Dairy Industry Takes Ever-Growing Milk Authenticity Crisis To The Internet

The National Milk Producers Foundation is fed up at all the fake dairy products out there — your soy milks, your rice cheeses, your muscle milks. So it’s starting to agitate, asking the Food & Drug Administration to limit use of the word “milk” to what they call “mammalian lacteal secretions.” (Yay, human milk is in the clear!) Too bad that the FDA has been ignoring lobbies regarding this particular semantic subject since the soy industry first petitioned them to be allowed use the term “soy milk” in 1996. So the milk producers are fighting to keep it real the only way they (or their interns) know how — on Facebook!

The They Don’t Got Milk campaign (get it?) may only have 213 fans at the time of this writing, but it does have rogue’s galleries of “beverages that use the names of a real dairy product (‘milk’), but don’t contain ANY real dairy milk!” and similarly offensive foods, as well as a very huffy mission statement about “white fluids”:

Putting a white fluid into the same package as milk, with pictures showing uses for it just like milk, with phrases on the carton like “the perfect alternative for milk”, putting it in the dairy case right beside milk, and including the word “milk” in the name of the product… all confuse the consumer into thinking these imitation products are nutritionally the same as real milk, when in fact they aren’t the same.

Or, as one fan of the page puts it more succinctly:

Milk is milk, made from milk. Peanuts are peanut. Don’t get it twisted!

Unless you are making a delicious peanut butter milkshake, of course. (Right? That’s still allowed?)