Joaquin Phoenix Uses His Oscars Speech to Speak Up for Dairy Cows

Vegan actor Joaquin Phoenix won the Oscar for Best Actor last night for his role in Joker, and used his acceptance speech to speak up for dairy cows in front of a global television audience.

It was the first Oscar of Phoenix's career, at his fourth nomination, at the 92nd Academy Awards at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles on Sunday, February 9. Rather than reel off a list of thank-yous, he spoke about injustice in all its forms: gender inequality, racism, queer rights, indigenous rights and animal rights. Then he talked about milk. This is from the Academy's official transcript:

"I think that we've become very disconnected from the natural world. And many of us, what we're guilty of is an egocentric worldview, the belief that we're the center of the universe. We go into the natural world and we plunder it for its resources. We feel entitled to artificially inseminate a cow, and when she gives birth we steal her baby even though her cries of anguish are unmistakable. And then we take her milk that's intended for her calf and we put it in our coffee and our cereal."

"And I think we fear the idea of personal change because we think that we have to sacrifice something to give something up. But human beings at our best are so inventive and creative and ingenious, and I think that when we use love and compassion as our guiding principles, we can create, develop and implement systems of change that are beneficial to all sentient beings and to the environment."

He finished by quoting a lyric his late brother River wrote at 17: "run to the rescue with love and peace will follow."

Notice what he didn't do. He didn't call anyone a bad person. He described where milk comes from and said we are clever enough to do better. That's the message we've been sharing on this site since 2015, and last night it went out live from the biggest stage in film. VegNews ran the headline that the speech will go down in history.

It's not the first time this season. Five weeks ago Phoenix used his Golden Globes win to thank the organizers for serving a 100% plant-based menu.

The facts are on his side. The UK's Advertising Standards Authority ruled that 'inhumane' is a fair description of dairy, and Oxford University's Joseph Poore found that meat and dairy use 83% of the world's farmland while providing just 18% of our calories. Plant milks win on every measure.

Phoenix is part of a much bigger shift. A popular London cafe ditched dairy after watching a YouTube video, a 90-year-old dairy switched to plant milks, and last month Starbucks made plant-based the first strategy of its climate plan while KFC sold a million vegan burgers.

Congratulations Joaquin. Pass the oat milk.