Milk is Milk Blog by Alex Avery
It’s official. The few multimillion dollar corporations that garner the vast majority of the organic dairy market have stepped up their misleading marketing campaigns. A recent financial analyst presentation by Horizon Organic parent Dean Foods suggests we can expect increased marketing expenditures, consolidation of organic mega-dairy farm sources and even higher consumer prices for organic milk.
Frequent readers of this blog are well-informed about the fear-profiteering tactics that companies like Horizon Organics and Organic Valley have employed in their marketing strategies (for example, when their labeling wrongly suggests that organic milk contains no hormones, or that conventional milk contains antibiotics and pesticides - messages that are developed not by scientists, but by PR and marketing hucksters).
But when Horizon recently revamped its Web site, false claims about nutritional differences between organic and conventional milk (in reality, there are none) appeared in a much more brazen - and more disturbing - way. The Horizon site dedicates an entire page to “Kids’ Health,” complete with a glossy photograph of smiling children perched on hay bails in the middle of a cornfield. Just underneath the image, the website states that purchasing Horizon products is a way to keep bovine growth hormones and “dangerous pesticides” away from your kids. Not surprisingly, the site fails to mention that those hormones exist in equal measure in all milk; are perfectly safe and that conventional milk contains neither pesticides nor pesticide residues. Not even the Organic Trade Association makes pesticide-related claims in a new fact sheet on organic dairy production.
Horizon’s new Web site raises supposed human health concerns associated with the use of the milk-production hormone rbST by their competitors and uses as “evidence” for this claim a study by Yale epidemiologist Herbert Yu published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. However, Dr. Yu has stated that Horizon’s use of his study was “improper.” That’s a polite way of pointing out that his research had nothing whatsoever to do with milk or the use of rbST. Federal regulations for making health claims in food marketing materials requires scientific evidence, not false interpretations.
I recently wrote a letter to the journal Environmental Health Perspectives to say, in a nutshell, that “those of us who communicate with the public on food safety issues should choose our words carefully.” The journal had published research that was sure to mislead readers into thinking that organic foods will protect children against non-existent neurological health risks from pesticides. My fear over the misuse of the research by organic profiteers has already been borne out: the Organic Center for Education and Promotion is claiming that the research shows organic food protects children against exposure to “Dangerous” pesticides - the same exact word now used on some organic dairy packaging.
I used to think that if you play with fear and false claims, you’d probably get burned. That is, I thought that these guys would get in trouble for making these baseless and misleading claims, for scaring parents into spending more money on a brand of milk that is really no different than a more affordable brand. Surely some regulatory agency or level-headed consumer advocacy group would speak out against this practice. (For my part, I’ve joined the Stop Labeling Lies coalition that has filed various statewide complaints against these dairies). Alas, the false and misleading advertising is simply not getting the attention it deserves. As such, companies like Horizon and Organic Valley are growing and expanding their black marketing efforts.
If the regulators and consumer advocates won’t step up to these self-serving predators, why isn’t the dairy industry regulating itself on misleading absence-related claims? After all, as I pointed out in an earlier blog entry, the real effect of niche dairy marketing claims is the decrease in overall dairy consumption. This makes sense. By scaring consumers into thinking that the milk they’ve been drinking is somehow unhealthy or unsafe, large organic dairy companies drive some people away from milk completely. This is not good for dairy consumers or America’s dairy farmers, and certainly not good for the dairy industry in general.
The obvious solution would be for dairy industry organizations to fight back and say, “Look, no milk contains antibiotics or pesticides and all milk contains the same natural hormone traces (and even organic dairies use added hormones like oxytocin and prostaglandin for reproductive health). Your tactics are bad for business and bad for the health of consumers who are frightened away from drinking milk.”
Then I realized: the dairy industry has surrendered. They’ve let Horizon and the others hijack the language used by dairy scientists and nutritionists, and as a result “hormone” has become a dirty word. Now even many dairy scientists want me to use the term “productivity supplement” rather than hormone because of the public misimpression. If the dairy industry decided to wage a public campaign against scaremonger labeling, it would have to get on the loudspeaker (much like I’ve been doing) and point out that the reason “hormone-free” claims are false and, therefore, illegal is because ALL MILK CONTAINS HORMONES. Fact: All milk contains over 25 varieties of hormones. Fact: Vitamin D3 which is added to all milk is a hormone.
But because organic dairy companies have succeeded in tricking folks into thinking that health or resource-conserving productivity tools, such as supplemental hormones and life-saving antibiotics used in animal agriculture are somehow unhealthy, the dairy industry has shied away from discussing these tools, and ultimately, from regulating misleading absence claims. This represents a victory for predatory marketing interests over sound science. Instead of correcting organic-orchestrated public opinion, industry organizations are becoming submissive to it.
Companies like Horizon seem to have taken notice of the dairy industry’s reluctance to right this wrong. As a result they have upped the ante with even more aggressive (and more misleading) marketing tactics. It’s interesting to note that Horizon is part of the Dean family of brands. So when Horizon says their milk has no “dangerous pesticides,” are they not implying that other milk does have it- including Dean’s other milk brands like Tuscan, Land O’Lakes Original or Pet Milk brands? (The fact that Dean is willing to promote its organic brand at the expense of its non-organic brands strongly suggests a much higher profit margin for the high-priced organic products. Hello, Consumer advocates! Where are you?)
It’s time that dairy industry organizations and state and federal regulators stop being afraid to speak the truth. It’s time that they declare in unison: “milk is milk.”