Why Twitter Is Roasting The Amount Of Milk People Buy

When CNN aired a segment about how inflation impacts people's day-to-day lives, they probably did not expect incredulity and ridicule as a response. After all, rising food prices are something that hurts most working families.

However, when "New Day's" Brianna Keilar shared the segment in a tweet, Twitter latched onto the following snippet: "A gallon of milk was $1.99. Now it's $2.79. When you buy 12 gallons a week times four weeks, that's a lot of money." For context, the people speaking were a couple who discovered that they liked to adopt children. This created a household of 11. That said, if a household of 11 goes through 12 gallons, that means the average milk consumption is 1.09 gallons per person per week.

It did not take long for people to pick up on this. David Sirota, a political journalist, tweeted how despite the wild rise of healthcare costs, "only now corporate media is suddenly worried about inflation and very upset that it costs a tad more to buy 50 gallons of milk every month." "As a former teen from a dairy farmer family on my mom's side who with my siblings would consume a station wagon worth of groceries in a day, it's still an absurd amount of milk," author Alexander Chee decided. 

Of course, the struggle is real, but that is a lot of milk to drink.

If people weren't shocked by the sheer quantity of milk drunk, they couldn't believe that anyone was still buying a gallon of milk for $1.99 or even $2.79 in 2021. Often, they shared a report published by the United States Department of Agriculture in October that showed that the average price of milk per gallon across the country is $3.69 and the average price of organic milk per half gallon is $4.21.

The focus on inflation also forgets how the dairy industry has purportedly manipulated the cost of milk over the years. In 2016, HuffPost reported on how a lawsuit claimed the industry killed 500,000 cows to keep the supply of milk down, thus ensuring a good price tag. In 2020, NBC covered and verified that farmers were being forced to dump their milk because restaurant closures meant demand was down. Both cases show that more is at play with the price of milk than just a nebulous tide of inflation.