Why Dairy Is Hiding in So Many Foods, Explained

When you think of dairy, you probably think of milk, cheese or maybe yogurt. You probably don’t think about hot dogs, flavored potato chips, canned tuna or gum — and yet those are but a few of the countless foods that can stealthily contain dairy. Why do so many foods have milk byproducts in them?

It’s in part because powdered milk is a highly versatile cooking ingredient. It’s a cheap way of fortifying other foods with protein, and many chefs also see it as an easy way to improve the taste and texture of otherwise non-dairy foods as well.

However, much of milk’s ubiquity boils down to one simple fact: the U.S. government wants people to eat dairy. Although we couldn’t find evidence that the government is directly selling cheap dairy to food manufacturers, it’s done just about everything else it can to pump as much dairy as possible into the nation’s food supply.

To further answer the question of why dairy is present in so many foods, let’s zoom out a bit, and take a look at how milk became an ever-present ingredient in modern foods.

How the USDA Promotes Dairy Consumption

Many people think that the USDA’s purpose is to promote nutritious eating, and to an extent, it is. But the agency also exists to promote, support and protect the financial wellbeing of the American agriculture industry, and to further this goal, it’s expended significant resources over the last century to ensure that Americans consume as many domestically produced agricultural products as possible, including dairy.

“There’s an obvious conflict of interest between the USDA being a promoter of major U.S. agricultural commodities, and at the same time being behind the Dietary Guidelines [for Americans],” Alissa Hamilton, author of Got Milked?, tells Sentient.

Hamilton notes that the USDA’s MyPlate program, which replaced the classic “food pyramid” in 2011, advises Americans to have dairy with every meal. The ostensible reason for this is that milk is packed with calcium — but so are almonds, figs, kale and plenty of other foods. The difference is that the almond, fig and kale industries aren’t nearly as big as the dairy industry.

“They’re promoting the agricultural commodities that are important to the U.S. economy,” Hamilton says. “If there was a big pumpkin seed lobby, and Americans grew a lot of pumpkin seeds, there’d no doubt be a magnesium food group [in the Dietary Guidelines].”

A Brief History of the Rise of Milk in America

Up until relatively recently, cow’s milk wasn’t widely consumed. All of this began to change later in the 19th century, as innovations like pasteurization, refrigeration and powdered milk made dairy more safe and accessible to the general public.

Many Americans came to view cow’s milk as an analog for mother’s milk. But in truth, most people have trouble digesting lactose. Dairy is also one of the leading sources of saturated fat, and cow’s milk isn’t a suitable stand-in for breast milk for infants. Milk is not, in other words, an essential part of a healthy diet.

Nevertheless, the perception of milk as nutritious took root in the mid-20th century, and has proven remarkably resilient in the decades since. But it wasn’t until the 20th century that the U.S. dairy industry became the behemoth it is today.

How the Government Started Subsidizing Dairy

During World War I, the government relied heavily on powdered milk and other processed dairy products to feed U.S. troops, and in response to this high demand, many dairy farmers took out loans to increase their production capacities. When the war ended, they couldn’t afford to stop selling all the extra milk they were producing, which led to a milk surplus and rock-bottom milk prices.

The government attempted to save the collapsing industry with the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which sought to raise prices of agricultural goods by paying farmers to cut their production capacities, thus reducing output and constricting supply. In practice, this meant slaughtering millions of farm animals who’d already been purchased, and burning fields of cotton, wheat and other crops.

This was the federal government’s first major intervention in the American dairy market on behalf of dairy producers, and almost a century later, this entanglement has only grown and deepened. There have been countless federal programs aimed at stabilizing dairy prices, protecting the financial wellbeing of dairy farmers, and encouraging Americans to consume as much dairy as possible.

Some of these initiatives have yielded unexpected consequences. In the 1970s, the government began purchasing excess milk from dairy farmers after yet another surplus. This milk was converted into cheese to extend its shelf life, and by the early 1980s, the USDA had amassed 500 million pounds of cheese. After failing to come up with a better solution, the government ended up giving away the cheese, much of which was moldy, to food pantries and food stamps recipients.

Incredibly, the USDA revived this cheese purchasing program in 2016, as plummeting demand for dairy products had resulted in yet another milk surplus. The government started buying up cheese again, and now has a record 1.4 billion pounds of cheese stored in warehouses across the country.

But the intermingling of Big Dairy and the federal government is perhaps best illustrated by a post-World War II law that continues to affect millions of American children every day: The National School Lunches Program.

How Dairy Producers Offload Extra Milk to Kids

World War II produced a similar cycle as World War I, with a spike in dairy production during the war and a subsequent milk surplus afterwards. This time, the federal government’s solution was to offload the extra milk onto America’s schoolchildren, which it did via the National School Lunches Act in 1946.

This law has played an enormous role in shaping children’s diets over the last 75 years, and nothing illustrates this better than its dairy requirement.

“During World War II, [the government] wanted to ramp up dairy production because they needed powdered milk for soldiers overseas,” Hamilton says. “But the farmers didn’t get a lot of money for powdered milk, so they had to come up with some kind of demand for fluid milk. And what better consumers than growing kids? You can just dump all this excess milk into the schools.”

The law created the National School Lunch Program, which funds free or low-cost meals to millions of children in public schools around the country. But in order to participate in the program, schools must serve lunches that meet specific requirements, and one of those requirements is that every school meal has to include fluid low-fat or fat-free cow’s milk.

There are other requirements as well, but they’re pegged to specific nutrients, not specific foods. Meals have to contain a certain amount of protein, for instance, but that protein can come from meat, plants, legumes or anywhere else.

But the milk requirement is different, as the National School Lunches Act explicitly says that every school lunch must include a cup of fluid milk. Schools aren’t allowed to serve non-dairy substitutes unless a child declares a disability and brings in a doctor’s note, or in some cases, a note from a guardian.

As a result, the dairy industry has effectively “locked in school kids as a captive market for milk,” Deborah Press, the associate general counsel at the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, tells Sentient.

The law also states that schools in the lunch program “shall not directly or indirectly restrict the sale or marketing of fluid milk products by the school.” This provision led to a lawsuit in 2023, when administrators at a Los Angeles high school told a student that she couldn’t hand out literature criticizing the milk industry unless she also promoted the benefits of cow’s milk.

“Her school had ‘Got Milk?’ dairy promotions every day in the morning announcements,” Press tells Sentient. “She just wanted to share information about factory farming and pollution, and was told she couldn’t do it without also promoting milk.”

Ultimately, the Los Angeles Unified School District settled the lawsuit, while a companion lawsuit against the USDA is still ongoing.

From Historical Accident, to Entrenched Policy

Government support during and after World War II caused the dairy industry to grow so much that it soon became an indispensable part of the post-war agricultural economy. This compelled the USDA, with its mandate to support American agricultural interests, to continue and increase its support for dairy farmers, creating something of a vicious cycle.

“They basically created their own monster,” Hamilton tells Sentient. “They grew the dairy industry, and now the industry is so large that its arms are in every aspect of government.”

This entanglement takes many forms. The dairy lobby is powerful and gives millions of dollars to lawmakers every election cycle, but also, all 50 states now produce milk. This means that even without any lobbying money, every senator counts on the votes of dairy farmers to get elected — a highly relevant fact, given that Senate approval would be needed to remove the dairy requirement from the school lunch program.

Hamilton also highlights the role of the “revolving door” in dairy politics. This is when lawmakers and regulators transition into working as lobbyists or consultants for the same industries that they once regulated, and vice versa.

Tom Vilsack is one example of this. He went from leading the USDA to working for Dairy Management Inc, essentially a trade group for the dairy industry, before then returning to lead the USDA again. Another example would be somebody like Robert Post, who served as acting director of the USDA’s Center for Nutrition Policy before joining Chobani, the yogurt company, as senior director for nutritional affairs.

In effect, the revolving door gives certain industries an enormous influence on public policy, and this is certainly the case with the dairy industry.

“In the beginning, it was the USDA incentivizing the [dairy] industry to grow,” Hamilton says. “Now, it’s the industry incentivizing the government to support it.”

Dairy Checkoffs Bring Domino’s to Schools

One way in which the government has helped inject dairy into so many foods is through the Dairy Research and Promotion Program, also known as the dairy checkoff. This is really a variety of different programs and initiatives, ostensibly overseen by the USDA but carried out by quasi-private organizations at the federal, state and local level. Dairy Management Inc, the organization Vilsack worked for, is one of many dairy checkoff programs.

The dairy checkoff funds promotions for dairy products, such as the infamous “Got Milk?” campaign. It also collaborates with major brands to figure out ways to cram as much dairy as possible into their foods.

“It started with school lunches,” Hamilton tells Sentient. “But now dairy is getting into everything, for the same reason — the need to create a demand for surplus dairy.”

Take McDonald’s. The dairy checkoff partnered with the burger chain in 2004, and pretty soon, there were six dairy checkoff employees on-site at McDonald’s corporate headquarters, working with the company to innovate new dairy-based menu items and increase the dairy content in existing offerings. This eventually resulted in the introduction of 27 new dairy-based items to McDonald’s menu.

It’s not just McDonald’s. The dairy checkoff’s partnership with Taco Bell resulted in the chain unveiling an all-dairy breakfast menu, the Grilled Cheese Burrito and the Quesalupa, which has five times as much cheese as a regular taco. Pizza Hut’s three-cheese stuffed crust pizza was born out of its partnership with the dairy checkoff, as was Starbucks’ short-lived Vivanno smoothie, which utilized dairy-based protein.

“Really, my job here is to make sure dairy has a presence, and to make sure it’s on the menu,” a dairy checkoff employee who works at Taco Bell’s corporate headquarters told a trade publication in 2020.

These kinds of government-funded corporate partnerships are also responsible for bringing Domino’s pizza to school cafeterias across the country. The dairy checkoff worked with Domino’s in 2010 to develop a version of their pizza that, unlike their standard slices, met the USDA’s nutritional requirements for the national school lunch program.

The result was the Domino’s Smart Slice, which has less fat, less salt and 51 percent white whole wheat crust. The Smart Slice debuted in 2010; by 2014, it was being served in 3,000 schools nationwide. Smart Slices are cooked at local Domino’s restaurants and delivered hot to schools; this means fewer meals need to be prepared on-campus, making the Smart Slice program an attractive option for school lunch administrators.

The Bottom Line

The dairy industry’s tentacles stretch deep into the federal government, and have for quite some time. From dairy checkoff and cheese purchasing programs to the National School Lunches Act and the MyPlate diagram, the U.S. government has taken great pains to make sure that dairy is both viewed favorably by the general public and included in as many foods as possible.

But humans don’t need milk to be healthy, and most people would be better off not drinking any dairy milk at all. Dairy production’s contribution to climate change is substantial, and more environmentally friendly governmental policies would need to lessen our reliance on cows — not sustain it.