The Dairy Industry Is Funding Satire In The Onion With Tax Dollars

By Melissa McEwen in Food on Aug 14, 2015 2:03PM

Thursday Civil Eats reported on how the dairy industry is targeting Millennials with sponsored content in The Onion. Amid declining dairy consumption and the growing popularity of non-dairy milks, they reportedly paid The Onion to run satires of concerns about antibiotics and "mean tweets."

One such sponsored piece, "Blogger Takes Few Moments Every Morning To Decide Whether To Feel Outraged, Incensed, Or Shocked By Day’s News," is suffused with lines like "Today, for example, I plan to rant about how we’re all morphing into poisonous zombies from the antibiotics administered to dairy cows by aliens."

At the bottom of the piece, a line says "America’s dairy farmers and importers want to share the real facts about milk. Learn more here" which leads to a site named Dairy Good.

What Civil Eats doesn't delve into is how Dairy Good is funded. It's part of The Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy, which is funded by a patchwork of source, which includes USDA funding (a.k.a. your tax dollars at work), as well as what's known as a checkoff program.

These programs include mandatory fees that all producers of certain products must pay, which goes into funding the promotion of those products. The problem is the groups that get this funding don't necessarily represent all farmers. It means even if you are a small milk producer with concerns about misuse of antibiotics, you are forced to fund things like Onion articles that make fun of these same concerns.