National Milk Producers Federation

The controversy over the use of rBST in the dairy industry has unfolded over the past fifteen years in a way similar to watching a car crash in slow motion: as you look at it from moment to moment, nothing much happens, but given the physics of the objects involved, you know a messy outcome is all but inevitable in the end.

To trot out yet another well-worn cliché, the proliferation of absence claims about milk not coming from cows treated with artificial growth hormones (or similar statements to the same effect) is the result of a perfect storm: the forces converging together include lax regulatory labeling guidelines, one-upsmanship among ever more heavily-concentrated food marketers, and perceptions of consumer unease over the direction of modern agriculture and food production. Put all those things in a blender, and you end up with a bitter-tasting product that appeals to few, but all have to swallow.

For more than the past year, it seemed like every month brought a new announcement of a food marketer deciding to source certain dairy products from cows not treated with rBST. The trend has swept up individual product lines, entire brands, and the milk from every farm in some major dairy cooperatives.

The latest announcement came last month from regulators, who, sensing the trend has gotten out of hand, decided to step in. In Pennsylvania, the state department of agriculture has told a handful of milk processors that they cannot use certain absence claims relating to the use (or lack thereof) of synthetic growth hormones. Neighboring states Ohio and New Jersey are reportedly also examining whether they have the ability to restrict the use of absence claims on dairy products marketed within their borders.

Regardless of how this specific pushback by regulators is settled, few will be satisfied with the eventual outcome. Pennsylvania’s Agriculture Secretary, dairy farmer Dennis Wolf, says he is heeding the concerns that many farmers have about the stigmatization of products and processes that not only are approved by federal regulators, but also in most cases can’t be calculated or analyzed.

On the other hand, there are farmers, cooperatives and processors who want to keep the ability to make truthful and not misleading claims on their products because a certain portion of customers (and I use that term to encompass both consumers and marketers) cares about the processes that go into the products, even if not every aspect of dairy production can be measured scientifically.

This conflict is likely to become more acute in the future as food marketers further attempt to differentiate their offerings from competing products that are often the same. It’s also going to continue simmering, as the huge push for sustainability throughout the consumer products industry mushrooms. So-called green products, produced in supposedly sustainable ways, are going to proliferate in the coming years. Because food is essential to human life, look for food products to be front and center in the heavily-contested sustainability arena. And who gets to decide, and how, which production practices are sustainable, will be another messy battle.

Back in February, I wrote in this space that food production has become more political, and that the rBST-free trend is ultimately about the shift in power toward the downstream end of the food chain. Nothing that has happened in the past seven months, including the crackdown in Pennsylvania over absence claims, has altered that dynamic.

NMPF traditionally has supported the right of farmers to exercise legitimate choices in production practices. But we also have to recognize that some processors, retailers, and consumers will exercise choices as well, including specifying how foods should and should not be produced. Even when we’re talking about processes that are perfectly defensible from a health and food safety standpoint, perceptions – even those driven by bottom-line economics – will shape our reality more than anything else.

As a footnote to this discussion, the poultry industry has recently gone through a similar clash. Tyson Foods announced earlier this year that it would not raise its chickens using antibiotics. In November, however, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said that the use of ionosphores, products not used in humans and which do not function like traditional antibiotics that attack harmful microbes, nevertheless qualify as antibiotics, contradicting the veracity of the Tysons “antibiotic-free” labeling claim. The company is now reworking its labels because what regulators define as the truth has shifted. For what it’s worth, this isn’t just about dairy products.

The irony is that a key aspect of sustainability is reducing the amount of packaging used to provide products to consumers. Yet it sure looks like that in the future, we’re going to need more and bigger labels to report the different claims about what wasn’t used in or done to the product. What is “truthful” is getting harder to define and defend.