The Daily Mail recently reported that academics at the History of Science Museum in Oxford are going to study the “political nature” of milk. They claim that milk is a “Northern European obsession” that has been forced on other cultures, and the belief that milk is an important part of your diet is a “white supremacist one.” The scholars are seeking  to unmask the “colonial legacies” of milk.

In somewhat convoluted academese, the museum stated:

By focusing on communities intersecting industry, aid and government regulation, the project aims to centre on heritage as a vital framework for understanding how colonial legacies influence contemporary issues and affect people’s lives. … The project will question both the imagined and real aspects of milk, revealing the intimate and political nature of this everyday substance.

The project received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. It’s tax money at work, unveiling the sordid history and secret weaponization of a drink that has so long sat innocently inside our fridges, innocuously associated in our minds with cookies and Santa, but which was, all along, a tool of oppression.

But is drinking milk actually racist? Is it a “Northern European obsession” imposed upon the world through colonization?

A little digging suggests otherwise. The 2013 book Milk: The Surprising Story of Milk Through the Ages by Anne Mendelson explains that dairy consumption is pretty timeless and pretty universal:

The practice of milking was an anchor of many prehistoric civilizations, one of humanity’s oldest and deepest bonds with domestic animals. … Its still unplumbed complexities are exactly what make it irreplaceable in a huge number of the world’s cuisines. In the ancient world it often had religious significance as a ritual offering; in India it still has sacred associations.

While drinking fresh milk wasn’t always as common as it is today (a practice that Mendelson suggests was driven by Western scientists who did not yet understand the genetic aspect of lactose intolerance), Mendelson does speak of the legacy of dairy throughout Russia, India, Eastern Europe, and beyond. She describes eating traditional yogurt in Greek, Bosnian, Turkish, Israeli, Persian, Afghan, and Indian restaurants: “Slowly it dawned on me that in simple fermented yogurt, I was tasting something that might have been eaten or drunk by Old Testament patriarchs, Sumerian lawgivers, Homeric heroes, Hindu gods, or the flower of Persian chivalry.” These are not typically thought of as “Western” cultures. If they’ve been consuming dairy for centuries, how is milk a specifically Western food, let alone a specifically evil Western food, imposed upon non-Western nations by colonial fiat?

One researcher on the milk project, Dr. Johanna Zetterstrom-Sharp, claims that milk-drinking is a Eurocentric, white supremacist practice since many non-European peoples are lactose intolerant. This neglects the fact that even many lactose-intolerant people can consume fermented milk, and indeed, this was traditionally the way it was consumed in many cultures. Mendelson writes:

Since prehistory, most of the milk consumed in all dairying regions of the world has been soured into yogurt or forms resembling today’s cultured buttermilk. … If you keep up with the story of lactose intolerance, you will realize that more human beings can more easily digest soured than sweet milk. To us an often-abused word, soured milk is in a very real sense a more ‘natural’ food for people past the age of weaning.

So different cultures have had different ways of consuming milk, but the mere fact of drinking it or eating milk products is hardly a specifically Northern European culinary achievement.

But more damning still to the milk project’s entire racism-based thesis is the evidence from  recent archeological work in Africa. In 2021, examination of human remains revealed that people in the regions now known as Kenya and Sudan consumed milk products at least 6,000 years ago, according to Science magazine. It’s possibly the oldest evidence of dairy consumption in the world. Moreover, according to Science, the research reveals that dairying existed in Africa at least as long as it has in Europe, and possibly longer.

How can global milk consumption be attributed to Western colonialism in the 17th–20th   centuries, given that plenty of non-European cultures were consuming milk or milk products for thousands of years prior to the coming of the Westerners—and maybe even longer than the Westerners themselves? I’m no historian, but something seems awry in this line of thinking.

So is milk racist and colonialist? No. So what’s really going on here? What’s the drive behind “academic” research like this?

The study of how Western colonialism has affected the wider world kicked into high gear in the 1970s, spearheaded by the work of critical theorists Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Homi K. Bhabha. Unfortunately, this academic field was conceived and framed within a worldview that analyzes all human activities through the lens of power dynamics. This view can only conceptualize literature or history in terms of how they manifest a battle between an oppressor class and an oppressed class.

Such a simplistic binary, however, is insufficient for explaining the complexities of the world. Nevertheless, academics continue to use this narrow viewpoint as their one-size-fits-all scholarly tool, especially in their examination of the legacy of colonialism, which has become knotted up with questions of racism and oppression.

The post-colonialists set about to examine the legacy of Western colonialism, especially how colonized or formerly colonized people have been oppressed—and continue to be oppressed by the subtle ways in which colonialism endures (such as through drinking milk, I suppose). To be sure, colonialism had both good and bad fruits, but post-colonialist critics tend to focus only on the bad. In the spirit of cultural Marxist theorists, they explore how dominant Western culture has been foisted upon colonized communities and continues to exploit them.

According to Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci, “cultural hegemony” is the mechanism by which a ruling class maintains power through shaping their culture according to their own beliefs. Certain ideologies are perpetuated as a matter of course through the power of cultural customs, beliefs, and practices. The idea is that a people remains enslaved to a certain ideology because they are constantly influenced by the environment of their society, which takes the ideology for granted.

So the assumption that stands behind this milk research project is probably the belief that milk is a part of the cultural hegemony of the West, that the west has maintained a dominant position in the world in part by forcing its nutritional customs on other countries who subconsciously adopt the Western diet as the norm. They are shackled by chains of milk. Or so we are to believe, despite the evidence already provided that milk is not a specifically western drink anyway.

This, alas, is what academia has been reduced to. Don’t academics have anything better to do than dream up imaginary forms of oppression that have no connection to reality or to real people’s lives? No longer do scholars search for a deeper knowledge of the good, the true, and the beautiful, but rather they fiddle away their time and money competing with one another to “unearth” some new, hidden form of oppression—like drinking milk.

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