Daily ‘dairy’: analysing the perceived kinship of food lobbies and the media output

Abstract

This work argues that while the consumption of ‘dairy’ products is widely encouraged as healthy and essential, the interests of the bovine animals who ‘produce’ milk are not taken into the account. In order to make visible the existing system of oppression of farmed animals, the public access documents of the main European agri-food lobbies, namely CELCAA, Copa-Cogeca, and FoodDrink Europe are thoroughly analyzed, with a special emphasis made on the ‘dairy’-related discourse. Besides, the role of national media in constructing the image of “healthy milk” is discussed on the example of 96 news stories collected from British (The Guardian; The Times) and Spanish newspapers (El Mundo; El País). The study follows the framework of Critical Animal and Media Studies and employs the methodology of Critical Discourse Analysis. The preliminary findings based on the empirical results reveal the perceived parallelism between the discourse of aforementioned lobbies and national media discourse.