Skinny Bitch by Rory Freedman

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    Meaning, in essence, the California Department of Agriculture and the USDA are managing advertising campaigns for the milk industry. Under the guise of advancing health, they managed to dupe President Bill Clinton, while he was in office, into posing for their ads. They also had the audacity to feature the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Donna Shalala, sporting that stupid “milk mustache.”174 The Secretary of Health and Human Services using her status and title to promote a commercial product! Would she appear in ads for Pepsi or Nike? Say it out loud: conflict of interest.
    They’ve even got the U.S. surgeon general in on the act. In the first-ever report on “the state of the nation’s bones,” the U.S. surgeon general warned of an impending “osteoporosis crisis” expected by the year 2020. In order to ward off this potential disaster, the Surgeon General’s report recommended three glasses of milk a day.
    Guess who issued the report? The Department of Health and Human Services.175 Trust no one.
    The horrors committed by the USDA could fill an entire book.
    But we shouldn’t be surprised. Although they don’t list it as part of their primary mission statement, the USDA does admit to being “committed to helping America’s farmers and ranchers.”176 The same USDA responsible for “the safety” of meat, poultry, dairy, and eggs also promotes the sale of them. In fact, they even go so far as to purchase the products themselves, using our tax dollars. The USDA will spend $30 million a year on beef buyouts alone.
    Another $30 million of our hard-earned money goes toward pork purchases.177 Wow. It must be nice for these industries to have the USDA bailing them out whenever they have a surplus of items.
    What, exactly, do they do with all this food that we pay for?
    All in a Day’s Work
    Ever hear of the National School Lunch Program (NSLP)? It’s a nation-wide $4 billion scheme that allows the USDA to buy up all this meat, milk, and cheese with our tax dollars, and then dump this crap into the bodies of more than 26 million school children.178 Ever wonder why school lunches are required to include milk? The NSLP directly benefits the meat, dairy, and poultry industries at the expense of our nation’s children.
    In 1999, a ground beef plant in Texas failed a series of USDA tests for salmonella. The tests showed that as much as 47 percent of the company’s ground beef contained salmonella—a proportion 5 times higher than what USDA regulations allow. Despite this, and the fact that high levels of salmonella in ground beef indicate high levels of fecal contamination, the USDA continued to purchase thousands of tons of the meat for distribution in schools. In fact, this company was one of the nation’s largest suppliers for the school meals, providing as much as 45 percent of the program’s ground meat.179
    Contamination aside, according to Michele Simon of the Center for Informed Food Choices, “One evaluation of the commodity foods program estimates that 70 percent of the items offered exceed the U.S. dietary guidelines for fat.”180 For decades, consumer advocacy groups have been horrified by this unhealthy, profit-driven arrangement. With the backing of countless parents, physicians, and nutritionists, they have battled to get soy milk and other healthier choices approved by the USDA for use in school lunches. But the USDA (a.k.a.: the beef, pork, poultry, and dairy industries) wants no part in this, of course.
    The USDA has fifteen food-assistance programs, including ones for the elderly, homeless, military, and poor. It is estimated that one in five Americans will take part in this $41.6 billion program.181
    Sounds like the USDA is helping to feed a lot of people, right?
    Right. They are feeding them fattening, unhealthy, artery-clogging, heart-stopping, acid-producing, contaminated meat, poultry, and dairy—with our money. How generous.
    Organic or Not?
    It’s not enough that