Got Soy?

Milk’s image is both wholesome and hip, thanks to the successful “Got Milk?” campaign. But a backlash is brewing, with activists and celebrities claiming that milk causes illnesses as serious as heart disease and cancer.

by Nina Willdorf

This past summer, Alicia Silverstone perched daintily on the plush couches that grace the sets of all the big talk shows and chatted with Rosie, Conan, Jay, and David about her new film, Love’s Labour’s Lost. Flirtatious and giggly, Silverstone touched on how she landed her plum role in the Kenneth Branagh film, and dished a little about what she likes to do in her spare time (play with her dogs). Then she coyly maneuvered the conversation to her newly adopted vegan lifestyle. Quickly, her interviews turned to . . . shit.

“I started pooping right,” the blond ingenue declared to anyone who would listen. It was, she said, one of the many salutary effects she enjoyed after kicking her dairy habit.

The star’s public testimonials about her greatly improved bowel movements were anything but apolitical. Like many public figures, Silverstone was using her name to promote a health issue — but not a high-profile one like AIDS research or breast-cancer awareness. Silverstone’s cause is much less obvious, and considerably less glamorous. She is trying her damnedest to give milk a bad name.

Oddly enough, Silverstone is not the only celeb dedicating her time to slamming the beverage enshrined as the cornerstone of a child’s healthy diet. She’s just one of the most public figures in a curious and furious backlash that has been brewing against the seemingly wholesome drink. Most of the criticism has been launched by animal-rights groups like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and vegan organizations like the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. To them, milk at its best is nothing more than a gross mixture of hormones, bacteria, and pus. At its worst, it’s a dangerous substance that promotes heart disease and cancer.

What’s more, activists accuse the dairy industry of using advertisements to target people of color — a demographic with an alarmingly high rate of lactose intolerance — in a ploy reminiscent of the tobacco industry’s appeal to adolescents.

All this has inspired a surprising number of citizens and celebrities to flex their activist muscles with a fervor usually reserved for fighting fur, nukes, or oppression in Tibet. They’re up against a strong dairy lobby that has a newly sexy image thanks to the ubiquitous “Got Milk?” ads, which feature well-known people sporting milk mustaches. But the anti-milk brigade is finding its own famous faces who are willing to shill for the other side, even if its techniques rely less on marketing research and more on pure gross-out simplicity. As Alicia Silverstone told TV Guide recently, “Once you know where milk comes from, you will not want to eat it. I mean, it’s like pure mucus. It’s just creepy.”

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There’s no question that behind the tall white glass is an industry with money, power, and influence, not to mention the strategic savvy to launch one of the most successful media campaigns in advertising history. Admittedly, that campaign faces an uphill battle. Milk, never a signifier of hipness, doesn’t have it easy in winning refrigerator space from cooler drinks like Coke or Gatorade. According to statistics from the Beverage Marketing Corporation, an industry research group, the average person drank less than 20 gallons of milk in 1999. That ranks it behind soda (55.9 gallons), beer (22.3 gallons), and coffee (22.0 gallons).

But the milk industry’s $150 million “Got Milk?” campaign has made bigger inroads than almost any other advertising of its kind. Introduced in 1995, the ads have presented familiar faces with white-streaked upper lips. Movie stars, sports figures, and teen icons such as Spike Lee, Britney Spears, Marc Anthony, and the Dixie Chicks (and, unfortunately, Survivor’s tubby champ) have lent their mugs to what probably seemed like the most innocuous, uncontroversial product in history. The campaign has even crossed the line from marketing gimmick to trend: kids collect “Got Milk?” ads featuring their favorite celebs and post them on their bedroom walls.

Of course, it’s not all advertising. The dairy industry is extremely influential in making milk a vital part of school-board-mandated school lunches. Plus, the New England Dairy Promotion Board regularly teams up with the Boston Public Schools’ nutrition-education coordinator to encourage kids to drink milk. Local public schools, for example, recently hosted the Dairy Promotion Board’s “Boney Bones” presentation, designed to coincide with Halloween, which featured a talk about the bone-building benefits of milk, followed by handouts of “Got Milk?” posters and skeleton key chains. The promotions also offered students a chance to pose in their own fake “Got Milk?” ads, which they then plastered proudly in the schools’ corridors.

The costly ad campaign and school presentations seem to be paying off. According to the USDA, total sales of fluid milk went up 0.7 percent between 1998 and 1999. Gary Hemphill, the vice-president of the Beverage Marketing Corporation, says that though marketing for milk “has historically been in the Dark Ages,” especially compared to marketing for soft-drink competitors, the rise in consumption in 1999 can only be attributed to the dairy industry’s marketing blitz over the past few years. “Our goal is to show really cool people drinking milk,” says Susan Ruland, vice-president for the International Dairy Foods Association, which oversees the “Got Milk?” campaign. “At the same time, we’re pushing . . . I mean, reminding Americans about the milk messages.”

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But not everyone agrees that milk does a body good. Critics of milk — particularly People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), an advocacy group that bills itself as a medical-research group — cite grievances ranging from health risks to animal abuse. Neil Barnard, PCRM’s founder and president, doesn’t mince his words. “Milk is a dangerous thing for adults,” he says. But when it comes to backing up such sharp criticisms, PCRM and PETA rely on findings from scientific studies that even some of the lead researchers find inconclusive.

The highly regarded Framingham Heart Study, for example, is a key piece of medical research in the anti-milk arsenal. In 1948, half the residents of Framingham, Massachusetts, were pulled together to participate in the study. A group of medical researchers monitored the healthy individuals’ cholesterol levels, blood pressure, and blood sugar over a period of 50 years, eventually prodding and monitoring the original subjects’ children and grandchildren. Study researchers found that people with high cholesterol levels had higher rates of heart disease. PETA now uses the Framingham study to back up its claims that drinking milk, some of which is high in fat and cholesterol, can lead to heart disease.

But even the study’s researchers call the link “a bit of a stretch.” William Castelli, one of the directors of the project, who now heads the Framingham Cardiovascular Institute, says that although the study did conclusively draw a link between higher rates of heart attacks and high cholesterol, milk never played a part. Castelli acknowledges that other researchers around the world have subsequently proven that drinking low-fat milk rather than whole milk will lower risk for heart attacks. But he says that a wholesale claim linking milk to heart disease — without drawing a distinction between whole, low-fat, and non-fat milk — is just plain “weak.” “We did not find direct data on milk,” says Castelli. “In fact, our diet-history data is kind of shaky.”

Nina Willdorf can be reached at nwilldorf[a]phx.com.

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