Milk: Republicans Against Regulations, Except When They Aren't

Dairy farmers and cattle ranchers are not happy. There's been a steady rise in the number of vegans and vegetarians, and the search for alternatives to milk and meat is threatening their bottom lines.

One of the big battlefields is naming. For decades people who are allergic to dairy products have turned to things like soy milk. As veganism goes mainstream, people are looking for alternatives to animal products, and soy milk is increasingly popular.

But a lot of people are allergic to soy, or don't like how it tastes. And so the marketplace has responded with almond milk, coconut milk and even oat milk.

Republicans have been screaming about reducing regulations for years, and the Trump administration has been rolling back environmental regulations like crazy.

So how does FDA in the Trump administration respond to the thriving growth in plant-based dairy  alternatives? By hammering the burgeoning industry with regulations!

The Food and Drug Administration signaled plans to start enforcing a federal standard that defines “milk” as coming from the “milking of one or more healthy cows.” That would be a change for the agency, which has not aggressively gone after the proliferation of plant-based drinks labeled as “milk.”

FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb talked about the plans this week, noting there are hundreds of federal “standards of identity” spelling out how foods with various names need to be manufactured.

Now this is ridiculous. Soy milk has called that for at least thirty or forty years, and coconut milk has been called that for centuries.

The thing is, no one ever calls soy milk just plain "milk." It's always got the "soy" in front of it. So there's never any confusion.

But dairy farmers are guilty of hypocrisy: feta cheese is properly made of sheep's and/or goat's milk. Many people who are allergic to dairy products can eat feta.

In the United States producers usually make fake feta, using cow's milk, which means people with dairy allergies can't eat it. In Europe feta is a protected designation, and to be called feta, the cheese must be made the traditional way in Greece, essentially giving Greece a trademark on the word feta, the way the Champagne region in France has a lock on champagne. Thus, American cheeses can't be sold in Europe under names like feta, parmesan and gorgonzola.

American dairy farmers want to sell completely phony feta and parmesan in Europe, but are trying to prevent the sale of clearly labeled soy milk.

The Trump administration wants to use government regulation to pick winners and losers in the war between soy milk producers and dairy farmers. Typical Republican hypocrisy.

For meat producers there's an even bigger problem coming down the pike. Some vegans don't eat meat because of the cruel conditions under which animals are raised, and the huge environmental costs: cows produce enormous amounts of methane, contributing to global warming. Large corporate farms create toxic lagoons filled with cow and hog manure. Spills from these lagoons are responsible for killing millions of fish across the country every year.

Meat production is also horrendously inefficient; per gram of protein, animal protein uses 6-10 times as much water as plant-based protein. It also takes a long time to raise large animals like cattle and hogs. Animal husbandry for food production is not sustainable with larger and larger human populations.

So scientists are looking at alternatives, like "cultured meat." Meat is just animal muscle tissue, which can now be grown in a test tube. It's basically cloning muscle tissue.

This would use drastically fewer resources. It would eliminate the need for factory farms where animals are packed into tiny cages their entire lives, making it cruelty free. There would be no urine or feces produced, so there would be no toxic manure lagoon spills.  There would be no need for slaughterhouses, which are notoriously dangerous to work in and basically require immigrants to staff them, because Americans simply refuse to work in these awful, awful jobs. And it would be far more sanitary, since there would be no dirty animals or slaughterhouse workers touching the meat.

But meat producers are already trying to ban calling cultured muscle tissue products "meat," again using FDA regulations to thwart their competition.

Which is totally ludicrous: these products are genetically identical to meat. You can make a rational argument for disallowing the term soy milk -- I actually have no problem with the FDA making soy milk producers call it a "soy beverage." But cultured meat is meat, even more than lunch meat, or sausage or hamburger are meat.

Have you ever eaten a hot dog? Or a bologna sandwich? Or even a turkey sandwich? Most of these "meats" have utterly no resemblance to real meat.

Most days I have a turkey sandwich for lunch. However, this is a misnomer: the texture and flavor of "turkey breast" lunch meat is nothing like a real turkey breast. Based on its texture and appearance it seems that they render it into a slurry, add preservatives and water, compress it in a tubular mold, slice it and then package it in plastic.

In real turkey, like you have on Thanksgiving, you can tease apart the fibers in the meat and tell that it was actually a muscle at one point. But most every kind of prepackaged lunch meat is a solid, textureless blob of animal protein.

Just like cultured meat.

Hamburgers, hot dogs and sausage are even less like real meat than cultured meat, because they don't use all muscle tissue. They include all kinds of animal byproducts (muscle, gristle, organs, fat, lips, snouts, etc.), ground up together into a product that has no resemblance to the texture of real meat.

Republicans claim to be against regulation, but they aren't. In their view, the purpose of regulation is to stifle competition, not to protect consumers from unsafe products or predatory monopolies.

Typical Republican hypocrisy.