Big Dairy has been funding pro-milk public relations campaigns for decades: You’ve without a doubt seen a “Got Milk?” ad on a billboard or in a magazine at some point between the 1990s and now. One of dairy’s biggest rivals, oat milk brand Oatly, has just launched its own campaign in response to the many attack ads plant-based milks have been subject to.
Oatly’s campaign takes dairy to task with a seemingly simple offer: free ad space in exchange for the dairy industry releasing information on the climate impact of its products. The Sunday, May 7, editions of the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post all featured a two-page ad spread that reads: “We bought this two-page ad to tell you we’ve started including climate footprint numbers on our products. And we’re donating this [second] page to the dairy industry so they can tell you their climate footprint numbers too.” Corresponding pairs of billboards, each offering one board to the dairy industry, popped up in New York and Los Angeles the next day.
The campaign is brilliant in its simplicity: Rather than overtly making any statements or accusations against dairy, their tactic is a (seemingly) simple call for transparency. The catch, of course, is that there are a lot of publicly available, peer-reviewed scientific publications that attest to dairy’s considerable negative environmental impact. Their offer puts the dairy industry in a tricky position: Be transparent and release potentially unflattering facts, or maintain opacity and let the implication speak for itself.
The “Climate Footprint Challenge” campaign isn’t exactly coming out of nowhere. The dairy industry, along with other animal-agriculture industries (including and especially beef), has been launching full-force attacks against plant-based alternatives.
This has been taking place at the government level, with industry groups lobbying for the FDA to keep plant-milk brands from using the word “milk” – i.e, “almond beverage” instead of “almond milk,” on the grounds that customers lack the ability to distinguish between similar terminology. (It’s worth noting that they’ve yet to go after the peanut industry for selling peanut butter, or apple farmers for selling apple butter, or pumpkin farmers for selling pumpkin butter…and so on.) The motivation for this lobbying probably has something to do with the commercial threat posed by non-dairy milk alternatives, while milk sales in the U.S. have been fairly steadily declining since the mid-aughts.
And outside of governmental advocacy, industrial animal agriculture has a robust history of marketing directly to consumers. Oatly’s campaign comes right on the heels of Big Dairy’s latest big-budget marketing project, featuring the famously deadpan-cool Aubrey Plaza. The actress starred in a campaign paid for by the Milk Processor Education Program, a quasi-governmental dairy industry organization administered by the USDA, and the same group behind “Got Milk?”
The ads, which you may have seen recently on TV, subway ads, and Plaza’s own Instagram, promote a phony new product called Wood Milk, a tongue-in-cheek jab at the flavor and nutritional profile of plant-based milks. It concludes with the punchline, “Is Wood Milk real? Absolutely not. Only real milk is real.”
The ad campaign quickly faced criticism, even prompting Plaza to turn off comments on her Wood Milk post. Kenny Torrella, writing for Vox, pointed out that the snarky ad’s main argument in favor of dairy over plant milk is based on a vaguely deployed “naturalistic fallacy,” which grants first that dairy milk is more “natural” and less “processed” than plant milks, and second, that anything “natural” is inherently better than anything “processed.” The ads also fail to address what are arguably the biggest criticisms facing the dairy industry right now: those pertaining to sustainability.
While the Oatly campaign is based around a call for transparency and scientifically supported information, the Wood Milk campaign traffics largely in impressions and public perceptions that aren’t necessarily backed up by any sort of hard facts—not about the nutritional properties of milk, and certainly not about any of the ethical issues relating to its production. It’s part of a larger trend in animal-agriculture industries managing their reputations by obfuscating or casting doubt on legitimate scientific findings and observable realities, like the treatment of animals within the systems of factory farming.
Writing for The Guardian, Joe Fassler detailed several ways in which the beef industry attempts to control the narrative around the environmental impact of industrial cattle farming. In addition to the millions of dollars spent on government lobbying, industry groups are pouring money into controlling public perception through PR and marketing campaigns directed toward consumers.
Their efforts include a Masters of Beef Advocacy (MBA) program (which Fassler himself “graduated” from; he notes that it’s not actually an accredited Master’s degree program), funded by checkoff funds gathered by the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA), the industry’s main lobbying group.
The media training program provides its participants with tools for disseminating misleading information to counter valid scientific publications, like the 2018 study published in the journal Science, which found that every kilogram of beef consumed, on average, results in the release of 99.5 kgs of CO2-equivalent greenhouse gases into the atmosphere—by far the most environmentally damaging food included in the study.
The ultimate goal appears to be to sow confusion among the public regarding the actual environmental impact of beef, and their PR tactics have been compared by experts to those used by the fossil fuel industry: discredit and downplay any damaging scientific findings. Other arms of the beef industry’s massive PR machine include quietly funding academic research that reaches conclusions favorable to the industry, and the operation of a 24/7 digital command center focused on detecting and preemptively responding to beef-critical conversations happening on the internet and in media. Their expensive, almost cartoonishly villainous tactics are mostly premised on supplying misleading but seemingly scientific information to counteract the valid findings of legitimate, independent research.
Of course, disinformation campaigns from the meat industry aren’t only limited to the environment; they also target health. It’s well established that eating too much meat—especially red and processed meat, like bacon, sausages, and pepperoni—has been linked to everything from heart disease to cancer to diabetes and Alzheimer’s.
But that doesn’t stop the meat industry and its ambassadors from saying otherwise. The North American Meat Institute, a trade group for the meat industry, for example, notes that processed meat—what the World Health Organization calls a “Group 1 Carcinogen,” meaning there is convincing evidence that the agent causes cancer—“are nutrient-dense foods.”
Ironically, the meat industry likes to argue that plant-based meat is unhealthy by pointing out that it is processed. But there is a wealth of information suggesting that plant-based meat—while not as healthy as kale or broccoli—is a healthier alternative with respect to several meaningful metrics, including heart disease, the number one killer in the United States. (Unfortunately, the relative healthfulness might explain why many salt-, fat-, and sugar-addicted consumers report not liking the taste.)
And now, armed with this data, plant-based meat companies are fighting back. Beyond Meat, for example, announced this week that Beyond Steak had joined the ranks of a select number of products that meet the American Heart Association’s nutrition criteria as part of its Heart-Check Food Certification program, including being low in saturated and trans fats, cholesterol, and sodium.
In reference to the certification, Ethan Brown, CEO of Beyond Meat said in an earnings call this week, “We are both defending our existing products in terms of our core approach and putting the information out there that the consumers need to make informed decisions rather than decisions driven by propaganda. . . .”
The Guardian article reports that according to surveys conducted by the NCBA, 47% of people are “unsure” about the sustainability of beef. That means almost half the population is in a position to either become informed, or to become misinformed. Similarly, there is a lot of perceived confusion around the healthfulness (or lack thereof) of meat and meat alternatives. We already know that the animal-agriculture industries have a comprehensive, well-funded machine to manage their public reputation.
It would be a public service, not to mention good business, for the plant-based food and beverage industry to step in, set the record straight, and make the public aware of industrial animal-agriculture’s tactics. Oatly and Beyond Meat can’t do it alone—the plant-based industries should band together the way beef and dairy have to fight their propaganda machine. All they need to do is get the facts out there. Once they are, they’ll speak for themselves.
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