Bizarre 'Wood Milk' ad with Aubrey Plaza backfires

[milliefink]

@Otherbrother

I agree with the first part of that statement but not the second. Humans didn’t always have Similac available to give their babies, you know.

[GospelX]

@EB01

A milky juice or latex present in the stems or other parts of various plants, which exudes when the plant is cut, and is often acrid, irritant, or toxic.

I’m curious about definitions preceding this one, just because a definition of a word that uses the word itself (milky) doesn’t work well. All of us here seem to accept that “milk” refers broadly to a white substance with a slightly thicker than water consistency. This definition, though, suggests that plant milk is just milk-like.

The others you quoted were quite good, just saying plants can produce milk. Period. Just another reason why Big Milk can’t change the language to suit themselves.

[milliefink]

Agreed. And I think you’ve milked that topic for about all its worth.

[oncebce]

Haha, plant nerd
(No, i love it really)

[Tamsin_Bailey]

Gonna have to choose an udder angle.

[Surprise_Puma]

I only drink

Not really. I drink a lot of cow juice.

[Carbonman]

@Pandulph

when looked at in perspective, “Big Almonds” are also a major part of destroying our ecosystem.

Once I realized how much water was required for growing almonds I quit buying them.

@Brainspore

Remember, it’s not just about how much a cow drinks every day (which can be quite a lot in itself) but also how much water you used to grow the food the cow eats.

I’m severely lactose intolerant so my animal milk consumption is limited to a bit of cheese occasionally.

[zfirphdn]

@milliefink

So try oat milk, or soy milk. Good, popular brands of both exist.

I tried oat milk, a popular brand, in an attempt to be better to the environment than drinking dairy milk. Unsweetened oat milk. And…It was way too sweet. Gah! Reading the blurb on the carton (or maybe it was on their website?), it explained that the process they have to use to make the oats into milk turns some of the starches into sugar. Well, I eat oatmeal all the time, just plain old cooked rolled oats, and I love it. Yay, oats! But I won’t be buying oat milk again. It gave me a real sense of why people say to eat food that is only minimally processed.

I’m not saying other people shouldn’t eat it or like it, though; just saying my own personal experience with it.

[Mindysan33]

@Otherbrother

Humans didn’t always have Similac available to give their babies, you know.

Um… wanna tone down the condescension a bit there… I promise you that the women here understand how feeding babies works…

Most people don’t drink breastmilk once they are out of infancy, which is what @chgoliz was referencing…

[Shuck]

I find it somewhat funny - but mostly eye-rolling - that the modern dairy industry is trying to pretend that using the word “milk” to describe plant-based white, drinkable fluids is something new, some sort of perversion of the language. Sorry buckos, but it dates back to maybe the 12th century (if not earlier). The use pre-dates freaking Modern English (hell, it may predate Middle English), something that can’t remotely be said about the modern dairy industry and its practices.

Plant milk is milk, always has been (at least by modern cultural standards of what constitutes “always”).

@EB01

earlier examples have dates of composition given as far back as 1398 CE

I’ve seen sources that put it as far back as c1200. The culinary nut/seed milk sense, specifically, is also pretty old. The oldest English cookbook has recipes for almond milk drinks…

@Pandulph

but when looked at in perspective, “Big Almonds” are also a major part of destroying our ecosystem.

And growing alfalfa - which gets used to feed cows - uses 50% more of the state’s water than almonds… The almonds are very bad, but they’re also (by like an order of magnitude) worse in terms of water use than all the other plant-based milks, which are significantly better than dairy.

@Carbonman

Once I realized how much water was required for growing almonds I quit buying them.

The problem really isn’t the almonds, it’s the water use laws. (If it wasn’t almonds, it’d be something else, like the alfalfa that uses even more of California’s water, and also gets exported overseas in large quantities.)

[milliefink]

@Carbonman

Once I realized how much water was required for growing almonds I quit buying them.

Once you realized how much more water was required for raising animals, did you quit buying meat and cow milk too?

[Otherbrother]

@Mindysan33

Um… wanna tone down the condescension a bit there…

I apologize (to @chgoliz and others) if my attempt at humor came off that way. Obviously, yes, I know that the women (and most men) of this message board know about human lactation. The pedantic in me just foud it difficult to let the sentence “the first mammal milk consumed by humans…” go unanswered but clearly I should have.

[DukeTrout]

@Brainspore

Remember, it’s not just about how much a cow drinks every day (which can be quite a lot in itself) but also how much water you used to grow the food the cow eats.

It should also factor in the energy it takes to purify the water that’s been fouled by cow excrement, which is not insubstantial.

[Mindysan33]

The person you should apologize to is @chgoliz, not me. She doesn’t deserve to be talked down to.

[Carbonman]

I’ve cut way back on my meat consumption and don’t buy cow milk. My wife uses a little milk in her tea but that’s it.

[SamSam]

I watched the ad before reading the stuff about it, and so found it hilarious until the very end, when I realized it was just the dairy industry shitting on soy milk and the like.

I guess I was pretty surprised at Plaza for it, because it seemed weird for the ad to be an attack ad, and I guess also punching down, as it is one huge industry making sure the little guys don’t get a foothold.

Yes, the humor of the ad was totally on-brand, but it still seemed like a net negative, especially attacking an industry that’s much better for the planet. I would have felt the same way if it were a hilarious ad shilling for big oil over electric cars.

[jmv]

I don’t think Aubrey really needs to worry about this one. There are a lot more significant things to concern yourself with. This was mildly amusing.

[Narwalt]

@EvansMike

Yea. I’m more of a rat’s milk person.

[girard]

@GospelX

I know more than a few people who have bad reactions to milk itself.

In fact, 70% of the human race can’t process lactose. Those of us who can (mostly, but not entirely, white western first worlders) are the aberrant mutants.

And though I can, I don’t, because dairy milk is aesthetically, conceptually, and ethically gross.

[cvanaver]

Try piping it through awk, then you’ll grep it.