By Sherry Bunting, Farmshine, May 29, 2020

BROWNSTOWN, Pa. — Two checkoff-funded vehicles are refining the “U.S. Dairy” machine. They are GENYOUth and the FARM program under the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy (“U.S. Dairy” for short), with a board representing food supply chain stakeholders and NGO’s like World Wildlife Fund.

It has been 12 years since the formation of these checkoff-funded organizations and programs under the umbrella of DMI (Dairy Management Inc).

How many times have we heard that consumers are driving FARM program requirements? Are they?

How many times have we heard that today’s young people – Generation Z – are agents for change, that they are socially and environmentally attentive in their food choices, that they are concerned about the impact of agriculture on climate and the environment? Are they?

The next wave for FARM will be environmental requirements to fulfill a new “sustainability” platform from U.S. Dairy’s Sustainability Alliance.

And the next frontier for GENYOUth is to use our nation’s schoolchildren and the climate change conversation as leverage for an emerging industry vision for the “future of food.”

In fact, it looks like they want to make future ‘Greta Thunbergs’ out of our school kids. (Thunberg is the teenage vegan anti-animal climate change activist from Sweden who was recognized as person of the year.)

According to a checkoff-funded survey of 13 to 18 year olds via GENYOUth and Edelman Insights, 56% of teenagers said they have heard of the idea of “sustainable foods” or never really thought about the idea of “sustainable foods” and in saying so, also checked the box that they want to know more. The “want to know more” is what GENYOUth is hanging its hat on to drive new education and influence shifts from food choices that taste good and contribute to personal health to food choices that demonstrate the ‘good for me, good for the planet’ mantra — a self-fulfilling prophecy of food and dairy system transformation DMI food partners want children to lead.  — Source GENYOUth Insights Spring 2020 

GENYOUth’s tagline is “Exercise your influence,” and in the Spring 2020 edition of GENYOUth Insights — the organization’s newsletter to schools and “partners” — the main article under the headline “Youth and the future of food” connects the dots.

GENYOUth used funding from DMI and Midwest Dairy, under the guidance of Edelman Intelligence, to do a survey of teenagers about their food choices.

Known for its “purpose-driven marketing,” Edelman is the global communications  that receives $15 to $17 million a year in checkoff funds from DMI for contract services. Richard Edelman, himself, is a key member of the GENYOUth board of directors. Many of the global companies getting involved in the EAT Forums, such as PepsiCo and Danone, are Edelman clients. Edelman also ‘loaned’ personnel to work with the EAT foundation from Sweden that launched the now infamous EAT Lancet report, and EAT FReSH (Food Reform for Sustainability and Health) Forums last year preaching “planetary boundary diets” that represent huge reductions in consumption of meat, milk and dairy products.

The minds of children are the next frontier. In fact, this is something Edelman identified in that pivotal year of change for DMI. That year, 2008, Edelman launched its “Edelman Food and Nutrition Advisory Panel” staffed by “globally known food and nutrition experts,” who “provide strategic counsel to the firm’s food and nutrition staff in the areas of obesity, food ethics, food policy, functional foods, health claims and nutrition communications,” according to the Holmes Report.

Among those Edelman panel members were past Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee members as well as a later appointee to the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee.

Fast forward to 2020, the recent GENYOUth newsletter article states in large bold type that, “What youth know, care about and do might make or break the future for healthy, sustainable food and food systems… The future of sustainability – which includes the future of food and food systems – will benefit from youth leadership and voice.”

The GENYOUth Insights article identifies the problem as revealed by the Edelman-guided checkoff-funded survey: “Youth are twice as likely to think about the (personal) healthfulness of their food over its environmental impact,” and the GENYOUth newsletter bemoans this finding needing action because “teens aren’t thinking too much about the connection between food and the health of the planet.”

Specifically, 65% of youth surveyed said they regularly think about how healthy or nutritious their food is, but only 33% regularly think about whether the food they eat has an impact on the environment.

In fact, when it came to actual food and beverage choices, a whopping 91% of teens said they think about taste, followed by cost (76%), followed by how personally healthy it is (76%). Whether or not the food is produced in an “environmentally friendly” manner was far behind at 60%. (Teens did say “package recycling” ranked high on their list of considerations.)

What’s wrong with teenagers choosing foods and beverages based on taste, cost and personal health? From this reporter’s perspective, those are logical choice factors for maturing young people. Incidentally, those are criteria that bode well for milk and dairy products.

But GENYOUth and friends want to guide teens to make food and beverage choices based on real or perceived “impact on environment.” This opens the door for partnering food companies to do “social purpose-driven marketing” and for organizations like WWF to further influence them.

This would seem to fall in line with the direction of the next round of Dietary Guidelines, which in 2010 became tied more closely to institutional feeding in schools and daycares through USDA administrative rules and the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act.

For the 2020 Guidelines, the Committee has ignored good research on saturated fat that was screened out of the process by USDA, and they released a draft report this week that further reduces the recommended level of saturated fat in the diets of children over age 2 and adults.

Back in the last cycle of Dietary Guidelines (2015), the committee attempted to use anti-cattle “sustainability” and “planetary health” as criteria in meal pattern recommendations. At the time, the “sustainability” requirement was directed toward reducing beef (cattle) consumption. The dairy industry was silent, while other animal protein sectors became vocal. One thing to remember is that whatever happens to beef will eventually happen to dairy because cattle are most definitely in the “planetary” crosshairs of anti-animal activists.

The “sustainability” language and framework were ultimately removed from the 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines, but fat is still the tool.

Back to the Spring 2020 GENYOUth Insights article, a new tagline has been coined: “good for me, good for the planet.”

The walk down the slippery slope begins. GENYOUth and friends, including USDA, want today’s teens to place more decision-making emphasis on the impact of food on the environment. In the Insights article, GENYOUth points out to its partnering companies and schools that kids don’t care enough about the environmental impact of the food they choose to eat.

This is where  FARM requirements and checkoff promotion are headed – toward social purpose-driven marketing as defined by the various supply chain partners that have people on these checkoff-influencing boards. The plan is to indoctrinate schoolchildren on sustainable food choices, then adapt what farms have to do to meet new consumer-driven criteria.

Yes, GENYOUth spent 12 years bringing big business into the schools through its non-profit foundation status. During that time, USDA, mainly 2010-2016 under Secretary Vilsack, has tightened the way Dietary Guidelines are tied to school food, NFL has marketed football through FUTP60 (while receiving $5 to $7 million annually from DMI), the NFL’s longstanding beverage partner PepsiCo received the 2018 GENYOUth Vanguard award and has created one of the largest K-12 foodservice companies in the U.S. Meanwhile, the dairy farmers – who started it all and fund the majority of GENYOUth through DMI – are stuck promoting fat-free and 1% milk, fat free yogurt and fat free cheese.

As reported recently in Farmshine, the partnership with DMI also gave Domino’s access to a whole new $63 million a year business making Dietary-Guidelines-correct cheese pizza for schools.

Through GENYOUth, America’s young people are being “led” into their ordained role as “agents of change” to lead the “future of food.”

The GENYOUth Insights article focuses on two examples of climate activism – holding them up as examples of how young people can and should be energized.

First, they reference the recently released report “A Future for the World’s Children?” produced by the World Health Organization (WHO), UNICEF and The Lancet. Think of this as the youth-version of the now infamous 2019 EAT Lancet report where new “planetary boundary” diets, depleted of animal protein, are recommended for human and planetary “health.”

We’ll call this report “EAT Lancet Junior”, and in GENYOUth’s own description, this report “reinforces the importance of placing children at the heart of United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.”

DMI has been actively working to incorporate these U.N. SDGs into “U.S. Dairy’s” sustainability framework and Net Zero emissions benchmark. This work also began over a decade ago when the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy was formed and GENYOUth was founded and the FARM program was under initial development.

Lead the children through confirmation bias, get them to become energized activists, respond with a “U.S. Dairy” plan that aligns with that activism, and implement it through the FARM program – further refining who can and can’t be part of “U.S. Dairy” in the future.

DMI knows full well that not all farms will be able to meet the criteria that are coming. In fact, according to a news release from PDPW covering the virtual presentation by Dr. Mike McCloskey, a key member of the U.S. Dairy Sustainability Council, acknowledged this fact.

Meanwhile, GENYOUth quotes from the “EAT Lancet Junior” report, asserting that, “Sustainability is for and about the next generation… We must find better ways to amplify children’s voices and skills for the planet’s healthy future.”

In its Edelman Intelligence survey of teenagers, GENYOUth reveals what it calls the “surprising disconnects and opportunities for stakeholders throughout the food ecosystem to do more to help ensure youth can lead, act and choose wisely in today’s food environment.”

When it comes to this idea of  ‘food that is good for me, good for the planet,’ teens said they currently rely on their families for most of this information and that they trust farmers for information.

But GENYOUth would like to move schools and food companies into this knowledge building arena – using farmers to ‘tell the story’ and teaching kids how to make ‘good for me, good for the planet’ food and beverage choices.

GENYOUth makes the case in its newsletter that now is the time to move toward ‘good for me, good for the planet’ food choice training of youth, which they say “aligns with a growing interest and sense of urgency among the food industry, farmers and others about the future of food and sustainability.”

So far this plan seems like one in which dairy farmers are helping steer the conversation and future choices, right?

Until we read deeper.

“How can the food industry and farmers become helpful and effective messengers around sustainable nutrition information to support youth?” And “How can schools play a bigger role?” These are two questions GENYOUth asks in its spring newsletter.

The answers, according to GENYOUth, are to see schools and food-related sectors become supporters that engage and inform young people about what foods and beverages are ‘good for me, good for the planet.’

Bottom line? The path to the future of food is one that moves the next generation away from prioritizing personal health, cost and flavor to put more emphasis on the importance of how food impacts communities, animals and the planet. DMI executive and former Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack said as much to the Senate Ag Committee a year ago when he asked Congress to help fund the pilot programs on farms that will get dairy where they believe it needs to be.

It’s not hard to understand why DMI is so slow to want to “educate” consumers about dairy products from a nutrition or comfort-food standpoint and why it is putting its checkoff bets on “sustainability” and “animal care.” Promotion of nutrition puts all dairy farmers on a level playing field. Promotion and implementation of sustainability requirements is a method for refining the U.S. Dairy machine.

GENYOUth says it wants young people to tackle the tradeoffs between health and environment and between taste and environment. They want schools and food companies to reinforce the concept that, “We all must take part in helping to sustain a fragile planet.”

We already see this beginning in our schools. A recent Scholastic Weekly Reader made headlines on social media when fake hamburger was touted as “the meat that could save the planet.” We see it in the vested plans of multi-national companies that are moving toward these products and marketing.

But it was the next part of the GENYOUth spring newsletter that was really shocking. Being held up as the example of youth leadership was Greta Thunberg, the teenage vegan anti-animal climate activist from Sweden, the country from which the EAT Lancet report on new planetary diets originated in 2019.

Don’t forget, the EAT Forum has the backing and participation of most of the top multi-national food companies including the top dairy product companies, as well as NGOs like WWF, and the dairy checkoff’s PR firm Edelman.

According to the GENYOUth newsletter: “We all must take part in helping to sustain a fragile planet. The astonishing power of aware, engaged, passionate youth is being brought home to us daily. As a remarkable example, look no further than Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg as the face of the climate-change movement.

“Aware, informed and engaged youth can be a powerful force for the movement toward food that’s ‘good for me and good for the planet,’” the GENYOUth newsletter continues.

Yes, alongside dairy farmer mandatory checkoff funds that launched and are maintaining GENYOUth administratively are the token funds of so-called “thought leaders” — large multi-national food corporations, sleep companies (because USDA is now interested in sleep studies on kids), technology companies, advertising and marketing companies, as well as celebrities and investor philanthropists.

In the name of breakfast cart donations, they are all riding the GENYOUth school bus to make future Greta Thunbergs of our kids.

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