Government Cheese...

"...and living in a van down by the River!"

Interesting article in the Times this weekend, which sheds some light but also brings up a lot of questions. 

To summarize: The government heavily subsidizes our dairy industry.  The end result being that the government ends up owning a lot of cheese.  A lot.  As in hundreds of millions of pounds of cheese.  Naturally the government can only have so many Taco Tuesdays, and so they need to find a way to get rid of all of this extra milk and cheese that they own.

To help in this process, the government formed an agency called Dairy Management, which sounds like a CIA front company if I ever heard one.  Dairy Management is funded mostly by fees on dairy producers, with a small portion of its budget coming from taxes.  But in reality, all of this money is tax money, since the dairy farmers are paying back a portion of their government subsidies.  DM's job is to promote the consumption of milk products, especially cheese.  To do this, they have worked and continue to work with fast food companies to develop and promote new products with more cheese content.

“More cheese on pizza equals more cheese sales,” Mr. Gallagher, the Dairy Management chief executive, wrote in a guest column in a trade publication last year. “In fact, if every pizza included one more ounce of cheese, we would sell an additional 250 million pounds of cheese annually.”

More cheese means more cheese. Got it.

The article goes on to describe how DM used their stunning grasp of cheese economics to help Dominoes develop a better pizza which was enjoyed more by customers and thus helped their sales.  And by "better" pizza they mean "they put a whole lot more cheese on top".

Anyone who knows anything about nutrition knows that cheese is high in deliciousness but low in health value. It tends to be high in calories, fat, and saturated fat, which is why people love it so much. But these pro-cheese efforts come in direct conflict with other government efforts to get people to eat a healthier diet, one which is lower in saturated fat and, by extension, contains less cheese. That's punchline to this article, as it points out the conflict here between different government agencies.

I like this article overall, and I think its the type of investigative news we need more of.  My only objection is the way the story is framed overall.  The writer frames it as a negative case of "government vs. government", which of course is true, but in reality its not as crazy or idiotic as its made out to be.  There are legitimate competing interests here, public health vs. the dairy industry, and both have been successful in getting their voices heard by the government.  Dairy Management exists because the Dairy industry has been able to put political and financial pressure on the government to create a subsidy regime.  The public health concerns exist because another part of the citizenry has pressured the government to try and promote healthy eating.  The government has responded to the demands of its constituencies, which is often a complicated and contradictory.

I would have preferred the author to talk more about the driving force in all this: the huge subsidies given to the dairy industry and their effects.  The really root of the problem and what to be done with it is barely discussed. Maybe this is a realistic view to take since changing the status quo would be so difficult, if not impossible, but I think it would be more productive to focus on solving the larger problem instead of putting all the emphasis on the conflicts of interest.  I think most Americans, myself included, can probably agree that its a good thing in theory to have a strong dairy industry.  But I think we can also agree that when paying out enormous subsidies actually results in the American diet becoming less healthy, this is a bad thing.  I'm not sure exactly where the balance should be, but I think that these subsidy efforts need to be pared back or eliminated.

There are some other, more disturbing parts of the article.  They discuss possible faked or fudged scientific research meant to promote dairy foods as health foods, and possible retribution against researchers who refused to shape their findings in this way.  If true this would be far worse in my mind than the idea of promoting putting more cheese on a pizza.  Its one think to push a product and let the free market decide (though in this case I doubt you could call it a true free market), its another thing to poison the well of information while people are making those decisions.

One thing that really struck me that wasn't talked about in the article: Just how freaking dumb is Dominoes?  They knew their pizzas sucked.  They wanted to sell more pizzas.  Yet it took a government agency to clue them into the simple idea of adding more cheese.  How was this such a big mystery?  I put cheese on lots of stuff, because its great and it makes just about everything better.  Its not that complicated:

1) People like cheese
2) Add more cheese
3) Profit

Dominoes isn't the only fast food company which has made use of Dairy Management in order to increase their sales.  Pizza Hut's idea to put cheese directly into the crust was a DM innovation, as was their "Summer of Cheese" marketing campaign.  Which is just baffling to me.  For all we here about the innovative power of the private sector and the idiocy of the government, why does it take a government agency with an agenda to clue in the private sector on the basics their own business?

I can't wait till next week when there will be an article about how Pork Management caused a revolutionary breakthrough when they clued in food providers that people really like bacon.