Crying over spilled milk

By M.P. Cremer

A few weeks ago, a fellow agvocate shared a screenshot of a story published online about teens pouring out processed and packaged milk at grocery stores in protest of the dairy industry. I won’t even waste time offering my thoughts on the matter, instead, I’d like for you to imagine a scenario.

You’re walking down the aisle of your local grocery store and you’ve got about seven days until payday. Your wallet isn’t just light, it’s dang near empty since you got laid off last month, and you’re hoping you’ve got enough cash to cover groceries for your family of four. Your mind is racing and head is pounding from stress because you don’t know how you’re going to buy enough food to feed four mouths, fill up the car with gas or pay the electric bill due in a few days. 

You pace the aisles, only adding the absolute necessities to the shopping cart, and you have enough food to make a few different meal combinations with leftovers to cycle through the following day.

You let out a sigh of relief, you did it; You’re pretty positive you can make it until payday, pending no emergencies. You’ve got one last stop to make before hitting the checkout counter, the milk cooler. 

You’re on the home stretch of this anxiety ridden grocery haul, you round the corner right by the paper goods aisle, and that’s when you see the most disgraceful thing you could possibly witness in a grocery store.

Three young adults, dumping gallons upon gallons of milk out, right on the grocery store floor. Two of them are doing the pouring, one of them is filming. They’re laughing and saying something like, “Down with dairy!”

After picking your jaw off the floor, your whip your shopping cart around and head to the front – you can live without milk for another seven days. As you’re nearing the checkout counter, you hear, over the loudspeaker, “Clean up on aisle five.”

You close your eyes as the cashier rings up your groceries, you shake your head in disbelief all the way to your car and unload the grocery bags. You start the car and grab the steering wheel, your knuckles are white from clenching your fists so hard, and then you let out a few tears; not out of sadness, of frustration. Before you know it, you’re crying over spilled milk.

This, my dear readers, although dramatic, is the reality we live in today. You are probably reading this right now and thinking, what the heck.

But to a handful of anti-ags, you’re wrong for thinking so. Why? Because they don’t care.

These anti-ag protestors are so tone-deaf, so privileged, so oblivious to the world around them, they don’t think they’re in the wrong for wasting nutritious food and beverages. They believe even people in poverty should play by their unrealistic and over priced rules. They do this, in my opinion, because they don’t think.

These anti-ags don’t think about the work going into producing a gallon of milk being poured out at a grocery store. They don’t pause and ponder on the fact they’re stealing nutrition from others as milk splashes on the ground. They sure don’t care about the people who could use the carton of milk more than them, because if they did, they’d have to admit they’re wrong.

They don’t cry over spilled milk, because they don’t care about anyone or anything that doesn’t further their agenda.