On Australia Day in 2011, Australian supermarket giant, Coles, announced that it was slashing the price of its own-brand milk to a considerably discounted $1/litre, a move immediately matched by rival Woolworths. The retailers, who had anticipated that low prices would be viewed as unequivocally good for consumers, found themselves at the centre of an unexpected media backlash and the subjects of a sustained campaign by the dairy industry to expose the threat of major supermarkets to Australian dairy livelihoods. This paper analyses the news coverage that emerged as a result of the events now dubbed the ‘milk wars’. Through discourse analysis of Australian news stories, we show how the media coverage of milk pricing—and the dairy industry campaigns that underpinned it—sought to galvanise media and public support through specific images and discourses associated with the ‘Australian farmer’. We argue that the discourses and images used most frequently by the dairy industry and which had most cut-through with media were those most strongly invested in Australian pastoral sentimentality: images of traditional, ‘small-scale’, multi-generational family farmers being tragically forced off their land by the supermarket duopoly. We show how this coverage reveals the power of romanticised depictions of farming as a media strategy for galvanising public support for farmers’ livelihoods, but in their focus on (certain types of) farmers and farming practices as ‘worthy’ of public and media concern, these depictions were ultimately co-opted by supermarket marketing campaigns designed to silence critique. That proponents of alternative food politics continue to mobilise discourses of pastoral sentimentality as a means to encourage (urban) consumer support raises questions about the effectiveness of such discourses to meaningfully oppose corporate power in the food system.

在2011年澳大利亚国庆日，澳大利亚超市巨头科尔斯（Coles）宣布将其自有品牌牛奶的价格大幅下调至每升1美元，这是竞争对手沃尔夫沃思（Woolworths）立即采取的行动。零售商原本认为低廉的价格将对消费者无疑是有利的，但他们却发现自己处于媒体意外反弹的中心，并且是乳制品业持续开展活动以暴露主要超市对澳大利亚乳品生计的威胁的主题。 。本文分析了由于现在被称为“牛奶战争”的事件而出现的新闻报道。通过对澳大利亚新闻故事的话语分析，我们展示了牛奶定价的媒体报道以及支撑其定价的乳业运动如何通过与“澳大利亚农民”相关的特定图像和话语激发媒体和公众的支持。我们认为，乳业最常使用且与媒体最直接接触的话语和图像是对澳大利亚牧民情感投入最强的那些：传统，“小规模”，多代家庭农民的图像悲惨地超市双头垄断迫使他们离开了土地。我们将展示这种报道如何揭示浪漫化的农业描绘方法，以此作为激发公众对农民生计支持的一种媒介策略，但在他们将（某些类型的）农民和耕作方式作为“值得”公众和媒体关注的焦点时，这些描述最终被旨在消除批评的超市营销活动所采用。替代食品政治的拥护者继续动员牧民感性的话语，以此作为鼓励（城市）消费者支持的手段，这引发了人们对此类话语在食品系统中有效反对公司力量的有效性的质疑。