Big Dairy's Big Friend

The American dairy industry is in a bad way. But the Department of Agriculture has thrown it a lifeline—it’s easing Obama-era rules for school lunchesv.

- Peter Robison and Lydia Mulvany

Consider the lunch lady: long-suffering, warmhearted. Or maybe fed-up and impatient. Always hair-netted. But how did she spend her summer? This past July, chances are she (lunch gentlemen are a rarer sight) was in Las Vegas for the annual conference of the School Nutrition Association. There, in the convention center at the Mandalay Bay hotel, thousands of cooks, cafeteria managers, and cashiers, toting swag bags in slow- moving waves, browsed a supermarket of brands—Tony’s pizza, Campbell’s soup, Cheez-It crackers.

Some purveyors splashed out for full-scale culinary demos, and it was during one of these, at 8:30 a.m., with an overhead camera broadcasting a gleaming cooktop onto a giant screen, that Food Network chef Jason Smith gushed about his favorite recipes from the dairy cooperative Land O’Lakes Inc. Smith, known for loud outfits such as the red shirt and black vest with tropical flowers he wore that morning, was a school cafeteria manager in Kentucky before he hit reality-TV stardom. In a homey drawl, he let the packed ballroom know he hadn’t forgotten how to stretch a school budget.