REVIEW & OUTLOOK (Published on January 20, 2007; Page A10)

Starbucks advertises itself as a coffee company with a social conscience. These are the folks who created the marketing gimmick of “fair trade” coffee for America’s latte drinkers. So it’s no shock that Starbucks announced this week that it will buckle under to pressure from left-wing activist groups and phase-out its purchases of milk containing artificial growth hormone.

In so doing the company will help legitimize one of the greatest consumer frauds of recent times: that milk from cows injected with the growth hormone rBGH causes cancer. The hormone’s critics also allege that drinking this milk causes early puberty in girls. About 20% of dairy products today comes from cows injected with hormones, which causes them to produce more milk, which in turn reduces prices to consumers. But for 20 years, green and Naderite groups, such as the Center for Science in the Public Interest, have waged a campaign against rBGH. That campaign has duped millions of health-conscious Americans into paying 40 cents to $2 a gallon more for “hormone-free” milk.

It’s a free country, and if Americans are willing to pay a $2-a-gallon premium for a meaningless label on the milk carton, so be it. But as far back as 1993 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved rGBH-milk as “safe for human consumption.” Some 14 billion gallons have since been consumed, and there have been no documented instances of disease or sickness. Henry Miller of the Hoover Institution, a former director of the FDA’s office of biotechnology, states emphatically: “There is no scientific evidence of a cancer link from the hormone rBGH — period.”