Joaquin Phoenix Canceled Milk Last Night In His Oscars Speech

RIP milk (1-2020). It was a good run, but milk has officially been CANCELED. Never woulda saw this coming. Lots of things get canceled, lots of people get canceled, but I never for the life of me thought MILK would get canceled. Soda is out here pumping 70 grams of sugar into you at mach speeds. 4 Loko was canceled but that's because college bros were shotgunning them and then driving full speed into trees. But milk??? Since the earliest of ages, we've been told milk is what makes you healthy. Want to build strong bones? Drink milk. Want to grow to be able to dunk a basketball? Milk. I mean they made us drink those little cartons of milk at lunch with every single thing they served, which looking back on it, was fucking gross. But that's the power Big Milk had on us, especially as kids. And now? I guess people are starting to realize maybe the idea of drinking cow's milk isn't all that great.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not canceling milk. I'm just seeing it from the other side. There's a lot of evidence out there that maybe it's not natural for us, humans, to drink the milk of cows, not humans. That maybe the entire idea of drinking milk to develop strong bones is a marketing campaign by a billion dollar industry.

VICE - A recent study published in the British Medical Journal found "no clinical trial evidence" of milk consumption strengthening bones or preventing fractures. The evidence was at best "weak and inconsistent."

Now, I love a good conspiracy as much as the next guy. I can buy the argument that we didn't walk on the moon. I can buy the argument that there is more than meets the eye to the JFK assassination. So I think it'd be silly to look at the milk marketing campaign and not think something a little fishy is going on. 

You can read dozens upon dozens of articles that dispels every fact about milk we were force fed as kids. It's actually fascinating when you think about it- how an industry with a ton of money can get into elementary schools and tell us we will be weak and ugly if we don't drink our milk. They had us stealing cartons of milk just so we could grow a little taller on our Scott Stevens growth charts

Look at that blatant propaganda! God damn milk was good at this!

That all being said, the crux of his speech was that milk is unethical because of the animal abuse and environmental issues. You can do your own reading on that, I'm not here to speak on that. I have no problem writing about how billion dollar lobbyists get into our heads as children, that stuff is utterly (haha, see what I did there?) fascinating to me. You can do your own reading on the environmental impact of drinking milk and eating red meat and make your own decisions from there.

So is milk canceled? I'm going to say no. It is engrained in our society so firmly I think it will take more than an Oscars speech to get people to stop drinking it. But I will say I do like when people start looking into things they otherwise wouldn't even have known was an issue. And not for nothing, Starbucks has already begun looking into canceling milk themselves. Seriously.

TBJ - On Tuesday, Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson released the company’s “sustainability commitment” on its website outlining five goals to reduce its carbon footprint by 2030. From reducing single-use packaging to more responsible water usage, Johnson also included a commitment to expand plant-based options, “migrating toward a more environmental friendly menu,” he wrote.

“Alternative milks will be a big part of the solution,” Johnson said in a separate interview with Bloomberg News. “The consumer-demand curve is already shifting.”

You know what? I never thought I'd see Burger King serving fake meat, but BEYOND Meat and Impossible Burgers are taking the world by storm. Meat alternatives are getting huge. And milk alternatives look to be next. Might be hard to even imagine a world where we don't drink milk, but I think it will happen in our lifetime. Crazy.