The Dairy Farmers of Canada actually contracted us last year to do focus groups with consumers to find out what they knew about and how they felt about compositional standards for cheese. That of course involved doing a lot of basic research ourselves.
We were absolutely horrified to find that most of the cheese currently on Canadian shelves is not actually cheese, according the standards that fall under the Food and Drugs Act. It is made with modified milk ingredients, which are not allowed under the Food and Drugs Act. That is contrary to the U.S., where they enforce their compositional standards very strongly and post their enforcement decisions online. They said, “We'll shut Kraft down in seven states until they either change their label, call it something other than cheese, or meet the Codex standards.”
That's not being done; it's not being enforced by the CFIA. They're allowing CAPA to take precedence over the Food and Drugs Act and throwing compositional standards in as a quality issue, whereas for us it's a nutrition issue.
One of the points that came out very strongly from this research was that the Canada Food Guide says to eat two slices of processed cheese to replace a glass of milk. We found that you actually needed five and a half slices of processed cheese to replace a glass of milk, and your calories went from 115 to 285. If that's not having a long-term impact on Canadian health....
That's just scratching the surface. We have no Codex standards for yogourt. Ice cream doesn't usually meet the Codex standards. We haven't done a lot of research in other areas, but that's the thin edge of the wedge where the CFIA is not enforcing the way it should.