Milk is Milk blog by Alex Avery

Hello all from the World Dairy Expo in Madison, Wisconsin. We’ve been here for the past few days manning a booth informing dairy farmers and consumers about the rampant misleading labeling practices in the dairy industry.

Not so surprisingly, we’ve been swamped with praise and thanks from the majority of dairy farmers (of various production philosophies) who don’t engage in “mislead and deceive” labeling to sell expensive milk.

It’s so heartening to get such enthusiastic support from people who know that hormone, drug, antibiotic, and pesticide claims are just wrong and intended to mislead consumers.

As one dairy scientist who approached our booth said, “the best lab in the world can’t find any difference between the milk [from those making such claims] and conventional.” That’s exactly what we’ve been saying all along.

Alas, not all at the World Dairy Expo are as supportive. It seems that farmers making big bucks via the misleading claims aren’t too happy that they’re being exposed and called out for their questionable marketing practices.

While we expect the occasional organic farmer to stop by and argue with us (and several have done so - mostly from Organic Valley), we didn’t expect the visit we received yesterday from a small gang of twenty-something organic jihadists. Before you think I’m hurling over-the-top insults, hear me out.

The group of young bucks (one supplied Organic Valley with milk) surrounded our table and tried to intimidate us with dark glares and muttered insults. When that didn’t work, they retreated to the steps a few feet away from our booth and glared some more. After they finally dispersed about 20 minutes after they first arrived, we saw that had left us a “warning” — they had beheaded one of the squishy “stress relief” toy cows we’ve been handing out to young and old (a wildly popular item). On the side of the poor, beheaded toy, they’d written “conventional.”

That about sums up their whole strategy: lie, deceive, bluster, and intimidate. But they’ll have to do better than that to make us stop telling it like it is.

Stay tuned, we have a feeling that the milk misinformation campaign is about to heat up.