Milk: To label or not to label?

There’s a battle taking place on U.S. grocery store shelves that most consumers don’t know about: Monsanto, the St. Louis-based agribusiness company, is again petitioning the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to prevent sellers of organic and sustainable milk from listing their products as rBGH- or rBST-free. Monsanto claims that these labels letting consumers know what’s NOT in their milk are misleading. But who is misleading whom?

Monsanto doesn’t tell consumers that rBGH (recombinant bovine growth hormone), in addition to increasing milk production in cows, can lead to bovine health problems (such as painful mastitis which infects cows’ udders) and in turn force producers to increase antibiotic use on dairy farms. And there is evidence to suggest that rBGH can cause cancer in humans.

The debate over whether to label or not has been raging ever since bovine growth hormones were introduced in the 1990s and manufacturers like Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and others wanted to assure consumers that their dairy products didn’t contain rBST or rBGH. And despite Monsanto’s assertions that consumers don’t need labeling, a March 2007 poll found that 80 percent of consumers do not want milk containing rBGH.

The entire European Union, as well as Australia, Canada, Japan, and New Zealand, have all banned use of rBGH, leading food advocacy groups to question whether Monsanto (and, depending on its response to Monsanto, the FDA), thinks U.S. consumers don’t deserve the same information as in other parts of the world.

Interested in staying away from rBGH? Buy organic milk or, even better, milk from a farmer you know at a farmers market. (In the U.S., check out Local Harvest for a list of farmers markets and community supported agriculture (CSA) groups in your state.)