Fighting dairy censorship


It’s a curious and little-known fact that the dairy industry is a leading advocate of censorship. It demands the suppression of words such as “milk” and “butter” for non-dairy products, even where their meaning is clear and their use is well established. If the dairy lobby had its way, you wouldn’t find “peanut butter” or “soy milk” in stores. Its puppets include several members of Congress, and it’s especially powerful in Wisconsin, where it was long illegal to serve yellow margarine.

More surprisingly, the dairy lobby appears to have bought the California Department of Food and Agriculture. The CDFA sent a demand to Miyoko’s Creamery demanding that it stop using terms such as “cultured vegan butter.” Indeed, the government’s demands went far beyond that, saying that Miyoko’s couldn’t call its products “cruelty-free” or show a picture of a woman hugging a cow. The letter’s thinly disguised purpose was to hamper competition with the dairy industry.

The dairy lobby pretends that stupid consumers think almond milk comes from cows, just as clickbait articles tried to convince us that people (you know, those other people, not you) think chocolate milk comes from brown cows. Federal courts have consistently rejected this estimation of consumers. The use of “milk” with a qualifier for non-dairy products is well established; “almond milk” has been in the English language since 1390.

Fortunately, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled in August that the First Amendment void’s the CDFA’s demands. It ruled against Miyoko’s on one point: Its claim that its products were “hormone-free” was factually incorrect. The government can appeal, but for now Miyoko’s is free to make statements that are true and match the common understanding of words.

Regulations like these fall on clients, not individual writers. The courts distinguish between commercial speech and expressive speech, and I haven’t heard of any independent bloggers being sued for writing about “soy milk.” Still, it’s a concern when clients get nervous about censorship. Laws greatly differ between countries; I won’t try to address the legality of the terms outside the US, though I’ll mention that an attempt at sweeping censorship in the EU was recently defeated. If you frequently write about dairy alternatives or vegetarian meat substitutes, it’s worth keeping an eye on legal developments.

A Brooklyn Law Review article gives some history of the dairy industry’s attempts to suppress competitors’ speech. If bull-headed dairy representatives try to intimidate your clients, showing them some legal history may encourage them not to give in. Of course, if it comes down to legal action, they’ll need a lawyer to help them, which I’m not.