“Amid an historic glut, a secretive, government-sponsored entity is putting cheese anywhere it can stuff it,” Bloomberg reports. More specifically: in fast food; not a boon for public health.
Highlights:
* “That Taco Bell is developing its cheesiest products ever in the midst of an historic dairy oversupply is no accident. There exists a little-known, government-sponsored marketing group called Dairy Management Inc. (DMI), whose job it is to squeeze as much milk, cheese, butter, and yogurt as it can into food sold both at home and abroad.”
* “For the past eight years, the group has been the hidden hand guiding most of fast food’s dairy hits—a kind of Illuminati of cheese—including and especially taco Bell’s Quesalupa. In 2012 it embedded food scientist Lisa McClintock with the Taco Bell product development team.”
* “The finished product is mega-cheesy: With an entire ounce in the shell, the Quesalupa has about five times the cheese load of a basic Crunchy Taco. To produce the shells alone, Taco Bell had to buy 4.7 million pounds of cheese.”
* “The checkoff program also puts DMI’s agents inside Burger King, Domino’s, McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, and Wendy’s, where they’re privy to each restaurant chain’s most closely guarded trade secrets.”
To read more about how the government and industry promote dairy junk foods, see Michele Simon’s 2014 report — “Whitewashed.”
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