Milk and Food Aid

World School Milk Day

The last Wednesday of September is World School Milk Day, a day that is observed in schools around the world to celebrate school milk and teach children about the benefits of drinking milk. Most people have probably never heard of this celebration but it would be difficult to overstate its significance. School milk programs are arguably the single most important driver of dairy consumption. To be clear: milk consumption is not merely increasing around the world, rather, milk consumption is being adopted as a wholly new behavior, and along with it, the idea that children must drink milk to grow and be healthy.

Many populations with no prior culture of milk consumption are now fully buying into this idea. That dairy should be eaten everyday and even constitute its own food group, as is the case in the American dietary guidelines, is a predominantly Western view. Like many things Western, it is rapidly becoming the global norm.

School milk programs are crucial to this global cultural and dietary shift. These programs, whereby children receive free or discounted milk at school, are a means to subsidize the dairy industry and provide an immediate outlet for their products. The short-term benefits for the dairy industry are evident, but their long-term effects are more significant.

Those involved in what can be rightly called the School Milk Industry, which includes actors such as the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the International Dairy Federation, speak clearly of the long-term goal. The importance of school milk programs is that it targets children. The taste buds, food culture and beliefs about nutrition of children are still an open slate, so by habituating them to drink milk one can create a future consumer base.

Milk is not only marketed as a food that is good or healthy—it’s marketed as something that is essential to children’s health, and by extension, to the healthy development of nations. The distinction is crucial, because if one particular food is necessary for growth, it means that other healthy foods are not quite healthy enough to fulfill the same functions. The implication of the rhetoric around school milk programs is that traditional foods are not up to the task of ensuring the growth and development of children. This rhetoric reinforces the homogenization of diets and agricultural systems that accompany the corporate globalization of our food systems.

World School Milk Day 2015 - Malaysia — World School Milk Day 2015 – Malaysia

In many regions with new school milk programs, lactose intolerance is the norm. One would think that unpleasant symptoms caused by drinking milk would put a damper on the rush to create a milk-drinking culture, but in fact, it doesn’t seem to make much of a difference. This situation highlights the power of the West to define dietary norms, which is relevant to countless other foods, from soda to hamburgers. Even when one is lactose intolerant, the conviction that milk is necessary is so strong that instead of going without milk, the solution must be found elsewhere. A number of strategies are proposed by health professionals: lactase supplements, smaller and more frequent servings, lactose-free milk, etc. These strategies reflect and reinforce the belief that just as diets without milk (i.e. most traditional diets) are deficient, lactose-intolerant bodies (i.e. most bodies) are pathological. School milk programs powerfully assert the normativity of milk and of lactase persistence*.

We should counter-celebrate World School Milk Day by appreciating and sharing information about the myriad of plant foods enjoyed around the world that are rich in calcium. Let’s teach children about their nutritional value and encourage them to be stewards of the biodiversity on which these foods depend. Let’s truly work to build the health of children, not the profits of the dairy industry.

* Lactase persistence is the condition where one’s body continues to produce lactase, the enzyme necessary to digest lactose, through adulthood. Lactase persistence is most common in cultures that have long consumed milk, for example those of northern Europe.

This post also appeared on seedthecommons.org.

Racism in Latin America

This weekend I saw expressed again an idea that pops up on occasion: that race doesn’t matter in Latin America.

It’s contrary to what I’ve witnessed and, frankly, to common sense. Race, in Latin America, is not an explicit and ever-present identifier in the same way that it is in the US. However, racism exists, and therefore, race matters. It may be that in some places, the distinction between white and mestizo is not as marked as in the US, hence the misunderstanding about the importance of race in general. But even there, inequality of representation in political and media spheres does indicate that whiteness matters.

Indigenous people are largely disenfranchised; Black people are often spoken about in ways deemed grossly politically incorrect in the US. Latin America is a huge and diverse region so I’ll just briefly speak about the place that I’ve started exploring for my research on food: Chiapas.

In San Cristobal, indigenous people were not permitted to walk on the sidewalk until as recently as the 1970s. They had to walk on the road instead. In Las Doñas de Chiapas, a collection of interviews of Chiapanecan women, patriarchy is a powerful current that creates a unifying narrative of the lives of all the women. However, there are also stark differences. Indigenous women speak of the difficulties of accessing sufficient food while one of the white women recounts traveling on the back of an “Indio Chamula”* in her childhood. This was the common method of transportation for her class and generation. Most of these women are still alive; this is very recent history.

The marginalization and poverty of indigenous people in Mexico is the framework of much of the country’s social assistance. It must be visible if one is to have any functioning understanding of the dietary and cultural effects of food aid. Likewise, exploring common representations of indigenous people, their food, and their bodies, is central to understanding the transformation of their food culture through milk distribution.

In San Cristobal, I spoke to many non-indigenous Mexicans about what indigenous people ate, and why. Their answers were overwhelmingly negative and one-dimensional. Portraying indigenous diets as inherently deficient, and pinning this more on culture than on economy, has profound ramifications. The government’s decision to promote milk as a nutritional panacea instead of implementing policies that would encourage consumption of native foods is, of course, primarily about profit. However, policies, assistance programs and public health discourse do not happen in a social vacuum. And the social context in which these are formed is fraught with racism. I will discuss this in upcoming posts as I analyze the relationship between social representations of foods, social identity, and the transformation of food culture.

*Indigenous man from the municipality of Chamula.

The Narrative of Lack

IMG_20160128_122541877 I met a vegan couple, one of them from Mexico and the other from the US, at Te Quiero Verde, a vegetarian restaurant with this awesome mural. The American has been involved in animal rights and other activism since the 90s. Upon hearing about my project, he told me the following story about the effects of food aid in Haiti, where he worked for several years.

In the middle of the last century, Haiti produced and consumed its own rice. At some point, it even exported rice as aid. And then, following a natural disaster, it started being flooded with American rice, which killed off local rice production as Haitian farmers couldn’t compete. The American rice was milled white rice with little nutritional value, while Haitian rice was brown. The effect of killing off local production was therefore not only economic but directly nutritional as well. And thus, in supposedly addressing a problem another one was created, leaving Haitians more in need of measures to address malnutrition.

Food aid can not be thought of in disjunction from the economic system in which it takes place. As critics have long pointed out, it has often been built on a donor-based logic, which means that the primary function of food aid is to fulfill the needs of donors – for example rice or milk producers – as opposed to the needs of the recipients. As expected however, rhetoric around food aid focuses on the recipients – their starvation, their malnutrition, their poverty. It is portrayed as a generous donation to address a pressing need in the recipient population.

Part of my work here is to look at the effects of food aid – in changing local markets, one also changes local food cultures. But analyzing the effects of aid also involves taking a critical eye to the narrative of lack. Is it real? Is it created? Is it being effectively addressed through aid? Is it the result of a larger systemic issue? If so, how does aid fit into the factors that created the need?

In the case of Haiti, aid wiped out an important source of nutrition and replaced it with empty calories. At some point in the cycle, the lost nutrients will need to be recuperated, perhaps with more aid. Where malnutrition exists it has a story and a cause, yet the marketing of aid is predicated on the implicit notion that malnutrition, hunger or poverty are default states.

When thinking about the distribution of milk to children, it’s interesting to take stock of the other foods that make up, or could make up, their diets. The idea that milk is an essential source of calcium is for many an almost unshakable truth – vegans who claim they get their calcium from almonds or broccoli are often met with doubtful looks. The same belief exists in Mexico. My conversations with women have yielded that they are exposed to the constant message – from medical professionals and commercials – that milk is a necessary source of calcium for them and their children.

Ironically, the basis itself of Mexican food is the tortilla, which is traditionally highly rich in calcium. For thousands of years, tortillas have been made with a process called nixtamalization, whereby the grains of corn are soaked in a lye solution for an entire day. The corn is then rinsed and ground and tortillas are made with the resulting wet mass. Nixtamilization drastically improves the nutritional profile of corn in several ways, among which, by adding calcium. In recent decades, traditional tortillerias have been mostly replaced by those selling Maseca tortillas, a brand owned by the large Mexican multinational Gruma. The move from an artesanal to an industrial process has resulted in a tortilla that is less calcium-rich. (Of course, people have also started consuming large amounts of other products churned out by Big Ag – coke, sabritas, etc – none of them nutritionally dense).

An approach that would truly benefit recipients would be to nurture and build on the existent basis – and the basis here is extremely rich. The state of Chiapas actually gets its name from the chia seed, another calcium powerhouse. An abundance of greens have also traditionally been grown in milpas and harvested in the wild, but their consumption is declining.* While milk and other industrial foods are ushered into marginal communities as food aid, traditional food systems are being dismantled by the market forces that create malnourished kids.

It’s worth taking a moment to consider the implications of a narrative that positions milk as essential in a context where it is not traditionally consumed.

Imagine growing up in the West. You’ve rarely, if ever, come across yucca. As an adult, you suddenly start to see it everywhere. It is promoted to the middle-class through commercials and gracefully bestowed on the poor to ensure their health. Medical staff insist that mothers absolutely must feed their children yucca everyday. It would seem that until that moment in history, nothing your family grew or ate for generations, nothing you could find in a store growing up, was nourishment enough to ensure your children would be well-fed.

The promotion of milk is linked to another implicit narrative of lack. Many foods are said to be healthy – some have been even labeled “superfoods”. To position a food as necessary is something else altogether. As milk becomes increasingly central to public health discourse and social assistance programs around the world, it subtly delegitimizes traditional foods as possible sources of nutrition and health. The idea may be unarticulated but clear: before the Spanish brought their cows and culture, there was no way for children in Chiapas to have strong bones and develop healthily. Luckily for them, Nestlé, Lala and others continue their benevolent crusade.

*This was the recent topic of the Masters thesis of an acquaintance, I’ll devote another post to her work.

Casa Vegano Sol

I’m staying at a guest house called Casa Vegano Sol. The owners encourage guests to keep a vegetarian kitchen and while they are not completely vegan, they aim their diet in that direction. Their son eats vegan at home and only drinks the milk that he receives at school. Indeed, Mexico has an extensive “Desayunos Escolares” program of which milk is a main component. In fact, the precursor to Desayunos Escolares was a program called La Gota de Leche – “The Drop of Milk”.

The couple who own this guest house both grimaced when I told them I was here to study Liconsa, a social program that distributes milk to vulnerable populations. We’ve spoken a bit about food in Mexico and I’m looking forward to hearing more of their observations around the food system in Chiapas. The wife is from San Cristobal, so it will be especially interesting to hear more from her about changes since her childhood in the city and surrounding communities, where much of her family lives.

This is a picture, badly taken I realize, of the husband painting a sign advertising vegan tacos. He is helping out an older lady who lives nearby and who will start selling vegan tacos next week. I know how I’ll be helping out the local economy…

And here’s the completed sign.

First post!

Finally starting a blog! My first focus will be my trip to Chiapas, where I arrived today to explore the role of food aid in changing food cultures and the process by which populations adopt the norms of dominant groups.

Like many parts of the world, Mexico does not have a strong tradition of milk consumption. Cattle was introduced by the Spanish, but during the colonial era milk consumption did not spread to much of the country, which remained largely indigenous. Current American and European cultural and economic influence is quickening a shift to dairy-rich diets. During my trip, I aim to look at the role of food aid in this process.

Since the 1940s, the Mexican government has been subsidizing the distribution of milk to vulnerable populations, especially children and pregnant or nursing mothers. Around the world, milk distribution has been a hugely significant driver of cultural changes around milk consumption, serving to normalize milk as part of one’s daily diet. This process is especially apparent today in East and South-East Asia.

Chiapas is a largely indigenous state in the south of Mexico that has had relatively little integration into “Mestizo” Mexican culture. It is undeniable that Western consumption habits have recently gained a firm hold in Mexico and processed foods and animal products are very prevalent. Mexico has even surpassed the US in per capita soda consumption – and has the diabesity numbers to show for it. Whether Mexico is therefore still a good place for this study is a question I’ll have to answer – has dairy already become completely normal and commonplace?

For now, my sense is that along with the colonization of local food systems by Big Ag, the positioning of dairy as a dietary cornerstone is still unfinished business. And so far, anecdotal evidence seems to confirm this. For example, a woman who has worked in Chiapanecan communities told me of seeing indigenous women give donated milk to their dogs, because “they don’t drink milk”. In San Francisco, I interviewed a young migrant from Yucatan who related how his mom started pushing him to drink milk when he was around the age of 18, for only then had she become exposed to public messaging regarding its importance.

Like other populations that do not traditionally consume milk, indigenous Mexicans have high rates of lactose intolerance. Given this, the heavy focus on milk in social programs raises further questions on ethnocentrism, normativity and the relationship of people to the norms of dominant groups. I’ll start to explore all if this here!

Welcome, and feel free to contact me with your questions and feedback.