Celebrate Februdairy

Celebrate Februdairy

What?  Have I gone mad asking you to celebrate February 2018 as Februdairy?

Well, I may be crazy, but it’s not because I’m promoting Februdairy.  Explaining my craziness is beyond the scope of this blog article.  Heck, it may even be beyond the scope of the world’s greatest behavioral psychologists.  But I digress. The goal of this article is not to explain my madness, but to explain why I think the birth of Februdairy is a good development.

The Original Purpose of Februdairy

Februdairy is the brainchild of dairy industry consultant, Dr. Jude Capper as a means to combat the growing popularity of plant-based milks and concomitant lagging dairy sales.

The plan was to have dairy farmers and industry leaders use the Twitter #Februdairy hashtag to share positive messages about dairy on social media. The degree to which the dairy industry is concerned about the fast growing plant-based movement is reflected by the following warning from Dr. Capper:

“If consumers don’t buy our products — milk, cream, butter, cheese etc — we will not have a dairy industry in five to 10 years.”

The Februdairy Backfire

But before Februdairy began, the campaign was already beginning to backfire. Critics of the dairy industry were using the hashtag for different reasons. A search in January on Twitter and Instagram yielded few intended results for #Februdairy.

Instead, the campaign seemed more like a commercial for promoting the benefits of plant-based milk products. People were using the hashtag to highlight the dairy industry’s divisive practices, dairy’s questionable health benefits, and dairy’s impact on the environment.

“While the campaign intended to bolster confidence in and support of the dairy market, it has instead cast a spotlight on the industry that it would have much rather avoided,” LiveKindly reported.

Consumers, health experts, and animal rights advocates all used the campaign to tell the (real) truth about dairy. For example:

This tweet:

“It is absurd to suggest that human evolution has been so inefficient that we can only survive by drinking another mammal’s milk. Homo-sapiens evolved 200k years ago, we started drinking milk 7.5k years ago. We have consumed milk for less than 4% of human history”

— Katie (@mermaid_k8) January 24, 2018

Have We Reached a Whole Food Pant-Based Tipping Point?

In an earlier article, I shared some signs that the WFPB movement is moving in from the lunatic fringes.  The plant-based hijacking of the #Februdairy campaign is another sign to add to the list.   For many decades, the dairy industry has been tremendously successful in using its financial clout to push the silly notion that the mammary secretions of a cow are essential to human health.

Although the industry’s money continues to dwarf the financial resources of anti-dairy organizations, it may no longer be as effective in preventing the anti-dairy message from spreading.  There are just too many people who now understand the benefits of avoiding dairy.  Here are some more signs that we are moving towards a tipping point to where more and more people are concluding that meat, eggs and dairy are scary.

• From the years 2014 to 2017, the amount of Americans that identify as vegans has skyrocketed from 1% of the population to 6%.
• Restaurant Consultants Baum and Whiteman claim that “plant based” will be the food trend of 2018
• The largest food corporation in the world predicts that the plant based movement will continue to grow and that “it is here to stay”.
• Elmhurst Dairy ditches dairy and is now producing plant-based milks

Should We Embrace Februdairy?

Celebrating Februdairy might seem like we are celebrating dairy.  But the backfiring of the #February campaign really means we are celebrating dairy’s demise.   So 2018’s second month is Februdairy and hopefully it will represent the dairy industry’s death throe.  So in 2019, we can resume with February.

By the way, is it pronounced Feb-yu-ary or Feb-ru-ary? I’m as confused as George Steinbrenner about this.

Stay healthy and strong!