Maybe I’m just sensitive, considering the time I spend each summer around the barns at State Fair Park, but the latest California cheese commercial has me steaming.
You’ve seen them, a bunch of cows parading around sunny fields with the tag line: “Great cheese comes from happy cows … happy cows come from California.”
In the commercial, a young calf is asking a cow in the field where she came from. After a little prodding, the elder cow shudders and the picture fades into a shot of the cow, standing in the middle of a windy blizzard -- an obvious dig at Wisconsin.
First of all, it hasn’t snowed here since the beginning of December. Let’s just get that out of the way.
More importantly, do the farmers of California really think that their idiotic campaign will actually have an impact here? Why on earth would Wisconsinites spend money on dairy products imported from the West Coast? Surely, it can’t come in cheaper than products made in say, Reedsburg, Merrill or even Waukesha.
My friends in California like to point out that Wisconsin isn’t officially “America’s Dairyland” anymore. That’s fine, at last check Wisconsin had a heck of a lot more lakes than our neighbors to the west, yet Minnesota still promotes itself as the "Land of 10,000 Lakes.”
Wisconsin still has the largest Junior Dairy Show in the country at the State Fair, and the dairy industry contributes more than $20 billion to the state’s economy. Considering that the citrus industry provides just $9 billion to the Florida economy and Idaho only gets $2.5 billion for potatoes, it looks like Wisconsin farmers have a pretty good idea of what they’re doing.
And we’re not the only ones, it seems, drinking our milk. More than 90 percent of the cheese made in Wisconsin is sold outside the state.
So don’t buy into the hype. The cows in California may be happy, but maybe that’s just because they haven’t been to Wisconsin. And if that state really is the new cheese capital of the world, maybe we Wisconsinites can ship our foam hats and let their sports fans become the oft-insulted “cheeseheads.”
That’s one title Wisconsin could gladly give up.
