Dairy Pride: Hypocognitive Rhetoric and the Battle for Dairy’s Name

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this essay, I utilize the U.S. Congress’ DAIRY PRIDE Act to critique the animal-sourced dairy industry's use of legislative and nutritional discourse to claim the name “dairy” and its analogs. Contextualizing the role of naming, re-naming, and un-naming in environmental communication, I begin with an overview of the U.S. animal-sourced dairy industry’s effort to suppress plant-based alternatives through strategic un-naming practices. I call this genre of un-naming “hypocognitive rhetoric.” I problematize hypocognitive rhetoric by demonstrating how the U.S. animal-sourced dairy industry uses this rhetorical strategy to obfuscate alternative (more specifically, plant-based) agricultural futures. In claiming dairy’s name and painting industrialized, animal-sourced dairying practices as natural, normal, and necessary for human advancement, the animal-sourced dairy industry not only renders invisible the human inequities inherent in animal-sourced dairy production and consumption, but also cloaks the experiences the nonhuman animals used for lactation.