Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

im not convinced this is an entirely bad thing as it seems the US has had a glut of dairy for quite a while. Here in the United States, we put cheese on everything and its slowly killing us. We largely started this trend when the USDA began eschewing whole milk in favour of skim. As a result, dairy farms simply redirected their waste fats to the production of cheese and cheese-like products instead of limiting their production as a whole. Efforts to tackle childhood obesity have zeroed in on things like sugary chocolate milk and unhealthy dairy products (aerosolized cheese and processed cheeses in general) to quantifiable success.

I also question whether the newspaper for the largest dairy producing state in the US is capable of covering the issue without bias. "fake milk" and "fancy water" are a few key phrases that concern me. The coverage also seems to try to have its cake and eat it too...highlighting the urgent need for Latino workers (a critical requirement almost exclusive to industrial farming) while bemoaning the struggles of small farms as "the industry" which is actually in turmoil.

Disclosure: I am a vegetarian, and derive a nontrivial amount of calories from dairy.

A couple of years back I had a rather abrupt dietary change due to some health issues. One of the key parts was the total elimination of cheese from my diet. I began to say to myself, "Props to those National Dairy Council guys," because cheese was everywhere I looked. It is kind of impressive, really.

I am not against labels like "fake milk." If anything, I find myself increasingly annoyed by products that are not what they actually claim to be: silk that is not really silk, milk that is not actually milk. I'm quite okay with linguistic prescriptivism when it comes to product names.

> I am not against labels like "fake milk."

I agree, anything other than full fat human milk that is non-homogenized and unpasteurized, with no additives (vitamins or otherwise) should be labelled fake milk.

Call me an anarchist, but as long as it comes from a mammal I have no problem with it being labeled "milk".

I detect an anti-marsupial bias.

Marsupials are mammals.

Me and my wife were actually joking the other day that at some point there's going to be a human milk industry. We envisioned something similar to the places you can go to sell your blood plasma.

There already is a network of sorts where lactating moms will donate milk to hospitals and mothers that can't nurse for whatever reason. [1]

[1] https://uichildrens.org/mothers-milk-bank-iowa

There was that human-milk ice cream in the UK around 2011:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_Gaga

I don't know how well that turned out.

I am anecdotally aware that human milk for infants goes for $5/oz (which seems crazy when you tally up how much milk an infant can drink in a day).

Yep. Labeling things milk that resemble milk is not a recent trend and I think it's a shallow excuse for people to attack non-dairy milk. Those people have no problem with milk of magnesia, milkweed, or milk thistle.

Is coconut milk OK?

As a product, I am sure it is useful or tasty or whatnot, but I don't think it is milk.

Is it labeled as milk? I always see coconut water, which is closer to the reality of coconut juice

Yes. Coconut milk is both the water and coconut oil/flesh. Common for cooking.

That is a different product. coconut milk is thick, creamy, fatty and used in Thai cooking. I know no other word for it.

It's also worth mentioning that the US dairy industry in aggregate operates at a ~40% net loss [0, p9], and Wisconsin dairy farms have collectively lost money every year since at least 2005 [0, p16], before accounting for subsidies. US taxpayers are paying for all of the health consequences you mentioned.

Disclosure: I am vegan. Also, I grew up on a farm in Wisconsin, and I derived a nontrivial amount of calories from dairy throughout my childhood and early adulthood.

[0] http://www.greyclark.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/US-Subsi...

In the 50s the US held huge stocks of "surplus cheese" that was bought up by the USDA price support programs. When it was close to going bad, it was shipped in large blocks to schools, where it was made into some of the nastiest mac-and-cheese on record. (Not sure whether the mac was made from surplus wheat.)

But government policy makes sense when you consider that a prime objective of government is to ensure an abundance of cheap food to feed the population. Shortages result in rapidly increasing prices, discontent among the poor, and then to demonstrations, riots, and general disorder.

Shortages in production can be widespread and severe. Examples include the Rocky Mountain locust plagues of the 1870s, the 1930s droughts of the Dust Bowl, and the current shortage of pork in China due to Swine Flu. Greening disease is threatening the Florida citrus industry. UG99 stem rust is a threat to wheat.

Therefore, government policy must be to encourage significant overproduction of food in normal times, with the surplus being either exported, eaten, or discarded.

It's important for people to acknowledge this. Governments have a strong incentive to ensure food is cheap because starving citizens revolt.

Here in the United States, we put cheese on everything and it's slowly killing us.

That's the result of frantic efforts by the dairy industry and their enablers at the USDA.[1] The USDA is buying up cheddar cheese, even.[2] They try to dump it on school lunches.

The "cheese with everything" push has reached the point that over half the items on the Dunkin' Donuts menu now contain cheese, and the brand is renaming itself "Dunkin".

Talk about entitled welfare queens...

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2010/11/q-and-a-w... [2] https://www.ams.usda.gov/content/usda-cheddar-cheese-purchas...

You seem to think that dairy is going away or something. That's not what's happening. Yes, dairy consumption is trending down a bit for various reasons, but hasn't changed a great deal.

What has changed is the consolidation of dairy herds into mega farms. Small and medium farms go bust while the mega farms increase their herd size (the overall milk production doesn't change a great deal).

So dairy will still be around, but as current trends continue, the milk will come from a Wal-Mart megafarm with requisite massive manure lagoons and high capacity water pumps, trucked by a Wal-Mart truck to a Wal-Mart creamery, and sent to a Wal-Mart distribution center and then Wal-Mart store for purchase. Instead of the traditional way of coming from independently-owned dairy farms, processed by cooperative creameries, etc.

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