This petition from the dairy industry has been in the works since 2009 to add artificial sweeteners to milk - without labeling the milk as containing this - in order to - get this:
more easily identify its overall nutritional value
Did you get that? They want to add artificial sweeteners to milk without labeling so consumers can "
more easily identify its overall nutritional value".
Tell me, can you determine the nutritional value of any food if you don't know what the ingredients are?
I know I can't.
Here's the reasoning from the petition on why the dairy industry (in particular International Dairy Foods Association (IDFA) and the National Milk Producers Federation) feel they need to add artificial sweeteners to milk without labeling the milk as artificially sweetened:
IDFA and NMPF argue that nutrient content claims such as "reduced calorie" are not attractive to children and maintain that consumers can more easily identify the overall nutritional value of milk products that are flavored with non-nutritive sweeteners if the labels do not include such claims. Further, the petitioners assert that consumers do not recognize milk—including flavored milk—as necessarily containing sugar. Accordingly, the petitioners state that milk flavored with non-nutritive sweeteners should be labeled as milk without further claims so that consumers can "more easily identify its overall nutritional value.”
Does this not read like some bizarre Contrarian Day logic?
I've already stopped buying some brands of milk because I learned they contain HFCS - perfectly legal without labeling and some also already contain aspartame without labeling. The objection from the dairy industry is that the FDA wants milk with these additives to be labeled as such.
I support the FDA on this, and would like to go a step further - that every additive be labelled.
Boohoo that people are drinking less dairy milk - they are getting it from smaller dairies and if they are like me, they are doing their best to get raw milk. The less processing the better.
In fact, that's the way I like all my food - the less processing by food manufacturers, the better. Any processing to be done should be done by me at my stove and in my oven.
By the way, home pasteurizing milk is easy. I grew up on raw milk, buying a pint from the dairy farm up the hill every morning and pasteurizing it before I went to school.
You will need a double boiler, a thermometer, a metal spoon, a large bowl of ice, a sterilized glass jar with a lid large enough to hold the milk.
1. Pour the raw milk into the top of a double boiler. If you don't have a double boiler, you can mimic one by using a stainless steel bottle or bowl placed on a rack in a few inches of water in a larger pot. You can, however, skip the double boiler altogether, but it requires more care.
2. Slowly heat the milk to 145ºF, stirring occasionally. If you are not using a double boiler, stir frequently (constantly, actually) to avoid scalding the milk.
3. Hold the temperature at 145ºF for exactly 30 minutes. You may need to increase and decrease the heat to keep the temperature constant. This is where the thermometer comes in handy. Clip the thermometer to the side of the stainless steel pot the milk is in so the tip is in the middle of the milk to get the best reading.
4. Remove the pot of milk from the heat and place it in a sink or large bowl filled with ice water. Stir constantly until the temperature drops to 40 F.
5. Store your nicely pasteurized milk in the refrigerator in a sterilized glass jar.
Also, milk is not the only food being foisted on us with improper labeling and hidden additives. Tuna
isn't always tuna and won't tell you so on the label (in fact, approximately 50% of tuna tested contained fish other than tuna or wasn't tuna at all). Olive oil is often
adulterated with lesser oils - including soy! Ground beef should contain ground up cow meat, not horse or buffalo or yak or TVP or dinosaur. Peanut butter should contain peanuts and nothing else, especially not soy oil. Labels don't have to reflect the actual contents of the container.
Truth in labeling. We need it.
Because, you know, I don't have time to grow my own olives and extract my own olive oil, I don't live where I can raise my own dairy cows and hens, and I live in a land-locked state where I can't fish for tuna (or shrimp, which is why, even though I love shrimp, I only eat it when I am near coastal Texas or Louisiana - meaning like never any more).
After I retire, I plan to do a lot of this, but while I work full time, I don't have time to do much of this and don't yet live where the zoning codes allow much of it.
That makes truth in labeling so very much more important.