By Martha Rosenberg
Not everyone likes--or drinks--milk. Teenagers and young adults typically shun it as do dieters, athletes and health-food eaters who reject the cholesterol, fat, calories and allergens. Several ethnic groups also avoid milk, as do the lactose intolerant, people who drink or smoke and animal and environmental activists. In fact, Dr. Benjamin Spock, whose pediatric advice shaped the entire Baby Boom generation, recommended no milk for children after age two, in his later years, to reduce their risks of heart disease, obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes and diet-related cancers.
Despite the ubiquitous “Got Milk?” mustache ads, milk drinking falls more every year.
The National Dairy Promotion and Research Program and the National Fluid Milk Processor Promotion Program, who are in charge of marketing milk, say that calcium-forti?ed juices and vitamin-enhanced beverages have supplanted milk’s healthy image.
The milk lobby has tried everything to make people like or buy milk, especially young people who it wants to get the milk "habit." A few years ago, milk marketers rolled out White Gold and the Calcium Twins, a spoof-y musical group that rocked out on YouTube and social-networking sites about milk’s bene?ts for hair, teeth, nails, and biceps. They also created an animated cartoon called the “Moo Factory,” which depicted cows, chickens, ducks, and pigs (and a horse working out on a treadmill), while milk cartons moved by on a conveyor belt. A helium balloon pops up continually, saying, “Tell Your Friends.”
“Do you think drinking calcium forti?ed beverages like soy drinks and orange juice will meet your bones’ requirements?” asks the cartoon. “Not really, says research that concluded 75 percent of calcium added to popular beverages gets left at the bottom of the carton.” Then an animated disclaimer pops up and confesses that milk’s actual bene?ts for “bones, PMS, sleep, teeth, hair, muscles [and] nails” have been “purposefully exaggerated so as not to bore you.”
The glib derision toward consumers, animals, and the truth gets even worse. “No animals were harmed in the making of this site,” says the Moo Factory as you leave it. “In fact the animals aren’t even real. If you think we could get a real pig to wear curlers, you’re bonkers,” says the site.
Jokes about "harming" animals are unforgivable in an industry considered one of the cruelest. After debilitation on dairy farms, milk cows are sold as cull cows to make cheap meat like fast food hamburgers. Undercover videos show that many too weak to even walk. Dairy cows are kept pregnant to keep producing milk and their babies are taken away to be slaughtered as veal over their plaintive and heart-breaking protests.
Recently milk producers have tried another marketing technique--adding artificial sweeteners like aspartame to chocolate and flavored milk. Most kids prefer flavored to unflavored milk but the drinks' high sugar content has earned them a ban in some school districts. Of course a trade-off between artificial sweeteners and too much sugar pleases no one--and some school officials will still ban the drinks. This leaves milk marketers scrambling for a new way to sell their "healthy" product. And competing with soy, rice, almond, flax, hemp and coconut milks all of which really are healthy. END
Read reviews of Martha Rosenberg's acclaimed food expose, Born with a Junk Food Deficiency on Facebook.
Comments