One interesting thing about lactose free products is, that most aren’t lactose free. They only contain the enzymes to digest the lactose. If you are lactose intolerant this is perfectly fine, but if you’re allergic to lactose it doesn’t change anything for you
I‘m not from the US (Germany) and neither have I much experience with lactose free products. I know someone who is allergic to lactose though and when I was buying stuff for him he told me the exact brand of stuff I needed to get due to the issue I mentioned.
True enough - I have to very careful when visiting local Lidls and browsing their products (though Finnish Lidls tend stock a lot of local lactose free stuff, luckily), else one invites the shitrocket.
But again this invites my query, invoked earlier on another comment in this thread - Germany is a much larger market with lots of immigration and the tech exists. Why not sell it to people, when there is also volume available?
Like most “but why US” questions, the answer starts with ‘M’ and rhymes with ‘oney’.
The dairy lobby is powerful in the US, for reasons I’ve never bothered to look into the few times one of their tantrums end up on the news.
It’s a matter of the Nexus of regulatory capture, unrestricted money in politics, and historic Inertia is my surface understanding of why ‘Dairy’ is such a bristly thing here.
Dairy’s really got their power in the 1940’s-1950’s when most farmers had around 10 head of dairy cows they milked. If was a major source of income to most rural American farmers. These farmers established dairy associations that were and still are highly politically active.
Most of them established a association fees based upon the amount of milk they produced. So they had a lot of money to spend on lobbying and voting power in rural communities. They then used that power to shape national policy and do national marketing campaigns.
With the consolidation of the industry since the 1980’s their voting power has declined but the money for lobbying keeps flowing. Since the u.s. government is controlled by legal bribery at this point…