Wooden Play Food - Pretend Play Grocery Shop - Milk Bottle by Erzi

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And while there are many ethical problems in dairy production, the highly processed nature of dairy milk isn’t one of them. In fact, it’s necessary. If you’re trying to produce enough milk to feed 330 million Americans at a low cost, you have to do it on a large scale with the aid of technology to make it more efficient and safe. (Raw, unpasteurized milk may be more “natural,” but the FDA says it can pose a “serious health risk.”) The fact that dairy production entails a complex series of processes tells us little about how good or bad it is for us — or the environment and animals, for that matter. Instead of asking whether, or how much, a food is processed, we’d be better off simply looking at a food’s nutritional content. When it comes to plant-based milk, there’s a high degree of variability — soy milk is similar in fat, protein, and calcium to 2 percent cow’s milk, though other plant-based milks tend to have little protein. (It’s worth noting, though, that Americans already consume far more protein than the USDA recommends). Plant-based meat tends to have a similar amount of protein when compared to animal meat. As a plus, plant-based meats contain no cholesterol and typically less saturated fat, and are higher in fiber. But on the downside, they’re usually higher in sodium. Plant-based milk for sale at a grocery store in Chicago, Illinois. Scott Olson/Getty Images

To be fair, the plant-based industry can fall prey to the naturalistic fallacy as well, decrying GMOs and touting plant-based burgers that are “simple and clean” with “no synthetic ingredients, no artificial anything.” But the problem with processed foods isn’t that they’re processed, or how much they’re processed. It’s that sometimes the processing involves adding in a lot of addictive ingredients your doctor probably wants you to eat in moderation, like salt, sugar, and fat, which, of course, make those foods really difficult to eat in moderation.It’s unclear how many of the punches against plant-based food have landed, and whether the Wood Milk ad will change any minds. After years of record growth, plant-based meat and dairy sales have slowed, though it’s likely due to factors like cost, taste, and habit, rather than what celebrities are paid to think. But Big Dairy’s attempt to discredit plant-based milk could all be in vain, anyway; researchers say it has played only a small role in the decline of cow’s milk, which started decades before cow-free milk began to make a splash. The dairy industry’s real enemy, based on consumer trends, is bottled water, which indeed is minimally processed. And while it has no nutritional value, it also doesn’t include added sugar, fat, or salt. NOVA, a classification system that sorts foods into four categories of processing — unprocessed/minimally processed, processed culinary ingredients, processed, and ultra-processed — puts plant-based alternative products in the latter category, along with Twinkies and soft drinks. Mark Messina, the director of nutrition science and research at the Soy Nutrition Institute Global, told Food Navigator that while food processing can impact nutrition, such categorization is “simplistic and does not adequately evaluate the nutritional attributes of meat and dairy alternatives based on soy.”

The latest twist: The ad may be illegal, according to a complaint filed last week with the USDA Office of the Inspector General by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), a group that advocates for plant-based eating. (Disclosure: My partner worked at PCRM from 2009 to 2017.) For example, there are strict definitions that differentiate jelly, jam, and preserves, while “milk” is defined as “the lacteal secretion, practically free from colostrum, obtained by the complete milking of one or more healthy cows.” Want to eat less meat but don’t know where to start? Sign up for Vox’s five-day newsletter full of practical tips — and food for thought — to incorporate more plant-based food into your diet. The FDA hasn’t said when it may finalize its guidance, but wherever it lands, it probably won’t stop Big Dairy from provoking dairy-free companies with “real” versus “fake” messaging. That may appeal to our preference for what we think is the real thing, but it doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. It’s a perfect example of the naturalistic fallacy, which asserts that whatever is “natural” is good and real, and whatever is “unnatural” is bad and artificial. The dairy industry has a point, but many commonly eaten foods have names that aren’t a perfect description of their contents. There’s no butter in peanut butter, for instance, or ham in hamburgers. (The latter name comes from Hamburg, Germany, home to the particular cut of beef that eventually went into hamburgers.)

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The cows, which have been bred to produce 2.5 times more milk than cows did 50 years ago, are killed at around 3 or 4 years old once their production has waned — far short of their “natural” life span of around 20 years. There’s room to criticize plant-based food producers for taking the route they have, but it’s a bit rich when it comes from the dairy industry, which partnered with Domino’s to create a pizza with 40 percent more cheese and with Taco Bell to create the creamer-based Mountain Dew Baja Blast Colada Freeze.