Popping out to get a pint of milk today runs the risk of wading into a fraught culture war. The furore over the Arla Foods announcement of its Bovaer feed supplement trial at UK farms has revealed how easily something that could have been heralded as a technological advancement can be hijacked by far right conspiracy theories spreading misinformation about climate change and falling birth rates. Meanwhile in America, Donald Trump’s incumbent Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr is agitating to make raw milk — unpasteurised dairy teeming with dangerous bacteria — legal for human consumption. Simultaneously, oat milk and other alternative products have become the villain, after fears about their nutritional values ripped through social media. How did our relationship with milk go so sour?
The Bovaer trials should have come as welcome news. Its active ingredient, 3-nitrooxypropanol (3-NOP), inhibits methane production in dairy cows. By suppressing an enzyme in the cows’ stomachs it can reduce methane emissions by up to 30 per cent, claims Dutch company DSM, which produces Boevar. Burping cows from beef and dairy production accounts for almost a third of human-caused methane emissions, and methane is a greenhouse gas far more effective than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in our planet’s atmosphere.
If we can get the dairy cows to burp less, we buy more time to enjoy dairy products on a planet that is not entirely ravaged by heatwaves and extreme weather. Arla Foods, the Danish-Swedish dairy cooperative that owns butter brands such as Lurpak and Anchor, announced last month that 30 of its UK farms will trial the Boevar feed additive. Great, right? But social media broke out in a rash of conspiracy theories spreading misinformation that the additive would transfer across to the milk and render drinkers infertile. Farming advisor to King Charles, Partick Holden, was quoted in the press scaremongering that the trial was an attempt at “re-engineering the cow.” The backlash was quick and hysterical in tenor, with members of the public announcing boycotts, videoing themselves pouring milk down the toilet or chucking blocks of butter in the bin.
Arla Foods scrambled to counter the milk misinformation. “Bovaer has already been extensively and safely used across Europe,” the co-op said in a statement. “At no point during the trial will there be any impact on the milk, as it does not pass from the cow into the milk.” The company also rebuffed claims that Bill Gates was involved, pointing out that the billionaire’s own methane-burp-busting product, Rumin8 (a pun on cows’ multi chamber ruminative digestive systems), is an entirely separate endeavour. As to the fertility fears, that transpired to be a potential risk posed only to men handling the product in its pure form, well before it’s added to animal feed.
With the row reaching fever pitch, this week Lady Sheehan, chair of the environment and climate change committee of the House of Lords, called on ministers to speak out against the misinformation about the product’s safety. “The government has the evidence it can use,” she said. “I can see why the government wouldn’t want to throw its weight behind recommending one of the feed additive options out there because there are others, but the government can point to the evidence to date that the FSA has licensed it and has reassured [consumers] that it is safe.”
In hindsight, Bovaer was the perfect storm for a milky moral panic. It contained all the tasty raw ingredients far right conspiracies feed on: climate change hoaxes, a multinational company tampering with the food supply; association with Gates, a beloved hobby horse for the tinfoil hat-wearers looking for shadowy world orders; threats to male fertility and therefore the ability of white people to reproduce in numbers to counter immigration. Listen closely to scare stories about falling birth rates and you often hear that white nationalist refrain about a Great Replacement. Not to mention milk itself, which has become a lightning rod for the right and far-right within the past decade.
“Milk as an everyday good, its imagined connection to maternity and childhood, make it a useful target for conspiracy theorists and white nationalists,” Dr Catherine Tebaldi tells me. “Milk becomes a stand-in for broader issues over masculinity and fertility, feminism, urbanisation and globalisation.” Dr Tebaldi is a linguistic anthropologist at the University of Luxembourg researching “digital traditionalism”, the trend towards right and far-right online influencers that post online explicitly about getting away from cities back to the land - and implicitly about returning to an era before civil and women’s rights. “Since 2015 or so, there was [a belief] among white nationalists that only white people had the genes to digest milk and folks would drink it publicly,” she says. “And of course Nigel Farage says that skim or oat milks are for liberals.”
Dr Tebaldi is referring, of course, to the MP for Clacton leader posting his outrage over the milk selection at a London hotel. In a video posted to TikTok last week, Farage disparages the lack of full fat milk.“We’ve got semi-skimmed. I don’t like that. Oat milk – what on earth’s that when it’s at home?” he asks. “I want proper bloody milk, not left wing options. Proper milk. What’s wrong with me asking for that?” A canny populist operator, the leader of anti-immigration Reform Party manufacturing outrage over the “proper” milk for a nice British cup of tea is another salvo in the milk culture wars.
Since 2015 or so, there was [a belief] among white nationalists that only white people had the genes to digest milk and folks would drink it publicly
Populist politicians weaponising milk is a trend that Fabio Parasecoli, Professor of Food Studies at New York University, has been monitoring with interest. “It’s a good example of what I call ‘gastronativism’, when food is used in politics as an ideological tool to create boundaries between us and them,” he tells me over Zoom from a chilly New York. “It happens through food because it’s something that we’re all connected to in a very emotional way,” he explains. Everyone eats, and what we eat (or don’t eat) is essential to how humans understand themselves and their community. “Politicians know it’s something they can leverage to connect to certain constituencies in an emotional way, through the guts – sorry for the pun”.
Parasecoli noticed milk getting dragged into the culture wars as an alt-right symbol in 2017, when a group of young men protested Shia LaBeouf’s anti-Trump art installation in New York. They brought containers of milk (dairy, not alternative, crucially) and drank it while chanting sexist, racist, homophobic and antisemitic slogans. The incident was dubbed “milk party” and spawned #MilkTwitter, a viral hashtag on the platform now known as X. “Milk was embraced as a symbol of good, healthy American masculinity against veganism and bleeding heart liberals,” says Parasecoli. Men who drank dairy milk alternatives were deemed “soy boys”, after debunked science that suggested consuming soy products could elevate estrogen levels and produce a feminising effect.
With dairy milk established as the “right” milk by the far right, the next issue to organise around became raw milk. If you’ve heard about it recently, it’s had some fairly high profile name-checks. RFK Jr is an ardent raw milk activist, vowing to remove restrictions imposed by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm, one of the bigger tradwife influencers, purports to drink raw milk. And Gwyneth Paltrow, actress turned purveyor of dodgy wellness products, claims to be a fan. “I drink Raw Farm dairy,” Paltrow said on the Skinny Confidential podcast, referencing a particular California dairy farm that is stocked in upmarket supermarket Erewhon. “There are schools of thought that say drinking raw milk is better, because once you process it it makes dairy harder to tolerate,” Paltrow claimed. No scientific study has ever found that raw milk is easier to digest than pasteurised milk in humans. There was a study that found exposure to heat-sensitive components in raw milk (that would get denatured by the pasteurisation process) can suppress food allergenic symptoms… in mice. Raw Farm is currently under quarantine from the California Department of Food and Agriculture after officials found bird flu in “multiple” samples of their products, prompting a recall. Its owner, Mark McAfee, claims RFK Jr has approached him about a job in the new administration.
Drinking unpasteurised milk was, until recently, an extremely fringe practice. Since the 1860s, when French scientist Louis Pasteur developed his technique of heating liquids to kill off bacteria that makes humans sick, pasteurised milk has allowed dairy products to be transported and sold safely. Unpasteurised milk was banned from shops in England, Wales and Northern Ireland in 1985 (it’s outlawed entirely in Scotland), and the US followed suit in 1987 when the Food and Drug Association banned the interstate movement of unpasteurised milk.
While raw as a descriptor implies an earthy, untouched quality, in reality unpasteurised milk is a haven for all kinds of bacteria. From the kind that could give you anything from a nasty case of food poisoning to bovine tuberculosis, scarlet fever, and typhoid - it all loves to grow in the nutrient-dense soup that is milk. Why would anyone want to reject the science and technology that makes drinking dairy milk safer, especially for children? Parasecoli sees it as a byproduct of the coronavirus pandemic and the rejection of lockdowns and mask mandates.“There is this sense of ‘we don’t believe in what experts tell us because the experts are part of the elite’,” he explains. “The government bases its decision on the expert, but [they feel] the experts are not in touch with the life of normal people.”
When you’re in a confusing situation, it’s reassuring to hang on to something that makes sense to you
Dr Tebaldi also points to how pasteurisation has become entangled in antisemitic conspiracy theories, thanks to the likes of Raw Egg Nationalist, a UK-based bodybuilder and self-published author. In 1946, Lord Rothschild, a biologist and Labour party peer, gave an impassioned speech in the House of Lords on the needless deaths caused by unpasteurised milk. This has been glommed onto by raw milk proponents in the danker corners of the internet as proof that the Rothschilds were a prominent Jewish banking family attempting to weaken white people by denaturing milk. “There is a vision of conservative, traditional farming – raw milk is typically associated with the family farm, not a big industrial scale production – which has been tainted, poisoned by elites,” says Dr Tebaldi. “I suspect the anti-vaccine folks are moving over into raw milk.”
It’s perilously easy for anyone to stumble across these right-wing ideas and influencers when looking for information about health and nutrition. “You’re exposed to very different, and at times clashing, discourses,” says Parasecoli. “When you’re in a confusing situation, it’s reassuring to hang on to something that makes sense to you. So you go on the internet and end up in some rabbit hole and if that gives you a sense of clarity and security, like a simple solution to an issue, you might embrace it.” The messages about milk and a whole host of other foodstuffs can seem enlightening, but smuggle in a much darker message. “In online spaces, individuals interested in eating better or building fitness can find these concerns can be taken up by people like right-wing health influencers to sell people on the idea that this is not just a problem, but a symptom of a sick, degenerate modernity,” explains Dr Tebaldi. “This vision of individual health and the health of the social body can frequently radicalise people into eugenics.”
Should you worry about what’s in your milk, then? Perhaps it’s more the anti-science people pedalling ideas about it that we need to be concerned about. Cup of tea, anyone?
