Fix Cruel ‘Foundations’! Kate Nash Pushes Starbucks to Ditch Harmful Vegan Milk Upcharge
Fix Cruel ‘Foundations’! Kate Nash Pushes Starbucks to Ditch Harmful Vegan Milk Upcharge
London – Today, on World Plant Milk Day (22 August), actor, singer, and long-time vegan Kate Nash sent a letter on PETA’s behalf to Starbucks CEO Laxman Narasimhan urging him to end the chain’s shameless surcharge on vegan milks in the US.
“I’m currently starring in Coffee Wars, a movie in which my character, like me, is all about creating delicious coffee drinks that no animal had to suffer for,” writes Nash. “And while I love Starbucks coffee, it left a bitter taste in my mouth when I learned from my friends at PETA that customers who choose non-dairy milk still have to pay extra in the US. There’s no surcharge for plant-based milk in the UK, so that just doesn’t add up.”
In the dairy industry, calves are taken away from their beloved mothers so that the milk produced for them can be sold to humans. Once the cows’ bodies wear out after repeated pregnancies, they’re sent to slaughter. The industry is also a major contributor to the climate catastrophe: emissions from farming cows are the primary source of the greenhouse gas methane, which is 80 times more potent in warming the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. Starbucks has even admitted that vegan milks are better for the planet than dairy milk.
As Nash notes in her letter, the surcharge is not just harmful to animals and the planet but also unfair to the millions of people around the world who are lactose intolerant. Starbucks dropped the dairy-free milk upcharge in the UK at the beginning of 2022, and several US coffee chains already offer vegan milks at no extra cost.
PETA – whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to abuse in any way” – opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org.uk or follow the group on Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, or Instagram.
Contact:
Jennifer White +44 (0) 20 7837 6327; [email protected]
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