20 States Have Milk As Their Official Drink — Here's Why

Did you know that milk is the official drink of New York? This writer, who has lived in New York virtually his entire life, didn't know that. I am pretty confused, too, frankly. While dairy is the largest agricultural product in the state, milk is not exactly what we're most famous for. Surely the official drink of New York would be a black coffee in one of those "we are happy to serve you" cups, right? 

Interestingly, milk is not only the state beverage for New York but also for 20 other states that aren't exactly known as dairy powerhouses, including Mississippi, Tennessee, and South Carolina. What gives? As is often the case when it comes to inexplicable facts of American life, the answer has to do with lobbying. You see, in the early 1980s, the dairy industry had a problem. President Jimmy Carter had given dairy farmers $2 billion in federal subsidies during his administration to help combat inflation, which resulted in an enormous surplus of milk and cheese. 

That may sound like a good problem to have, but when you're dealing with a famously perishable product like milk, you need to move as much as you can as quickly as you can. Government cheese was a start, but they needed to do more. And so the dairy industry began a decade-long public relations blitz extolling the virtues of milk, resulting in the famous "Got Milk?" ads as well as a number of states declaring milk their official drink — after extensive pressure from dairy lobbyists, of course.

Now, this is far from the only time food industry lobbying has had these strange knock-on effects; in fact, the bacon craze of the early 2010s may have started for a similar reason. Sure, we suppose we'd rather have a relatively wholesome drink like milk foisted upon us by industry lobbyists than, say, bottles of pure high fructose corn syrup. (It may not be worse than you for sugar, but it's still not great.) Still, it's telling that a lot of the states that declared milk their official drink in the 1980s craze later adopted other, more representative beverages.

These states haven't gone so far as to walk back declarations that milk was their drink of choice, but they have made additional announcements to boost some of their most famous other drinks. Nebraska, for instance, named Kool-Aid (which was invented in the Cornhusker State) its official state soft drink in 1998. Meanwhile, Delaware and Maryland declared their official state drink to be Orange Crush, which was invented in Maryland and popularized in Delaware. The dairy lobby is pretty powerful, but hey, they still haven't gotten us to call almond milk "nut juice" yet, have they?