One of the most shocking aspects of the industrial age is the treatment of animals. Industrial farming practices, where the aim is to produce bigger, more, faster – has a shocking record of cruel treatment of animals. Yet this tends to go unnoticed by the average consumer. Milk cartons and meat packages in the supermarket are illustrated with happy cows roaming a green pasture; an image that we still buy into, despite the fact that this is far from the truth. Every time we buy such products, we are unknowingly supporting an industry that places no value on animal welfare.

Instead of addressing this problem of industrial farming using the ‘well known’ offensive style, that utilizes brutal pictures of suffering animals, we decided to use another approach: concentrating on the positive, the alternative. We chose to highlight this through a single product: milk.

Milk was chosen, with the aim to encourage people to use fresh farm milk – this in many cases could mean finding out where the closest farm is, meeting the farmer directly, and seeing or getting to know the animals and the environment in which they live and are treated. The infographic we developed shows the different ways in which fresh farm milk can be used to make a variety of dairy products – products which cannot be made from industrial, treated milk.

The colourful, playful infographic shows simple ways that you can use fresh milk, with easy to follow instructions. We also included interesting ‘side’ information, such as the most popular cow names. After all, personalizing the animals that make our produce helps us to realize the need for their fair treatment.

The milk infographic is available to use free of charge (you can download it here in English and here in Hungarian). We are sharing it with farmers and other organizations that can use it.

This project was done in collaboration with Johanna Medvey Illustration. Johanna has a background in environmental and climate policy. After having worked on the advocacy aspect of these issues for several years, she decided to combine her professional knowledge with her creativity and became a freelance illustrator. Johanna is interested in contributing to projects with social and/or environmental objectives, and felt inspired by the idea of using raw milk for various dairy products.