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16 J. Food L. & Pol'y 11 (2020)
Something to Celebrate?: Demoting Dairy in Canada's National Food Guide

handle is hein.journals/jfool16 and id is 18 raw text is: Something to Celebrate?: Demoting Dairy in Canada's National Food Guide Maneesha Deckha* Abstract In early 2019, the Canadian Government released the much- anticipated new Canada Food Guide. It is a food guide that de- emphasizes dairy products and promotes plant-based eating. Notably, in the new version, milk and milk products are de-listed as one of the previously four essential food groups. On the surface, it seems that the federal government is promoting veganism and helping to bring about a friendlier future for animals and humans harmed by being producers and consumers of dairy, as the new Guide may seriously contract the currently robust Canadian dairy industry and its powerful lobby. On closer inspection, the messaging from Health Canada is easily overtaken by an administrative landscape that protects the dairy industry and markets dairy products to Canadians and abroad as well as a legal landscape that completely commodifies cows. Adopting a critical animal studies perspective, this paper situates Health Canada's de-listing of dairy as a nutritionally foundational food source within a larger socio-legal Canadian regulatory landscape to assess the potential of the new Canada Food Guide to contest the entrenched legal and cultural norm of the dairy cow and her milk as products for human consumption. I. Introduction Through its agency, Health Canada, the Canadian government issued an updated version of its national food guide on healthy eating, titled Canada Food Guide, in 2019 (2019 Guide).1 * Maneesha Deckha is Professor and Lansdowne Chair in Law at the University of Victoria. She expresses her gratitude to the workshop convenor Dr. Cressida Limon and the participants of the Eggs, Milk and Honey: Law and Global Bio- Commodities Research Workshop held at the University of Western Sydney, and to the members at the Centre for Feminist Legal Studies at The University of British Columbia Allard School of Law for their comments on previous presentations of this research. She is grateful to the journal editors for their exceptional editorial assistance and to Nina Dauvergne for her excellent student research assistance. Professor Deckha is also grateful to the organizers of the Dairy Tales: Global Portraits of Law and Milk symposium for graciously inviting this contribution and convening the symposium on which this special issue is based. Finally, she extends her appreciation to the University of Western Sydney and Brooks Institute for Animal Rights Law & Policy for travel support.

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