Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine - Sawbones: Milk, Part 2 - Government Cheese

Episode Date: April 28, 2026

Are you ready to lose your mind about dairy and look at your charcuterie board differently? Justin tells Dr. Sydnee all about the inflated demand for milk, how good for you dairy actually is, and how the United States came to have a giant bunker of cheese in Missouri Music: "Medicines" by The Taxpayers https://taxpayers.bandcamp.com/ Marsha P. Johnson Institute: https://marshap.org/ Happy MaxFunDrive! Right now is the best time to start a membership to support your favorite shows. Learn more and join at https://maximumfun.org/joinsawbones

Sawbones is a show about medical history, and nothing the hosts say should be taken as medical advice or opinion. It's for fun. Can't you just have fun for an hour and not try to diagnose your mystery boil? We think you've earned it. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy a moment of distraction from that weird growth. You're worth it. Hello, everybody. Welcome to Sawbones, Amarital Tour, Miss Guy Medicine.

I'm your co-host, Justin McElroy. I'm Sydney Macroix. There's no time to waste, Sydney, because the Max Fun Drive is coming around the bend into its final week. It's our last chance for us to ask people, hey, will you support us? Yes. Do you like what we do? Yeah, if you like the stuff we make, not just on Sawbones, on our whole network. Yeah.

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Lactose. Yeah, not just milk, but we did talk a lot about it. Not lactose intolerance. What are we calling it now? Lactase persistence. Lactase persistence. Yes. You have the enzyme to break down lactose.

into adulthood, which the majority of humans on Earth do not, which means you can tolerate milk. Because as a reminder, the majority of humans on Earth do not have the enzyme as adults to break down milk. Okay. I'm going to tell you about our history with milk. And this is not going to be like a normal sawbones history because it is honestly, it's a wild story, Sydney. I know a lot of sawbones stories are wild, but this one, it just doesn't make a lot of sense. So let me back up, okay? So you could start a lot of places with this history, but I want to talk about the DMI,

because I think the DMI is really fascinating. And what is the DMI now? The DMI is the Dairy Management Incorporated, but it goes way back. Okay, so it would take you back to 1915 around there, okay? So there's a public health crisis because we had an outbreak of foot and mouth disease. And everybody's freaking out about dairy, right? Right. Nobody wants to drink dairy.

Nobody's freaked out about it. Could I say this is, I think we should clarify. I asked the question in our first part, why did humans drink milk if most of them were intolerant? I think you're asking the question, why do humans continue to drink milk and why is it so important? I think we're still answering this question. We're still answering this question, right?

We're answering it from another perspective, right? Like, this is another spin on why do humans drink so much milk? Imagine, dear listener, your role in this is, you have a role in this chain, and it is milk consumer. And that is really the only role you play in this grand chain here, right? You have to understand you're just a part of the wheel of the Great Wheel of Milk. So you're taking us back to hand foot and mouth disease outbreak.

When are we? It's footmouth disease. It's 1915. And there's this. People don't like dairy. People don't want to get dairy. So we have the formation of the National Dairy Council. And it is in the NDC's language to protect the public's good image of dairy.

So the first thing that the NDC puts out is a, a, a, a, parent. called milk the necessary food for growth in health. Now, why do they need people to drink dairy? Like, who is paying for this? The National Dairy Council was founded by dairy farmers and processors. So this is not a government thing. This is a lobbying organization, right, in much the same way that a lot of lobbies, you know, you see like, what's a good example, beef.

It's what's for dinner, right? So that's the beef people. And once you eat beef, pork, the other. white meat. Uh-oh, there's a pig guys. Would you eat pigs? That's a deal. And it's like any other lobby. I think it's important to note that while whatever they're lobbying for could be

good, bad, or indifferent, but their motivations are that they want to sell dairy products. Yes, but this is the NDC. This is not the DMI. The DMI is a different beast. The NDC is educating people. Hey, milk's great. You know, you got to get out there.

We're wild for milk. On the West Coast, the Dairy Council out there in California, a similar organization, just to give you an idea of what they're doing, they had a custom truck that Derryman Clarence Michael began driving around with a live cow on board.

He drove around to Los Angeles area schools and this mobile dairy classroom where he would show people, this is how we get milk. It still goes on today. They're still touring around, I guess, and showing people how the live cow gets milk.

Do they milk it right there? I assume, yes. And then hand the milk to the children? Drink the raw milk child. See, that's well now that you can do that these days. So this is a, this is an educational outreach, right? That's like, hey, milk is great and you should all be into milk. One of the biggest proponents of this was a chemist named Elmer McCollum.

And Elmer McCollum is a nutritionist who, like a lot of people is just kind of playing with half the information. You know what I mean? He's very into nutrition, but like literally everybody else in his time. period, he doesn't have a full understanding of it, right? Which is true for our time period now, I would say. When McCollum's mother became pregnant, he fell ill with scurvy. Okay. She weaned him on mashed potatoes and boiled milk, and he was slowly dying of scurvy.

And then one day, this is the anecdote, okay? One day while his mother was peeling apples, McCollum started to see. suck on the peals. On the following day, he felt a little better. She fed him more apple skins. When spring came, she gave him other fruits and vegetables. And he completely recovered from scurvy, but his teeth caused him trouble for the rest of his life. Is there a lot of vitamin C and apple peels? I don't know, man. This is the story. He coined these protective foods, okay? And in McCollum's figuring dairy was our all around best food. And throughout this like work that he's pushing out, milk consumption goes up.

And people are like, I guess milk's really important. McCollum also tries to tie. And so we see the first roots of deficiencies that are being drawn in populations. One of McCollum's foundational principles was that. There is not dairy in the typical Chinese diet and the national character, whatever that means, of China suffers for it. Now it's interesting. No, no, it's interesting. Yes, right.

Agreed. But I read an article by a Chinese historian who said that this idea actually got some traction in reformist Chinese circles and actually produced an increase in milk consumption in China to where it's now. like a lot, like a lot, lot, lot more common. When COVID was happening, it was a huge deal that so many of the cows had COVID. Like, there is a big deal over there at this point. And it is largely from what this historian was saying, you know, prompted by this push. Which is interesting, considering from what we learned in the last episode, statistically, I would assume many Chinese people, if not most, cannot break down lactose. That's really, really so important, Sid.

By the way, apple peels are a great source of vitamin. see. There you go. Thank you, Elmer. I just found this out. I didn't know specifically the peel is a better source than the flesh. So that's about education, but that is also important because you can start to see how this is the basis of our idea that milk is like pure and natural because it's very important for them to get that idea across. Okay. Because there's this fear about the disease, right? So there's a push to say milk is clean and pure and good for you. and it's a superfood, right? So to not drink milk becomes,

what's the alternative, right? Impure. Yeah, and unhealthy. Now, are we pre-pesturization still at this point? I'm not going to talk about pasteurization. That's about health. I'm not talking about health. I'm talking about marking.

So the problem becomes in 19, the 19th, listen, if you want answers about pasteurization, you should have talked to Sydney. She's kind of the pasteurization expert. 1920. Are we pre-1920? Still? Yeah.

Okay. Well, then there were pre-pasturization. Okay. That's about, that was about our cut, not all milk was not pasteurized after 1920, but that's when we, this is when things take off. Okay. Do you know about government cheese? From the West Wing. Okay. So you're talking about the big block of cheese. Yeah. No. So 1970s, we got a dairy shortage. Okay.

This is the ping pong of events. This is just like before, right, where we're something kicked off with hand, footmen. mouth disease and then, oh, no, 1970s, there's a national dairy shortage. Uh-oh. Yes. Jimmy Carter says, farmers, produce more dairy. If you produce more dairy, the U.S. will buy it. If you make too much, you can't sell it, we'll buy it. We'll be the customer.

Just don't worry about having too much. We'll buy your surplus. Okay. And do what with it? Really, really interesting questions, since, because it ended up. We had by the 80s 1.4 billion pounds of surplus cheese is actually that is there what is there now still. Where is it? Today hundreds of feet below the ground in Missouri.

No. I was kidding. It's all in one place. Yeah. It's a huge stockpile of perfectly preserved American cheese, not American cheese. I mean, it's American cheese in the sense that we bought it. So. There's a giant bunker of cheese in Missouri.

Yep. So, 1981 is the year. We have all this extra, right? John Block, who's the Secretary of Agriculture, showed up at the White House with a five-pound block of cheese. And this is a quote, told reporters, we got 60 million of these that the government owns, and it's moldy. It's deteriorating. We can't find a market for it. We can't sell it.

And we're looking to give some of it away. And that's the beginning of government cheese. Is it already moldy at this point? So, no, this is, it is molding, right? They have the cheese. They got to get rid of the cheese. So government cheese, here you can see a picture of Reagan with the big five-pound block government cheese. We're saying this out to everybody.

No one has ever looked as happy as Ronald Reagan looks holding that giant block of cheese. So we got these big block of cheese. And this is like we're shipping it out to all these different, like, it becomes a huge source of us sending food to different communities that are. our online food stamps or whatever. So like government cheese becomes almost sort of iconic. But it is an it is an offshoot of the government trying to balance our dairy production and dairy consumption. So they just sent it to people for free. I've heard of government cheese, but I didn't know what that is the idea.

That is the idea. Like you just got sent a giant block of cheese. Well, I mean, it wasn't. I mean, I assume different families got different amounts. But yes, it was sent cheese from the government. stockpile and it was famously not particularly appetizing. Really? Yes.

So we don't. Cheddar? This is sharp. This is what I, American. It is referenced in Kendrick Lamar and Jay Z songs. And in 2017, Snoop Dog taught Martha Stewart how to cook it on their show. So the, when the government sees that we have too much cheese or too much dairy, they have to step in and do something.

and that is how the dairy management. Eat it. Yeah, they have to eat it all. This is how the dairy management incorporated or the DMI was founded. It was absorbed the NDC from before, the National Dairy Council, was absorbed by the DMI. And their educational curriculum was picked up by DMI. And DMI is, okay, this is wild. We've got to back up a little bit to talk about.

the dairy production stabilization act of 1983. Woo! That was the year I was born. Yes. Well, guess what happened the year you were born? What time is it? Yeah, I got time to explain this.

Nothing as important as that. Nothing as important as that. Okay. So here's the Dairy Protection Stabilization Act of 1983. Okay. Okay. What they said to anybody that wants to produce dairy in America is that per hundred weight of on commercially marketed milk. I don't know what that is. Probably 100 pounds of milk.

I don't know, 100 gallon, whatever it is. A liquid measurement. 15 cents per that, right, has to be given to the National Dairy Promotion and Research Board, which is the parent organization. That is the DMI. And the USDA oversees the National Dairy Promotion and Research Board. So this is a government agency. This is a government agency, right, that if you want to sell milk or make, if you want to make milk. You have to give this percentage of your profits. You want to make milk in America.

You have to pay some amount to the government, right? Right. The government, the National Dairy Promotion and Research Board, there are 36 members of of that board, different producers. And they are the ones that oversee these funds that get paid in by everybody who produces dairy, right? You pay into this thing. And so you have DMI. So the DMI is charged with marketing milk, with getting milk out there, with getting people excited about milk.

So the idea is that the reason, if I am somebody who sells milk, the reason I would want to do this is that I take some of my money from selling milk and give it to you. you're going to make more people buy my milk. Yes, but this is the key thing about this relationship that you have to understand for the rest of this episode to make sense. Okay. This is overseen by the federal government. Right. So there was a lawsuit, Johans v. Livestock Marketing Association 2005 that clarified this.

Supreme Court ruled that commodity checkoff advertising is, quote, government speech. So when DMI runs a campaign, like a marketing campaign, or they do a partnership with, well, when they do any of the things that we're about to talk about after this, that is the government. That is the United States government who is sending out that message. And they've declared milk a commodity in order to do that. Could they do it with other commodities? Like, can they do that with any commodity? I mean, that's an interesting question. I don't know.

They did it in 1983 because they said, listen, guys. we can't keep goofing around with this situation where you don't know how much milk to make, okay? So we're all going to work together and we're going to figure out how to balance this so we're not constantly on this up and down. And a big part of it was, okay, we have to figure out how to market this together.

So we're going to be, we're going to market it so we don't end up in the position of having to get this on the back. Does it limit the amount of dairy? Is the thought that because you have to pay some of your profits, you're also going to limit the amount of dairy available so you don't have too much? It is not about,

And it's not about control or supply. And that is so important. I didn't know if it was like a catch share kind of situation. No, no, it's not that because the, and this is the supply of the milk is is independent from that. You know what I mean? So it's like, I mean, it's not independent in that there's more, if they make more, there's more money to advertise milk.

But there's not necessarily more demand for milk, right? So like they have to create the demand for the milk. If they produce, if more milk is produced, if more milk is produced, more money is allocated to marketing milk, and thus they hope consumption increases. Which should drive production, but it sounds like it's backwards. The stat that the DMI most recently floated,

this was from Barb O'Brien, the first woman to lead the DMI, said that for each dollar invested in the fund, they're $15.60 in dairy sales are generated. This is what they claim, Which I would say. Great ROI. If that's their RRI, let's put them in charge of other stuff.

We're going to talk about the DMI and some of their fun stuff. But first, Sid, we tell us about the Max Fund Drive. Thank you. That's right. This is the time of year. Once a year, all of us on the Max Fund Network come to you and say, hey, if you are listening, then you probably enjoy what we do. I hope so. I hope that's why you're listening.

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Thank you so much. Maximumfund.org forward slash join us that address. Thank you. Thanks a lot. Okay. Sid. Yes. Are you ready to lose your mind about dairy?

I guess. We found the DMI. I already did last week, so. The DMI is the U.S. government. Okay. Do you understand this? I understand that. It's the government.

They're making us drink milk. They get money from us to make us drink milk. Okay, so the first, probably most notable that a lot of people know the DMIs work from is Got Milk. That was an ad. Actually, Rachel, we could probably play the audio of that ad. I think that's fair use. We'll listen to that. We'll come back.

Hello. Hello, for $10,000. Who shall... Hello. Excuse me? Oh, hold on. Let me get some milk. No!

I'm afraid your time is almost up. So that ad, there's a guy eating a peanut butter sandwich and he can't get the milk. And everybody knew this ad in the 90s. It was a very famous ad. Directed by, do you know this? Michael Bay. Also, interesting, the voice on the radio is Rob Paulson, who is like Yako and did, Rafael.

I didn't know that. Anyway, that was huge. They also did the milk mustache ad. Can you tell people about that? Yes. So these were print ads. And basically every celebrity who, from any realm, from sports, from music, from TV, all of your favorites of that era were doing these ads where it was just them with got milk across the top and a milk mustache. Yes.

Made the milk mustache not something to be embarrassed about, but even kind of like sexy. Yeah, like a sexy. Look at my sexy milk mustache. Yeah, kind of a sexy milk. Yeah, exactly. So that was a, that's marketing. And that was a very big campaign from like those two kind of dovetailed actually, mid-90s to mid-2000s. Think about that.

Two really big national, big, notable campaigns for milk, like iconic, both DMI, both the U.S. government trying to get you to buy more milk. But the DMI, I mean, my thought would be these, if it's a government agency, are tax dollars. But they're not because they're not. their profits from the dairy industry. Right. So it's not tax money. Right. And the more money that the, and the more dairy that the dairy industry makes, the more money the United States government has to spend to sell the dairy that it is being produced, right?

It's not our fault. It's like we have to do this. We have to. Do you understand? It's like a Brewster's millions. We know it's not. We also know that dairy farming in a lot of ways is at the scale that we're doing at, is not great for the environment. Right. But we have to sell all this milk that we have, right? So we have to keep marketing it.

But is anybody worried about that at this point? Is there, is there like a clash within the DMI? Well, no. But I mean, within this specific government agency, is there, are there people there like wringing their hands? Like, we have to stop. We don't want to do this, but we have to. Do you think there's anybody in any government agency currently in the year of Our Lord 2026 ringing their hands about any moral quantity whatsoever? Yes. All right. So some other big ones, and these are the ones that I am really excited about, fast food partnerships. Sid, do you remember when Taco Bell came out with the grilled cheese burrito? And it was a burrito that had cheese on the outside and cheese in the inside. Yes.

That was a creation of the United States government. Look, I'm not lying. This is a picture. I'm not lying. I'm not lying this time. This is a picture of a man named Mike. That says Mike of. DMI.

At Taco Bell. Taco Bell and McDonald's, the big, and they have people inside the kitchen working for them. There are DMI food scientists, researchers, nutritionists, culinary experts who work for the United States government, DMI that are inside the kitchens of Taco Bell and McDonald's. McDonald's making cheesier ways of you to consume food as the United States program to get you to eat more cheese. You know what's weird too. Not a joke. Well, and as I think about it, how many places if you get a kid's meal do they have the option of milk? Like, that's sort of the default, like with your happy meal or with whatever.

Yeah. And I will say, I mean, like even like Chipotle has milk. And I will say that like my kids, if I am serving them lunch at home, they're never drinking milk with them. their lunch? That's never, I mean, we don't even think about it. Like, there's not even the thought. Like, would you want milk with that? But the fast food restaurant's like, well, obviously with that hamburger, you're going to want to drink some milk. Right. Do you remember, Sydney, when Domino's came out and they said, listen, our pizza has sucked for a really long time. Right. But we were really sorry and we're going to do better. Well, and they did, to be fair. Domino's pizza is much better now.

They did. They did do better. Do you know how they, you know how they turn? it around. How? Well. You're probably going to say dairy. The DMI partnered with Domino's to increase the amount of cheese, 40% more cheese, as a matter of fact, on their pizza.

That's how they save the Domino's cheese pizza with a brand new recipe that had 40% more cheese. Do you think I'm on a list somewhere because I order pizza without cheese quite frequently and that there's like like the dominoes people have to call the dm i and be like we're so sorry boss it's not our fault there's just this one lady there's just this one lady who keeps ordering pizza without cheese and we're not we're not advertising that she just does it do you know um do you know why you probably know about domino's great new pizza recipe because there was a 12 million

dollar marketing campaign for the new pizza recipe. Do you know who paid for that marketing campaign? The DMI. Yeah. Yeah. It's just like, it's like, and then the sales rose by double digits. So it's like, yeah, it worked. Everybody loved it. At this same time, this is from an ex-po say that a guy named Michael Moss wrote around this time in

2010. At the same time, the USDA was At the same time, the USDA was telling Americans that they should start asking for half the cheese because the amount of cheese that we were consuming is not healthy. This is the, take a second, right? This is the USDA, which is the branch of the government that oversees the DMI. So the USDA in 2010 is simultaneously manufacturing and marketing a Domino's Pizza. with 40% more cheese while it is telling people to cut their cheese consumption in half, thereby creating, by my math, a 200% deficit in their cheese guidance, I feel. There's a 200% gap in their approach to cheese.

I mean, that just feels like it was a little bit of a sneak peek into what life in 2026 was going to constantly be like. Yeah, yeah. No, we promise we want you to get vaccinated. Are we changing all of the vaccine schedules and underfunding vaccine research? and in every other way we can, you know, hurting public confidence in vaccines. Yes, but we do want you to get vaccinated. So that's the fast food angle of it.

There's also the DMI has a program. This is my favorite. Fuel up to play 60. Fuel up with milk? That's a partnership between the NFL and the DMI. Fuel up to play 60 encourages students to consume nutrient rich, Foods. We have milk.

And cheese. Does that mean 60 minutes? What? Does that mean 60 minutes? Get at least 60 minutes of physical activity every day and eat as much cheese and ice cream as you can to power your activity? I wonder if that's a successful campaign because like looking at that logo and then fuel up to play 60, that does not sound.

I should mention there was brief congressional scrutiny about the fact that the USDA was telling people to get less cheese and more cheese. but then they kind of lost interest. America. The NDC, just part of the DMI, this is something that should probably get more attention, I think from when I was reading, this is probably more serious, but the NDC also has nutrition scientists and dietitians

and other folks, lobbyists, whose whole job is to talk to the American Academy of People, pediatrics, all the different doctor associations, to try to, the way they put it is research-based information about dairy's health benefits. So, yeah. I mean, I don't, what's weird to me is, like, what you're talking about is very similar to a lot of the way that big pharma operates. And the same entities that are currently screaming about how big pharma has misled us and we don't need medicine, food is medicine and nutrition and blah, blah, blah, are the same entities that are screaming about how we need to drink more milk.

Right. Now, what's hard about that is that we have, and you touched on this last time, but what goes uns sort of said so far with a lot of this stuff is, as you pointed out earlier, there are cultures that are better at drinking that down. Yes. Yeah. It's, do you have the enzyme lactase as an adult or not? Because if you don't, dairy is probably going to make you feel lousy

and you probably aren't going to want to drink much of it. So foisting dairy on people is, in a sense, racist. Because what you're saying is there are certain people that are going to do better with this and certain people that want. So if you're funding it in schools, for example, you're creating an imbalance right there for kids. Just to give you an example. But there's also this idea that gets tied to that where if you,

and, you know, when you're talking about outright garbage, It's always this question of like, if you take it seriously enough to engage with, then, oh, you miss the joke. A P.S. guys, it wasn't fun. If it's not funny, there's no joke. Like it, but if you take it seriously, then it's all you didn't get it. You didn't understand it. It was never serious. You know, we weren't really drinking milk as a racist protest. It was like a joke we were doing and you didn't get it. So, ha, ha, you idiot. But that is the, the basis of it goes back to that the work that Elmer did and the basic truth that there is. and cultures that are better with milk. So this idea that like if you can't drink milk, then you shouldn't be in America is an

idea that is, it becomes part of the national identity because the U.S. government has been pushing it because of this arrangement for that long. And it may have started without those, like, without any sort of negative thoughts behind it. But like, when you institutionalize a substance in your government DNA for that long, there are going to be repercussions. Yes. Well, and what it makes me think is like, obviously the main driver here is we're keeping the dairy industry profitable. And it's the machines feeding itself. And that from an economic standpoint, I see why the government would be interested in doing that. But the reason it finds such fertile ground for its messaging is its ties to white supremacy. Not consciously. I'm not saying everybody who's ever told their kids to drink milk is thinking, I'm racist. I want my kid to drink milk. But that is, that's the underpinnings that they are, that they are using. I mean, that make it successful. That's why the campaigns are successful.

Yeah. I read actually, this is interesting from a piece that was in the New York Times in 2018 that said that black taste persistent actually arose in independently in East African hurting communities. So it's not just a, while it is, culturally more, you know, white people have this enzyme. There's nothing about whiteness specifically that would, you know, include. No, it's just where the mutation first arose and then that population continued to spread it. And there's a lot of them in America. That's it.

It's worth noting, by the way, that with all this, like, attachment of milk to racism in this time period during the first Trump administration this time, DMI has not spoken out about this. So, like, this is not, the DMI has not said, like, racists are not welcome at milk. Well, who, okay, but here is, here is where the whole story gets weird for me. Yeah. So I feel like, in terms of, is milk healthy for you? And did I say this last episode? I think maybe I did.

Like, the scientific conclusion on that is, well, it's healthier than some things and it's unhealthier than others. Like, I think what I said was it's better for you than bacon, probably. but it's not as good for you as nuts. Yeah. Does it have stuff your body needs? Yes. Can you get those things elsewhere?

Yes. So is milk necessary? No. But does that mean it is inherently bad for you? No. But, I mean, the idea that we need to promote milk as like only milk can fill a certain void is a false idea. And I do think that idea has been perpetuated. I mean, as a physician, so many parents have asked me, like, when do I start giving my kid milk and how

much milk and when can I stop giving them milk? That's a question a lot. When can I stop making my kid drink milk? So obviously we have perpetuated the idea that you have to. Right. So, and we don't know how much milk is too much or whatever. So that's always been there. For a while, we were moving away from milk because there was this whole idea that dairy was inflammatory and all these wellness people were like, it's unnatural to drink milk from a cow. You're not a baby cow. So I heard all that in the wellness circles, right? Sure. And then somehow we've gotten to a place in the wellness circles where they're like, no, no, no, not only is dairy good, full fat dairy is good, straight from the freaking cow, don't pasteurize it, drink that raw,

full fat milk, like just like right out of the utter. Yeah. And that's, that's in, I mean, you're hearing that echoed not just in like the manosphere, but in like wellness circles are starting to latch on to this. I mean, I see these like carnivore diet dairy people who are the same people who were telling us to, you know, stay away from all dairy and all gluten a year ago, and now it's all different. Yeah. It's a, honey, our culture is a diaspora.

There's a lot of different ideas being bounced around. You never know who's going to be advocating for what. Did the DMI pay for the Kid Rock commercials? I don't know. Where did the money come from? I want to know who paid for Kid Rock and RFK Jr. Sitting in a hot tub together drinking milk. I want to know.

The Maha stuff gets complicated mainly because it's happening a lot more currently. But the basic structure is thus. We get to this time period where we're still trying to sell milk. We don't want to back off of selling milk because we have a lot of dairy farmers that want us to sell more milk. Right. But what's hard is a lot of the dairy farmers, the small independent dairy farmers feel that the checkoff, disproportionately benefits the large corporations. So the checkoff isn't really benefiting everybody equally,

but you're the big corporations are the ones who have lobbyists, and so the system stays the way it is, even though it's clearly dysfunctional. Right. They're still, to finish out the DMI educational aspects of it, they are to this day, like still like out there hustling. the flagship program, well, one of them is called Discover Dairy. And Discover Dairy is an upper elementary and middle school curriculum that is aligned with common core standards and has more than 52,000 classrooms enrolled.

Sidney, do you know what the name of their flagship program is? What? Adopt a cow. Go on, Sid. Well. Well. Yep. I mean, it's not, you can admit, it's not like this is the worst.

Dairy farming does not necessarily need to be, we talk about a lot of bad stuff on this show. I don't know that we need to demonize dairy farming. No, well, I don't want to do it. I don't want to demonize any farmers and dairy farmers or anyone else. I don't. I mean, because the thing is, you're just sad that your child got indoctrated by U.S. government dairy propaganda? Yes. Me too.

Yes. We brought the cow home. We brought the cow. home and didn't even get the milk for free. We took the cow to, where do we take it? We took the cow somewhere, cosi or something. We took the cow on a trip with us so that we could take pictures of our kid with the cow and then bring them back to class and be like, look, here's the cow going on adventures.

So yeah, we have done this. We participated in this propaganda. And I don't, I'm not even using propaganda in a negative way. It just is, right? It is propaganda. Yes. I think the problem is, you remember on the last episode when we both made the comment, isn't nut milk bad for the environment in some way?

Yeah. We got an email from a listener saying like, eh, it's not quite, that's kind of a misunderstanding. From me, that is not a surprise. Well, me too. I thought it was too. And it's much more nuanced. There are some areas in which, like, it uses more water. But then in terms of carbon footprint, it's not necessarily.

So, like, it's a lot more nuanced. But why do you, why did you and I both latch on to the messaging that nut milk was bad for the environment? Why did that stick in our brains? I don't know. It was probably a really useful tool to make sure we kept drinking dairy milk, wasn't it? Hmm. Oh, yes. So you got to wonder about those things.

Did you see butterboards getting their moment in the sun on TikTok with a bunch of influences? Yes, the butterboards. The butterboards. You know the... Oh, God. Cheeseboards. Charcuttery. Oh, my God.

Do you know who's responsible for butterboards? Okay, check this out. It was this big spread. Justine Doeran was the name of the influencer that kind of kicked off the whole thing. And DMI has claimed credit for the butterboard in industry press because while the original butterboard video did not include advertising disclosure was not part of her partnership, technically the chef posted a dairy management ad two days before her viral post and it was part of the industry group's dairy dream team of paid influencers.

So DMI has a paid dream team of influencers that includes Sydney. Is that Mr. Bees? That's Mr. Bees. If you see Mr. Beast visit a dairy farm, that was paid for by a DMI. Mr. Beast. Partnership with DMI. How could you? My standards for you were so high.

My bar for Mr. Beast was so high. This is great. And I really want to read this directly from Grist because I think it's great. It is perhaps dairy promoter's biggest coup of last year. The limited run McDonald's Grimmishake went viral after. TikTok users began crafting miniature horror films featuring the bright purple beverage. Dairy management has a longstanding partnership with McDonald's beginning in 2009. It placed two dairy scientists at the fast food chain to help incorporate more dairy into the menu.

Less than a decade later, four and five McDonald's menu items contained dairy. According to a dairy management board member, dairy management has even funded research to help improve McDonald's notoriously glitchy milkshake machines. So I fell into that trap too. I made a grimace shake video. Mm-hmm. It's all U.S. propaganda. It's all propaganda.

It's all propaganda. But see, I mean, there's more hypocrisy in the, with the current HHS than we could even begin to cover on this show. And we talk about it a lot. But the idea that somebody like RFK Jr. is head of the Maha movement, who walks around talking about the influence of big pharma and big medicine in the government and how we've tricked people and lied to people and paid people to make them. them, you know, get a vaccine that will save their life. Evil trick. But at the same time, he will tout dairy and have that and like the level of influence that the dairy industry has in government and then in all of these other ways through

government to keep making us eat and drink more dairy. And he has no accountability for that. Yeah, for instance, they hired Aubrey Plaza to sell wood milk in an ad. that lampooned milk alternatives. And I didn't know she did that. Yeah, wood milk. And then this one, they did a campaign with Brian Bumgarner, who was Kevin on the office. And the tagline of that one was, and I really never doubt what you love.

Surprisingly grim, I know. So that's the fluid milk folks. Is that Trump, 2028? I know, right? So they're still trying to get the word out there. The thing with the Maha stuff, there was definitely a push for raw milk that was being led by a bunch of Maha type people. And then that kind of fell off. There was not the, I don't think the appetite was there, if you'll pardon the pun, for raw milk.

But there is this. Oh, it is in West Virginia, though. So there is this, well, yeah, there's this recirculation of these ideas that white milk, whiteness, smarter people than me can draw these, like, connections. But you can obviously see, like, there's a lot of reporting on this currently. Like if you see a goddess recently, it's February, 2026, there's a piece that milk mustache is back about the return of white power milk from the International Association of Vegan Sociologists who, of course, have a horse in this race. But the Washington Post ran a story of it at the end of January. So it's a thing.

They're doing it. Well, dairy consumption is slightly back up again. Nut milk consumption is slightly down or milk alternatives, not just nut milks, but all milk alternatives, but all milk alternatives, slightly down. So they're succeeding in their campaign, and there's a lot of fertile ground for that sort of. white supremacy messaging right now, unfortunately. A lot of folks also here, you probably know how to pronounce these people's names better than I do in this paragraph here.

Are you talking about ballerina farm right now? Yes, right here. Oh, you're talking, man, okay. You're talking about Norah Smith drank raw milk while visibly pregnant. And then Hannah Nealman, who is Ballerina Farm, pause direct to consumer raw milk sells in 2025 after state inspectors found elevated,

oh, coliform bacteria. colony forming bacteria. So that doesn't surprise me. You know, though, you would think that with raw milk, people would drink it and they would get sick. And then you would go, oh, well, maybe that was a bad idea. And so it's an idea that would kind of burn itself out, right? But that hasn't always proven true. Like, we are very, we humans will do a bad idea and hurt ourselves and then keep doing the bad idea sometimes.

So I don't know. I'm familiar with both of those creators, sadly. The Tradwife aesthetic is all part of this too. Milk and having your own farm and like growing your own food, which I'm not slamming these ideas independently, but it's become ingrained in white supremacy and white culture. And also it's very sexist. It's a very male dominant culture that puts you as a woman at home on your farm, drinking your raw milk and having all of your children and not really having a life outside of that as the. like highest form of womanhood, which if that's your thing, fine.

No problem with that. Don't drink raw milk still. But like, if that's what you want to do, do it. But it definitely is being held up as the white woman standard right now. About a year ago, the FDA aftercuts from the Trump administration, they halted their lab proficiency testing program for grade A milk. so they're not they stop testing the labs that test to make sure milk is great A but there's been no stoppage of trying to push it on people so that's the deal um it is uh milk is like has all this

baggage attached to it and that's why and it's a story can i say from a medical perspective as i've said the science on milk is that it can be part of a healthy diet and it cannot depending on how you consume it there is no question as to whether or not you should drink pasteurized milk. You should. You should not drink raw milk. It's dangerous. It can make you sick. You might drink it and not get sick, but that doesn't mean that you won't get sick next time. So you shouldn't drink raw milk. If you want to drink some milk and it doesn't make you sick, I'm not going to tell you not to. But if you can't drink milk because you're lactose intolerant, I'm not going to tell you to drink milk. It's sad because there

are probably scenarios where depending on where you live and your economic status and what foods are available, milk may be a really useful source of certain nutrients. You know, it may be a really great way to make sure you're getting calcium into your diet, that you're getting vitamin D, if it's fortified with vitamin D, that you're getting things you need, right, depending on where you live and what you have available to you. So we shouldn't demonize milk, like you said, just like we shouldn't demonize dairy farmers. It may be really good for where you live and what you eat. And then also, you may have plenty of other sources and you do not need milk. And so forcing it on, especially school children who maybe have no other option if they are getting their lunch for free at school and their parents

are not in a position to send an alternative to school for them to eat and drink. I think that that is racist. There's also, I think there is an aspect of the whole more recent thing, you know, this idea that like whole, it is tied up with whole milk and 2% milk basically. You know, it was good enough for me when I was a kid. Well, the reason it was good enough for you and your kids is because you were in these same programs that they were, the government was forcing milk upon you. Yes. That's, that's true. Yes. It's, I mean, I think if we are, if we, if as white Americans, if we can come to a point where we're reckoning with the idea of the good old days as not being the good old days for most people, right? Just for a select few who are making the sort of the rules about what the good old days. where milk is part of that story. Also, when the food pyramid got flipped, whole milk, whole dairy, they were, you know, one of the pillars.

And three of the nine experts who helped design that had ties to the National Dairy Council. So... I've got a question of my charcutory now, Justin. Now I'm sitting here thinking about the rise of charcutory and how much I love a good... I mean, I like the meats on there too,

but I love the cheeses and... I don't know what to do with that now. You can have a vegan charcutory. Yes. Just all kinds of pickles. A bunch of little pickles. I like cheese, though. Thanks so much for listening to our podcast.

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Until next time, my name is Justin McRoy. I'm Sydney McRoy. And as always, don't drill a hole in your hand. Maximum Fun. A Worker-owned network of artist-owned shows. Supported directly by you.