...is the tagline at the end of a commercial produced by the Dairy Farmers of Ontario (see video below if you must...)
I would now like to answer their question.
Milk (produced FOR calves but stolen by humans) and/or the dairy industry itself:
- CAN'T claim to be healthy
- CAN'T claim to be all natural as it's still processed and fortified with Vitamin D (just like plant milks, but at least they don't pretend otherwise)
- CAN'T claim to be healthy and natural when a good chunk of the global population has a reduced ability to even digest lactose
- CAN'T claim to be ethical
- CAN'T claim to be cruelty-free
- CAN'T claim not to involve theft of living beings from their rightful parents
- CAN'T claim not to be stealing the nourishment meant for calves
- CAN'T claim not to be in possession of stolen goods
- CAN'T claim not to be trafficking in stolen goods
- CAN'T claim not to be in possession of property obtained by crime for the purposes of trafficking (the last 3 points being legal criminal offences, no?)
- CAN'T claim not to be actively involved in misleading or false advertising (remember the "there are zero growth hormones in milk produced in Canada" scandal of 2019?)
- CAN'T claim exclusive rights to the word milk (the white juice of certain plants), although it has certainly tried
- CAN'T claim to still be part of a food group in the revamped Canada Food Guide
- CAN'T claim (unlike plant milks) increased annual consumption*
- CAN'T live up to its claim of Dairy Done Right
- CAN'T be considered truthful or transparent
- CAN'T possibly be excused for dumping gazillions of gallons of milk during COVID-19 (couldn't you at least have donated to local food banks instead?)
- and CAN'T possibly be excused for the killing of who knows how many of its producers (the cows themselves) during the pandemic either
* in fact, on p24 of their 2018 Dairy Sector Overview Dairy Farmers of Canada themselves admit that: "Moreover, over the past 20 years, the consumption rate of milk products has changed—the consumption of fluid milk has dramatically declined, while cheese and yogurt have increased…" (The report is quite interesting. Did you know that milk yield increases per cow = more than 157% over the past 43 years? They act as if that's a good thing, of course. Page 14 talks about the bailout packages to the dairy industry in other countries, page 17 mentions the Dairy Farm Investment Program, and p19-20 bemoans the revised Canada Food Guide.)
Well! That's an awful lot of CAN'Ts, if you ask me.
In short, there's more that milk can't do, than can, as evidenced by the silly lengths it went to in trying to prove otherwise:
===============================================================
Oh, and this post reminds me that of all of my animal rights messaging t-shirts, the one that gets the most negative reaction is the one with the caption Not Your Mom, Not Your Milk. While my other "friendlier" ones (e.g., image of cute animals with the caption Friends, Not Food) tend to elicit smiles and enthusiastic agreement, the Milk one, not so much. Maybe too close to the bone? Have to admit I usually wear it on days when I really don't care if I piss people off or not, snort.
