Monsanto Says rbST Milk is just as Good as Organic!

And the Journal of the American Dietetic Association is spreading the news in their July 2008 issue.

I’ll warn you now – this article is pretty much a personal rant, so I’ll make the drama optional by starting with my conclusion:

Buy milk from local, grass-fed farms where you can talk to the farmers about their practices and even go visit them if you’re willing to take a drive. Do so even if they are not USDA Certified Organic! This action supports the physical health of you and your loved ones, your local economy, the quality of life of the cows that make your milk, and the overall health of the planet.

Now on with the ranting! More...
First the fiction:

It is important for food and nutrition professionals to know that conventional, rbST-free, and organic milk are compositionally similar so they can serve as a key resource to consumers who are making milk purchase (and consumption) decisions in a marketplace where there are misleading milk label claims.

This is the final sentence of the article’s abstract. What I love most about it is how the fake truths are served up with a heavy portion of civic responsibility topped with a splash of empathy regarding how confusing it is for us poor consumers trying to make healthy choices. Wouldn’t it just be so much easier for us if these silly truth-in-labeling activists would just hush up and let milk be milk?!

Now for the fact. (I’m about to give Monsanto a little credit. Don’t expect it to ever happen again.) Before they slip into defining the milks as compositionally similar, the do make a more accurate statement:

Label claims were not related to any meaningful differences in the milk compositional variables measured.

See! If you include the implied “in this study” at the end of the sentence, it’s a more or less simple statement of statistically-biased truth.

But if you’re like me, you may be less than sure that you share the same ideas about what’s meaningful as Monsanto, so you might be asking, “What exactly did they measure?”

Did they look for pesticides and herbicides, since quite a few folks think that’s pretty much the point of ‘organic’ foods?

No.

Did measure amounts of mucous or blood or inflammatory mediators, the sorts of things that might indicate the overall health status of the animals producing the milk?

No. (And ew, gross!)

Did they look for any residual rbST (the synthetic version of somatotropin, a.k.a growth hormone?

Maybe. I’m not a biochemist, so I don’t know if testing for somatotropin also reveals levels of its synthetic counterpart. And I didn’t feel like paying $25 for the full article text to try and sort through nitty gritty details, so I also don’t know if they considered only total fat or if they looked at a profile of different fatty acids. Here’s what the abstract has to say:

A survey study was conducted to compare retail milk for quality (antibiotics and bacterial counts), nutritional value (fat, protein, and solids-not-fat), and hormonal composition (somatotropin, insulin-like growth factor-1 [IGF-1], estradiol, and progesterone) as affected by three label claims related to dairy-cow management: conventional, recombinant bovine somatotropin (rbST)-free (processor-certified not from cows supplemented with rbST), or organic (follows US Department of Agriculture organic practices).

And, of course, their conclusion is that there is no functional difference between organic milk and conventional milk from cows treated with rbST.

But the real question here is, as far as I can see, “Did this study even begin with substantially different samples of milk?” Well, they were acquired from retail establishments in 48 states and separated based on their labels.

Another, and what I consider to be more useful, way to say this is, “Do USDA Organic dairy cows actually spend their lives walking through green pastures and eating grass?”

Again, maybe. And a pretty weak maybe at that.

The USDA National Organics Program is a long, tedious document written in legalese which is intended to simplify the great big quandary that is organic labeling in the U.S. The language is vague and open to interpretation, including such phrases as:

(1) Access to the outdoors, shade, shelter, exercise areas, fresh air, and direct sunlight suitable to the species, its stage of production, the climate, and the environment; (2) Access to pasture for ruminants;

Access?

This is what happens when you throw billions of dollars and countless hours at a question a 4-year-old could answer with one word:
Mom: “Billy, what do cows eat?”
Billy: “Grass!”

I really hope that we all know by now that such simplicity is long, long lost on the technological advancement that is conventional confined animal feeding operations. But isn’t organic supposed to mean something different?

It is supposed to, but reality is that the USDA operates on a shoestring budget with little funding for such eccentricities as enforcement of the National Organics Program. And, to top that off, they don’t seem to be dishing out justice for infractions when they are revealed. (Here's another article on this.)

So, I’m not surprised that Monsanto easily discovered no “meaningful differences” between rbST milk and organic milk in a certain Monsanto-chosen subset of qualifiers. And I don’t expect either Monsanto or the American Dietetics Association to share my views on the definition of healthy food.

But I still can’t help but be annoyed by the smoke and mirrors acts big agriculture is constantly throwing up to funnel consumers into their market share like cows led to slaughter.

Maybe someday I’ll evolve.

In the meantime, articles such as this remind me how grateful I am for the work done by the farmer’s hand that I shake every two weeks when I pick up my grass-fed meat, dairy products and eggs. He’s the one who makes my lifestyle possible. And he’s the one who gets my money. Maybe I don’t have as much money as Monsanto, but I think he appreciates it just the same.