This summer, as a counselor at CitySprouts, the Cambridge-founded urban gardening initiative, I taught middle schoolers about healthy food and food production. I saw how much my campers enjoyed cooking and eating the lettuce, basil and raspberries from our garden. The King Open School rooftop garden is not nearly large enough to produce breakfast and lunch for 20 kids, though. We relied on the Cambridge Summer Food Program, and at the end of lunch, I was always frustrated by the full trash of unopened milk cartons that U.S. Department of Agriculture policy requires students to take at every meal regardless of whether they plan to drink it.
Now, as the president Donald Trump administration labels funding for school meals as a whole “wasteful,” I have looked into that waste more fully – where does it come from? One thing I am sure of is that free meals programs themselves are necessary and not wasteful. Trump’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” funding cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program put my campers’ free meals at risk, along with thousands of other food programs across the country.
But why is food being thrown out? And why, even as a sustainable gardening program, can’t we feed our kids better food? The “waste” in government programs is not from ensuring low-income residents have the bare necessities to stay alive. Rather, it is a result of allowing corporate monopolies to coopt our government programs for their own benefit and shift the blame onto everyday citizens; the discarded milk cartons I naively blamed on the Cambridge food program result from the very same dairy monopolies that now get tax breaks from the Big Beautiful Bill’s funding policy.
Countless reports published by the Harvard Medical Center to Stanford Medicine have shown that milk, despite what Big Dairy wants us to believe, is not a necessity. In fact, factory-farmed milk can increase unnatural hormone and antibiotic exposure, promote cancer development and has “little to no benefit for bone health.” Yet milk continues to be a requirement in every American’s school lunch.
The United States used to nurture small dairy farms, giving each cow ample room to graze and providing a healthy amount of high-quality milk to Americans.
When we imagine a cattle farm, we picture a local farmer in overalls standing by an idyllic home and fields. In reality, just two companies sell 74 percent of all milk. This model of industrialized farming may have increased efficiency, but while factory farms have no problem producing two times more dairy than in 1970, they are still confronted with the fact that milk consumption has decreased nearly 50 percent since 1970.
The USDA has repeatedly saved Big Dairy by allowing it to offload its surplus of dairy onto children, requiring milk in all school meals across America. I still have a vivid recollection of Dwayne Johnson with a white mustache pictured on the cafeteria wall of my elementary school, Graham & Parks, above bold letters reading “Protein to Rock Your Day.” Only recently did I learn that these posters weren’t a local effort to improve kids’ health, but were targeting students on behalf of Big Dairy. Eventually, even these “Got Milk” advertisements weren’t enough to keep up with the industry’s drive for growth; by 2016, the industry had shifted its resources from promotional campaigns to its own “scientific” studies to spread fabricated information about the health benefits of milk.
Not only is industrial dairy production actually often harmful for kids’ nutrition, it is destroying their futures on this planet. Factory farm cattle never see outside inhumane, disease-ridden feedlots, while the companies’ executives rarely see outside their mansions, conveniently placed hundreds of miles away from the factory farms, safe from the pollution released from the farms’ over 1 million tons of annual manure.
It is not the cows that are the issue; it is the greedy monopolies that never fail to choose profit and efficiency over well-being.
Grass-fed cow manure is naturally composted back into the pastures, which have the potential to sequester up to 1.5 tons of carbon per acre. Considering the more than 80 million dairy cows in the United States, if all dairy cows were pasture-fed using regenerative grazing, we could sequester 120 million tons of carbon, enough to offset the Northeast’s yearly emissions. Industrial feedlots, by contrast, allow manure to pile up and release 2.5 million tons of methane annually, trapping as much heat as 70 million tons of C02. From 1997 to 2017, corporate consolidation drove out two-thirds of family-sized commercial dairies, and even though the number of cows remained stable, planet-warming methane emissions from dairy manure more than doubled.
Big Dairy has taken advantage of government programs to pollute our country with waste, chronic health issues, greenhouse gases and corporate consolidation. As monopolies reign over the United States and local economies suffer from lower wages and divestment from the community, Americans are struggling to make ends meet. We cannot blame individual families who don’t have enough money to buy food at all, let alone local grass-fed milk. Rather than rethinking government programs to provide more funding for healthy, local, sustainable food, the Big Beautiful Bill takes advantage of struggling Americans by allowing them a few hundred dollars in tax breaks while cutting fundamental food and health care programs. The bill not only gives the majority of its benefits to the top 20 percent of households, but reallocates funding for school meals to further subsidize industrialized dairy production.
As citizens, we have to join together to target our anger toward the right culprit. The issues of “waste” in our government programs stem from the very same monopolies that label these programs “wasteful.” Rather than cutting Snap programs that ensure our youth have access to food, we should seriously rethink who American tax polices prioritize.
Simone Colburn, Cedar Street, Cambridge
The writer grew up in Cambridge and is a student at Colorado College as well as a leader in The Sunrise Movement and a CitySprouts summer site lead at the Putnam Avenue Upper School.
A stronger
Please consider making a financial contribution to maintain, expand and improve Cambridge Day.
We are now a 501(c)3 nonprofit and all donations are tax deductible.
Please consider a recurring contribution.