This is udderly ridiculous…

When we were kids, the world seemed like a much more innocent place than it is now.  We may have cried and fussed and ran off and pouted in the corner, but when it came down to it, we respected our authority figures and believed what we were told by them.  We learn so much when we are young, and sometimes even when we reach adulthood it never dawns on us that a lot of the stuff we were taught was a gigantic, steaming load of unadulterated bullshit.

If you grew up at pretty much any point in the last half decade in America, you have it ingrained in you that milk was the greatest health food ever discovered in human history.  My fellow 80’s brothers and sisters will recognize the milk campaign this commercial came from…

Amazing!  All you need to do is drink milk and you’ll grow up to be a big, muscular hunk!

I drink straight from the udder!

There were a number of commercials released by the National Dairy Board in the late 80’s featuring this same theme…. the 98 pound weakling is confronted by someone who intimidates them, and thanks to that bovine miracle potion they are drinking, they quickly grow up to be beautiful, fully developed assholes.  Here’s the little girls version of this commercial if you are interested.

You won’t be getting this popcorn back until you drink a shitload of milk, dear!

There are so many things that are just totally messed up about the boy meets girl commercial I posted above…

Like that scrawny little boy suddenly growing up into a steroid fueled bodybuilder before our eyes.  Bruce Banner turning into The Incredible Hulk was more believable than this milk guzzling tale.  If this were true, Rocky would’ve been downing gallons of milk instead of glasses of raw eggs.

Watch out, hunters! I’ve been drinking my milk!

Then there’s the fact that this preteen kid is lusting after a girl that’s probably about ready to graduate high school.  It’s not like he’d be the first 12 year old to pop a boner over an older girl… heck, at that stage of puberty, boys can get wood over just about anything.  But it still seems a bit creepy… unless the girl is just prematurely developed because she’d been drinking too much milk full of hormones…

Milk did my body good!

But the best part about this commercial is how this girl our lactose hero is pursuing appears to be a total bitch.  Not only is she completely ignoring the whole spiel this kid is delivering, but she’s also failing to notice how he’s aging so fast he might keel over from old age before the ad is over.  This poor kid’s problems are the least of her concern, however, because for the entire 30 seconds the ad is running, she does nothing but preen and paw at herself in some invisible mirror that apparently only she can see.  No wonder you need to turn into a hunk so fast, kid, because this chick is so into her own looks that nothing short of Brad Pitt crossed with George Clooney is going to get her eyes off of her own reflection.

My mirror staring back at me…

In large part thanks to ads like this that the National Dairy Board has been running for a long time, we have become indoctrinated to believe that if we don’t drink lots of milk, we are going to grow up to look like the Elephant Man.  Of course, that’s because we don’t realize that pretty much every message we hear that comes in the form of advertising is nothing more than propaganda.  We associate propaganda with groups that we generally have a negative attitude about, like used car salesmen and anyone on an infomercial.  We don’t consider for a moment that just maybe The National Dairy Board has a heavy interest in wanting us drink more milk, and just maybe they’d overstate the benefits of drinking milk while covering up all the bad stuff.

Maybe I should’ve had the orange juice instead…

I wasn’t one of the gullible kids back in my day.  I knew milk wasn’t really that good for me, and refused to drink it when they tried to make us every day in kindergarten.  Well, OK, I didn’t really come to that conclusion… I just never could stand the taste of milk.  Why in the world would we want to drink an organic formula that was specifically made for a different species?  I mean, would you want to drink something that came from this?

I hope you like your milk with a nutty taste!

So here’s to one of the greatest snow jobs any commercial food industry has ever pulled on a calcium starved population.  Thanks to your carefully crafted advertisements for the udderly nutritious drink you needed us all to imbibe in, we became a country full of strapping studmuffins and stacked goddesses with bones that could withstand pile driver, and muscles that rippled and flowed like there was a perpetual earthquake.  We here at The Nest raise our glasses of hormone saturated, antibiotic spiked, pure 100% cow juice to your ads that were memorably humorous, if not totally scientifically accurate.  You can rest assured that when we aren’t pouring down the Pepsi, we have always “got milk”…

For the sake of this blog’s PG-13 rating, I do hope that’s the udder…