(US:PA) Got Alternatives? (to dairy products)

[Guest guest]

The Philadelphia PA City Paper at CityPaper.net

 

http://www.citypaper.net/articles/021402/cs.coverb.shtml

 

February 14–21, 2002

Got Alternatives?

Hey, y’ever notice how calcium is in everything these days — not just dairy

products and leafy greens, but orange juice, soy milks, waffles, even graham

crackers and cough drops? You might think the " Calcium Summit II " event would

examine all these sources and compare them with, say, cow’s milk in terms of

pros and cons.

 

Think again. At the Calcium Summit, calcium equals milk. End of story.

 

This was the message at January’s conference in Washington, D.C., where the

narrow focus on getting kids to drink milk provided a sharp contrast with our

Chinatown conference’s haphazard diversity.

 

You see, even though America has a higher per-capita calcium intake than most

other countries, we’re in a " calcium crisis, " necessitating this free event for

health workers and media.

 

The setting, the technology and the presentations were all highly professional,

but soon became redundant, as though they were all poured from the same

homogenized carton.

 

Maybe that’s because they were, as the Physicians Committee for Responsible

Medicine (PCRM) found through a Freedom of Information Act request. BSMG

Worldwide, the ad agency for America’s dairy farmers, assigned many presenters

their topics, their titles, their talking points and, in some cases, their

PowerPoint slides, in addition to their honoraria.

 

PCRM held a morning counter-event across the hall from the Calcium Summit,

putting calcium and dairy in context for overall bone strength. But amusingly,

the summit attendees were protected from the PCRM by a series of 20-foot-tall,

heavy, black curtains draped across the entire hall. These forced journalists

who had heard about the PCRM event to trek up the stairs, around past the front

entrance of the building, down a side hall and back down to a smaller conference

room.

 

After a rather somnolent morning seminar, I enjoyed Neal Barnard’s animated Q & A

session, but even better was a handout — the book CalciYum!, packed with a wide

variety of tasty dairy-free recipes chock-full of calcium.

 

Returning to the summit, I was back in a world where green leafy vegetables like

collards (with as much calcium as milk) are irrelevant because " no children will

eat them, " and where the fortified orange juice (more calcium than milk per

serving) I see on supermarket shelves everywhere apparently has not yet been

invented.

 

Sure, as a confirmed non-milk-drinker going in, I was skeptical about how dairy

would be positively compared to other calcium sources. I expected the role of

excess protein in sucking calcium out of bones to be downplayed along with the

fact that the majority of the world’s adults are lactose intolerant. I expected

the mainstream controversies over rBGH, a bovine growth hormone, and antibiotic

overuse to be ignored. But I didn’t expect this audacious strategy: The only

true calcium source is milk, so no discussion of anything else is called for.

 

This tunnel vision was considered unremarkable, I found, in conversations with

various earnest representatives and organizational partners. Stanley Wallach,

executive director of the American College of Nutrition, shrugged off the

distortion of nutrition information. " There’s a bias, " he agreed. " Sure there’s

a bias. We all have our little hang-ups. "

 

Yep. Kurt Graetzer of the milk-mustache campaign crowed about how a new

initiative to flood schools with chocolate-milk vending machines will get " the

product " straight to these young consumers: " That’s a lot of gallons of milk, "

he said, and then, forgetting he wasn’t at the annual board meeting, " and a lot

of money. "

 

Every industry deserves to have a convention, to swap ideas, to draw press

coverage, whatever. But when you cast your trade show as a public health

seminar, you invite a higher standard of scrutiny. And even knowing who was

behind this, I was fascinated by the degree to which " dairy über alles " was

pushed at the expense of viable alternatives.

 

To put it simply, I expected them to milk it; I just didn’t expect so much

cheese.

 

—Vance Lehmkuhl

 

 

 

 

 

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