Our national obsession with all things cheese — from pizza to Easy Mac to the yellow stuff on stadium nachos that forms a skin when not eaten right away — has finally caught up with us. On Tuesday, the Center for Science in the Public Interest published a report card grading Americans on their eating habits. In the area of dairy, we scored an abysmal C-.
Although consumption of full-fat ice cream is down and consumption of yogurt is up, our cheese consumption has nearly tripled since the 1970s. Americans used to average eight pounds of cheese per person per year. Now, we’re up to 23 pounds. Yep, 23 pounds of congealed stadium cheese per person. What a time to be alive.
We can attribute this unhealthy increase to a number of culprits — the rise of cheesy dips such as Moe’s queso, for example. However, the biggest influence on our whirlwind love affair with cheese is, believe it or not, the government.
In his 2010 New York Times article “While Warning About Fat, U.S. Pushes Cheese Sales,” Michael Moss relayed a story about how an organization called Dairy Management partnered with Domino’s Pizza to create a pizza with 40 percent more cheese after the pizza conglomerate suffered a dip in sales.
Moss, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist behind “Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us,” said the sneaky increase in cheese resulted in skyrocketing sales.
However, one slice of the cheesier pizza constitutes more than two-thirds of a day’s maximum recommended daily amount of saturated fat.
Dairy Management is not a private business consultant, Moss wrote. The organization was created by the United States Department of Agriculture, and its purpose is to work with restaurants and food vendors to pump more cheese into their menu items.
“Urged on by government warnings about saturated fat, Americans have been moving toward low-fat milk for decades, leaving a surplus of whole milk and milk fat,” Moss wrote. “Yet the government, through Dairy Management, is engaged in an effort to find ways to get dairy back into Americans’ diets, primarily through cheese.”
How can the Department of Agriculture be both a “marketer of agriculture products and America’s nutrition police,” as Moss put it? The two roles just don’t mix, like Sunny Delight and Oreos.
This presents a horrible ethical dilemma, and it diminishes the messages from activists like Michelle Obama who are fighting to decrease America’s inflated obesity rate.
The Department of Agriculture’s Dairy Management is in bed with junk-food giants like Dominos, McDonald’s and Pizza Hut, and we’re willing to bet some kinky stuff goes on there — Cheez Whiz is probably involved.
A version of this editorial ran on page 6 on 9/25/2013 under the headline "Cheese-spiracy: The gov’t is behind our dairy obsession"
