust 401k funds to stay safe (except from stock market crashes), and don't trust companies to fulfill pension obligations.
The downside, as with healthcare and many other things in the US, is that when "good" jobs circumvent the problem, it takes away most of the social pressure to actually solve it for everyone.
It's still not perfect; stock market drops and sudden increases in life expectancy can mean a pension fund won't be fully able to cover its obligations. This happened after the 2008 recession, so new laws demand that the funds need to aim for more leeway in their funding.
Of course that means that with a good economy, the fund may end up with a lot of money it's not obligated to pay. For this reason there's a movement to give people a larger share of this risk, both on the beneficial end (when the economy grows more than expected), and effect of economic downturns (which is going to suck for people who retire during an economic downturn).
This is actually what my pension does: I have a special kind of pension fund for self-employed freelancers where I seem to own the money in the fund and carry its risks, whereas normally it's the pension that owns the money and the risk. I'm not entirely sure how that works tax-wise, because it is still tax-deductible as far as I know. But if the investments do well, I get more money, and nobody's bankruptcy can cost me my money, which might still be a theoretical (though not actual) risk for a standard pension fund.
But anyway, that's the name of the game. Take on a lot of debt, stuff that debt into your pension, go bankrupt, company is restructured without pension debt. There is also the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation, so this corporate debt is shift to the tax payer.
It's corruption that knows no bounds in the USA. Both major political parties are guilty, we have to dismantle the federal monster, it's the only way forward.
That allowed Walmart to gobble up the best of those farms (30 something farms between Indiana and Michigan), for cheaper. Given that they're processing, bottling, and distributing it to their own stores let's them sell it cheaper too, which then makes companies like Dean Foods lost contracts and now suddenly have pretty stiff competition.
Walmart didn't replace all of those contracts Dean cancelled (and I imagine other processors/distributors too) which really hurts the small guys that have 50, 100, 200 cows.
Keep in mind a cow is only good for 6-7 gallons a day, so these smaller farms just aren't worth it for a massive company like Walmart. Within 2 hours or so of the plant they're servicing close to a thousand stores (if not more once you include the grocery-only ones) so those smaller farms basically end up screwed with no one to sell that milk to.
It's not like you can just go "ok we'll let's butcher some of those cows and make some money while we figure something else out" either because, dairy cows are generally older and only good for ground beef and really cheap cuts. Even with a beef cow you're only going to get $700 or so.
At 25lbs~ of dry weight food a day per cow, you might get a little over a year of hay for one dairy cow sold for ground beef - basically those contracts getting cancelled just kill the small dairy farmers.
http://www.fmpc.uconn.edu/research/milk/conference/Criner.pd...
A link about the margins implies that may be technically untrue but I don’t know enough about the grocery business to say.
I wonder if this is why they always put it in the back of the store? That way you have to walk through a vast array of higher margin things that you might suddenly decide you need on the way to and from picking up a gallon of milk.
That and using stacks of items as road blocks in the aisles to slow me down in front of higher-margin items. They don't need roadblocks with my pokey-shopping neighbors who stand in the middle of the aisle and stare at the two boxes of white-label pasta in each hand, attempting to calculate in their heads which one is the cheapest per noodle (my dad and grandmother being chief offenders here) all the while completely oblivious to my nasty glares because I just want to get past them so I can get to the sauce and move on.
And in a store where the cases are stocked from the front, they need to be up against some wall so that they have access to electrical outlets (and maybe drainage for the compressors, depending on the nature of the case).
~20 year ago I heard about stores putting milk up front for those who just wanted milk quick. If you looked though the milk in front was more expensive (different bar code) than the milk in back. This hints that getting people to the back is part of the reason. I haven't seen milk near the front of a grocery store in a long time though (I don't know why).
They are adding extra concentrate to the milk. That's why it is 12 grams of protein per cup instead of 8 grams as it comes from a cow's udder or 2.5 as it comes from a human breast.
The entire system is currently pretty strange. Even family farms wind up feeding into corporate wholesale conglomerates. So the "small farms" that are non economic wind up supplying the corporations who pasteurize, package, process, and market the milk for retail both as milk and as other finished products. The corporations that can bear the regulatory and other costs wind up profiting from the farmers who are indentured to the government. They may not be literally indentured but it's a good metaphor for the relationship. They get bottom price milk from subsidized producers while keeping the retail profits.
Grocery stores have tons and tons of loss leaders. Anything perishable unless it is premium priced is probably going to lose money. Dealing with low priced perishable, refrigerated, fragile, leaky products is really tough. The profits are in dry goods, drugs, supplements, and prepared foods.
It's a shame that milk farmers got to bail out without being held responsible. The fast growth in alternative milk was driven by bad practices by the dairy industry, and when unethical behavior is driven by shareholder expectations, it only gets worse.
We need to stop supporting in and investing in companies that poison food supplies, otherwise we're literally suffering for the profit growth that that creates.
Some of these companies troubles also smell badly of PE shenanigans with over leveraged debt deals and other PE card tricks.
As someone else said, the unwinding of large consolidated food companies is largely a good thing.
Now that I telecommute, it's very hard for me to keep milk around for just coffee. Non-dairy milk keeps better in the refrigerator.
(But, when I'm at a coffee shop or in an office, I use real milk. It moves fast enough that it won't go bad.)
The point is, the struggles of the dairy industry are entirely their own making. They ignored the potential for diversification, with loads of family farms going out of business because they wouldn't move beyond fluid milk -- same concepts of value-add and vertical integration exist in dairy just like in other businesses. Before Chobani, good luck finding "greek" yogurt. After Chobani, good luck finding anything not "greek" yogurt. But where's the Quark? Where's the Creme Fraiche? Where's the "real" greek yogurt made with sheep milk? Dairies thought they could keep producing sub-standard Holstein water and didn't need to actually think like competitive businesses.
AZ: https://www.danzeisendairy.com/ WA: https://www.twinbrookcreamery.com/
To me, this (the unwinding of the large consolidated food companies) is largely a good thing.
Apart from humans, do any other species drink milk from another species?
If you think too hard about any kind of food, it can start to get weird.
Like coffee. You're taking the fruit of some tropical plant, ripping off the berry-flesh part that it wants mammals to eat, taking the seed that it wants those mammals to poop out somewhere else, killing it with heat to produce different flavor molecules, crushing it to powder, then passing hot water or steam through the powder to leach out those flavor molecules, including the molecules that the plant uses as a defense against improper eating. On top of that, adding things like the fat skimmed off the mammary secretions of other species, highly processed molecules from a temperate grass modified to produce gigantic seeds full of starch, and crystals from the juice of pulverized stems of tropical grass. This is poured into a vessel formed from huge trees pulverized down to loose cellulose fibers and molecules created using organic reactions from crude petroleum, or maybe just those organic polymers, puffed up with air.
It could be all that insane-sounding stuff, or it could just be a cup of coffee.
It is sort of cool that humans can't digest grass, but they grow grass anyway, so they can feed it to animals that can digest grass and then turn it into proteins and nutrients that humans can harvest from the animal without killing it, and which is tastier and more nutritious than raw grass juice.
Out of curiosity, how much is a US dairy farmer paid for a gallon of milk?
> "In 2016, Canadian farmers received an average price of C$0.79 a litre for milk, compared with C$0.49 on average for US farmers."
So it appears that US farmers are paid roughly the same or slightly more than their European counterparts.
I wonder about that. Has anyone studied this? In general, I mean.
Sure, the retail sticker price is higher. But in my tax payer role, I also pay. If the government impairs the Freedom Markets™ with quotas and price supports, is society paying more or less over the long term? Factoring in bankruptcies, asset bubbles, crashes, unemployment, and so forth.
(Asked as someone who despises how the USA does ag subsidies.)
It's a tough thing arguing the overall a system is cheaper when my apparent cost is going up. Like the single payer debate in the USA. It seems like a no brainer to prefer a tax burden which is lower than my (and my employer's) health insurance premium.
But the optics suck, right? People will go out of their way to avoid taxes.
Unfortunately, our current leadership are idiots and prefer to hand over blank checks to companies to keep them going.
https://www.npr.org/2018/08/28/642525831/agriculture-dept-wi...
Recently went to a plant-based pizza place. (Unknowingly.) Pizza comes out. It's a white pizza. Cashew cheese all over it.
Biting into what you think is cheese and getting cashew is disgusting. Biting into a cashew, sage and roasted pepper flatbread is quite nice.
The language around substitutes likely needs to evolve for mass adoption. (That or make it literally unrecognisably similar, e.g. what Impossible and Beyond Meat are trying to do, at which point one likely surrenders many health benefits.)
Mind sharing the name? I'm out there in a few weeks.
Saying "vegan X" for a complex vegan recipe intended to approach the experience of eating X seems like a naming failure when considering the sometimes heroic effort that went into researching the recipe.
Calling it "vegan cheese" is thus doubly unsuitable, as it disappoints everyone expecting something like real cheese, and denies the vegan innovator a distinctive, intrinsically vegan name for the creation.
Veganism should really be appealing for vegans first, and then the masses will appropriate from that culture whatever foods they like best from it. A "mac and vegan cheese" will never be able to outcompete mac and genuine cheese among the people who don't really care all that much if dairy cows are exploited or unhappy. But a "macaroni and cashew-butter sauce" might be fine if I'm not really in the mood for real cheese, or want to try something different.
I'm perfectly willing to try original vegan foods, but when they go head-to-head with vegan imitation against non-vegan genuine, I will choose the genuine food most of the time.
Here are my kids making vegan mac and cheese.
Dairy milk is not nutritionally necessary in any age cohort. If you enjoy it, that's fine of course, but it isn't required if you don't.
(Ref: 'Little Britain') https://youtu.be/FmD2Y6WxpIw?t=61
Increase might be a better word than improve. Number of "diagnosed" cases might have gone up, but I'd argue accuracy of diagnosis has gotten much much worse.
There was a recent study showing only about 1 in 10 people who claimed to be allergic to antibiotics actually had any allergic or other negative response to them.
https://www.pharmaceutical-journal.com/learning/learning-art...?
It's fine to research and make decisions about your diet which are in line with your own understanding, philosophy, and dietary requirements. Please don't pretend that your views on this are particularly useful for others.
Also, there's a fairly foolproof test for lactose intolerance.
Almost no infants are lactose intolerant, for obvious evolutionary reasons (mother's milk is full of lactose).
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/lactose-intol...
> Milk contains a type of sugar called lactose, which is distinct from the sugars found in fruit and other sweet foods. When we are babies, our bodies make a special enzyme called lactase that allows us to digest the lactose in our mother’s milk. But after we are weaned in early childhood, for many people this stops. Without lactase, we cannot properly digest the lactose in milk. As a result, if an adult drinks a lot of milk they may experience flatulence, painful cramps and even diarrhoea. (It’s worth noting that in other mammals, there aren’t any lactase-persistent adults – adult cows don’t have active lactase, and neither do cats or dogs, for example).
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190218-when-did-humans-...
Adult cats are generally lactose intolerant[0].
0: https://www.prestigeanimalhospital.com/services/cats/blog/wh...
Note, adult mammals. Drinking milk as a baby is literally the definition of mammal. Even the platypus, which lays eggs and lacks teats, counts as mammal because they still produce milk to feed their children.
Infant mammals. Adults consuming the milk of another species is recent. (About 10,000 years in humans.)
We have mixed evidence for the benefits of milk. It was a rich source of calories when those were scarce. Today, it might promote obesity. And good advice for some is bad advice for others. For example, milk boosts iron at the expense of vitamin D; that makes it favorable for light-skinned people at high latitudes [1].
Milk's branding as a superfood essential for kids is a product of post-war propaganda [2]. (TL; DR The U.S. government boosted dairy demand to feed soldiers. After the war, that production was threatened. So civilian demand was boosted.)
[1] https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/131/1/e144
production was threatened. So civilian demand was boosted.
There was wartime demand. Dairy farmers invested to meet it. War ends. Demand goes down. That capital must now be written off, re-purposed, or the demand re-started. We chose the last option.
Production as in productive capital or productive potential.
So show a dairy industry advertisement, and show that milk is actually better than THAT. :)
Most humans can't digest lactose after infancy [1].
For those who can, we have limited research around the quantity in and frequency with which their ancestors consumed whole milk. Comparisons to modern milk, produced by stressed-out cows bred for volume and fed god-knows-what, are tenuous.
Most humans can't digest lactose after infancy [1].
"Reduced ability" != "Can't"
Here (Europe) most can. So it's normal to digest lactose here. In other words, yes percentage wise you are correct. But is's not equally distributed.
Even those who are included in "lactose intolerant" populations actually have no trouble chugging a huge glass of milk everyday along with some cheese and yogurt. Intolerance charts like you'd find on Wikipedia would lead you to suggest east Asians can't consume milk at all without discomfort, yet yogurt for breakfast, milk during lunch, a milk tea before dinner and ice cream after isn't even the slightest bit uncommon and causes no trouble for most people.
That some people can consume liters a day (or gallons, for those trying to gain muscle fast) seems to indicate that some people evolved to be fine with dairy.
lol at this ridiculous comment. Present the evidence please.
How many millions of years do you think mammals have been drinking milk for?
This doesn’t mean consuming a moderate amount of milk is somehow unhealthy.
drinking your own species milk is very different from drinking another mammals milk. humans didn't start drinking /eating dairy until very recently in the last couple 100K years.
Who is Dr Miller. Does he present his research in medical journals, or just on YouTube? Got a link to a research paper? "Look it up on YouTube" isn't a valid response when someone asks for proof of something...
> " Also, there's the China study..."
China's a big place. Lots of studies going on, I'd imagine. Again - got a link to a research paper?
How about this: https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/causes-of-canc...
"Milk and dairy are good sources of calcium and protein which are needed as part of a healthy, balanced diet. Calcium is important for teeth and bone health.
Studies looking into the link between cancer and dairy products have not given clear results. There is evidence that dairy products could reduce the risk of bowel cancer, but we cannot say for sure that this is the case. There is no strong evidence linking dairy products to any other types of cancer. We need further research to find out more about the links between dairy products and cancer risk."
This will shock you, but It's a fact that no animal produces it's own protein. Protein gets produced in Plants, that's where it comes from. Animals get their protein from plants. If you get it from a cow through milk or eating the cow meat, your just eating 2nd hand protein. Look at all the strongest and biggest animals in the world: Apes, Gorillas, Cows, Elephants, Rhinos they all eat plants and get nearly all their protein from plants.
Milk is actually terrible for your bones. There are many studies showing that it is linked to increased bone fractures in elderly people and also linked to increased cardiovascular risk.
I know this all sounds shocking, but if you want to know the truth, you should watch "Forks over knives" or watch "What the health". both can be found on netflix.