Cash Cow Exposes the Myths

of the Dairy Industry

In a rousing and polemical new work, Cash Cow: Ten Myths about

the Dairy Industry (Lantern Books, October 2015), French-Canadian

food blogger and writer Élise Desaulniers examines the dairy industry

in her native Quebec, Canada, and North America as a whole.

Comparing her experience of waking up to illusion and

disillusionment to that of the main character played by Jim Carrey in

The Truman Show, Desaulniers, who first published Cash Cow in Canada

under the title Vache à Lait (Stanké, 2013), systematically dismantles all

the reasons we give ourselves on why we have to drink cows’ milk and eat

dairy products.

She argues that our attachment to milk is not cultural, but has been

created by the dairy industry, which spends millions in advertising and

funding research to convince us it’s normal and necessary to consume

dairy. She asks why it is the industry promotes chocolate milk as a healthy

beverage when we know it contains as much sugar as a soft drink. She

notes that independent sources such as the Harvard School of Public Health are questioning the

prominent place dairy has in dietary guidelines despite the evidence that high intakes of dairy

products do not reduce the risk of osteoporosis and may increase the risk of some chronic

diseases. She reveals that industry routinely considers cows merely production units despite their

sensitivity, intelligence, and sociability. She also explains how dairy cows end up as hamburger

meat after four to five years, despite the fact they would normally live more than twenty years if

they weren’t killed. There is no way, she says, to produce milk without suffering.

Desaulniers demonstrates that the treatment of “organic” dairy cows is not significantly

better than regular cows: that they spend most of their time indoors and are artificially

inseminated to continue producing babies, who are taken away from them at birth. She also

shows how dairy is a substantial contributor to climate change: for instance, the water footprint

of one liter of cow’s milk is more than three times that of soymilk (1,050 liters compared to 297).

Contact: Martin Rowe Publisher, Lantern Books martin@lanternbooks.com 212-414-2275 x 12 lanternbooks.com

—more—

The U.S. version of Cash Cow comes with a new foreword by Mia MacDonald of

Brighter Green—a U.S.-based public policy “action” tank that works to encourage policy action

on issues that span the environment, animals, and sustainability. MacDonald places the North

American dairy market in the context of an intensifying, global industry that is taking dairy

consumption to parts of the world where the great majority of individuals are lactose intolerant.

Élise Desaulniers is an independent scholar and animal rights activist who published her first

book on food ethics, Je mange avec ma tête (“I Eat With My Head”), in 2011. She co-authored

two articles in the Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics (Springer 2014) and won the

Quebec Grand Prize for independent journalism (opinion), for a piece on feminism and anti-

speciesism in 2015. A frequent lecturer and presenter at colleges and universities, she lives in

Montreal.

Élise Desaulniers

Cash Cow

Ten Myths about the Dairy Industry

192 pp, 5" x 8," 978-1-59056-493-6 , $16.00 pbk original,

Lantern Books, www.lanternbooks.com