Milk is Milk Blog by Alex Avery
Today is a first for us. As many of my readers know, my organization - the Center for Global Food Issues - has been striving to educate consumers about false and misleading dairy labeling claims using Internet media. In addition to this blog, the Milk is Milk Web site posts frequent news articles, action items, and links to our partner sites. While some of our efforts have extended to offline activities (such as submitting a request to the CEO of Wal-Mart that his company might embrace non-misleading labeling practices on their organic offerings and running newspaper ads in select papers in key dairy producing regions), the majority of our efforts have been focused online.
Well, that is about to change a little. The Center for Global Food Issues will be launching three billboards that will, quite literally, take the Milk is Milk campaign to the streets. The billboards, two of which will be unveiled today, will be placed along Route 99 in California. “Why California?” you ask. Because, even though you might think that when you go to your local Whole Foods that the food is being sourced locally, the fact of the matter is, as one small family farmer in Connecticut put it, “Almost all the organic food in this country comes out of California. And five or six big California farms dominate the whole industry.” Unfortunately, California just happens to be the state where much of these organic interests exist, and where much of the misleading messages about conventional milk comes from. Check out our press release here.
To all the avid readers of this blog, don’t worry. We’ll continue to fight this good fight online as well. I’ll make sure that my blog is updated consistently, and in fact, we’ve just recently made some improvements to our Web site that will syndicate its articles more widely. Heck, you can just think of these billboards as offline banner ads. And for my California readers, keep your eyes open and let me know what you think about our new billboards. After all, everyone - not just people with access to the Internet - deserves to know that milk is milk.