First they came for the milk-drinkers. In the last five years, you might have noticed a puzzling succession of headlines aimed at milk. Maybe it was the Buzzfeed article titled “Hate to Break It To You: Drinking Milk Is Not Okay,” or the Vice story that said drinking milk “is unsettling behavior,” or a film critic’s op-ed which stated “only psychopaths drink milk.” Maybe you recently noticed yourself feeling awkward when you had to clarify to your local barista that you’d like “regular” or “cow’s milk,” not oat, almond, or soy. If you’d really been making the connections, you would have also noticed that dairy farmers are committing suicide in record numbers.

Milk is in crisis. Not oat, almond, or soy milk, but dairy milk. Compared with each of the previous six decades, American milk consumption fell fastest in the 2010s, down from a peak of over two cups per day to just half a cup. An average of five dairy farms shut down every day in the US, representing a loss of more than 38,000 farms since 2003. Dairy cooperatives like Agri-Mark Inc. have resorted to mailing their farmers a list of suicide prevention hotlines alongside their bleak price forecasts.

Milk, once seen as foundational or even luxurious, is facing an unprecedented reckoning. Due to climate change regulation, dairy farmers in the Netherlands have been ordered to slash their emissions by as much as 95%, forcing them to either shut down or drastically reduce their livestock numbers; they’ve responded by setting highways on fire and blockading food distribution centers with their tractors. Patrick Brown, the CEO of Impossible Foods, has openly stated his desire to “get rid of the friggin’ cows.” On the grassroots level, mobs of angry vegans are drilling holes in milk delivery trucks, teenage animal activists are going viral by livestreaming themselves emptying gallons of milk onto the floor in grocery stores, and trendy LA brands sell “Anti Dairy Social Club” apparel.

While not every civilization drank cow’s milk, the situation in the Western world today is perhaps the first time in human history the value of dairy, and cows by extension, has been so aggressively questioned. But there are a few who still revere milk. Not just any milk, but raw milk: unpasteurized, organic, grass-fed, and locally sourced. To this ragtag coalition of homesteaders, bodybuilders, and new-age hillbillies, raw milk is “nature’s perfect superfood,” and — with raw milk still illegal to sell for human consumption in 20 states — they’ll go to great lengths to procure it. They’ll also go to great lengths to defend it, and theirs is a more covert war waged online: they troll oat milk companies incessantly, publish Twitter threads about “raw milk nationalism,” and make funny memes to propagandize potential converts. 

These are the milk wars, and they have everything to do with how food will be consumed in the 21st century. As we approach an era in which climate change ultimatums are poised to eradicate entire industries, it’s not just the future of cows called into question. Milk is a proxy for societal forces to wage an information war over agriculture, artificial meat, animal husbandry, and much more.

Whoever wins will control the future of food. The stakes have never been higher.

For thousands of years, milk has symbolized nourishment and blessings. The Bible mentions milk over fifty times, with G-d describing the Promised Land as a “land which floweth with milk and honey.” Milk and its products have played a particularly foundational role in the West; cheese consumption was seen as a defining characteristic of the early American colonist, with the word “Yankee” derived from the nickname Jan Kaas (John Cheese). In our lifetimes, many of us might remember the ubiquitous “Got Milk?” ad campaign.

The truth is, by the time “Got Milk?” hit the airwaves in 1993, dairy was cooked. Though the campaign reached 90% name recognition in the United States, it was in fact Big Dairy’s agonal gasp, failing to meaningfully increase sales. In 1945, Americans drank 45 gallons of milk a year; now, they drink only 11, most of it in their coffee. Analysts predict industrial cattle farming will be obsolete by 2035.

With the fall of dairy milk came the rapid rise of vegan milks. Since 2012, sales of plant-based milks like almond, soy, coconut, rice, cashew, pea, flax, and oat milk have more than doubled into a $2.6 billion US market, or close to 20% of all retail milk sold. Sales of oat milk alone grew over 50% in 2022, representing an increase of $527 million. With over half a million hashtagged posts on Instagram, #oatmilk has been described as a “status symbol” for Gen Z — an aesthetic signal that one is environmentally conscious, vaguely healthy, and on-trend.

“The dairy industry needs to end,” Amber Canavan, Assistant Manager of Campaigns for PETA, told me in a phone interview. (Canavan is the real deal — she once spent 30 days in jail for infiltrating a foie gras farm and rescuing two ducks.) “Cows on dairy farms are forcibly impregnated, have their babies stolen away, and are ultimately sent off to the slaughterhouse where their throats will be slit.”

“No one needs to eat dairy or eggs,” Canavan said resolutely. “You can get everything you need from a dairy-free diet. This transition into the vegan food sector needs to happen as we deal with climate catastrophe.”

Canavan’s beliefs about dairy — that it’s bad for cows, bad for humans, and bad for the planet — are shared by millions. University of Oxford researchers have recommended that “a vegan diet is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth.” It’s indisputable that dairy produces more greenhouse gasses than its plant-based alternatives — each year, a single cow will belch about 220 pounds of methane, collectively adding up to 2% of US greenhouse gas emissions. Livestock worldwide, including cows raised for both meat and milk, amounts to 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

But that doesn’t need to spell the end of dairy. In fact, the US dairy industry’s goal is to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Some companies are way ahead of schedule: Horizon Organic plans to be carbon-positive by 2025. Dairy farmers are also finding unique ways to reduce their environmental impact, such as breaking down manure to generate power and using probiotic supplements to reduce cow belches. Because of these practices, a gallon of milk in 2017 used 30% less water, 21% less land, and left a 19% smaller carbon footprint than in 2007. Furthermore, dairy alternatives still contribute to environmental devastation, through destructive mono-crop practices that deplete the soil, require deforestation, and spread harmful pesticides like glyphosate, which is tied to the disappearance of honeybees.

Another major point of contention is about whether dairy milk is good for you. Vegans are correct about milk produced by Big Dairy factory farms: heated through pasteurization — which makes milk safer, not more nutritious — skimmed of fat which contains an abundance of healthy omega-3s, and pumped full of hormones, the nutritional value of an average cup of milk is compromised. The negative perception of cholesterol, only now lifting due to new research, hasn’t helped either. In 2017, 19% of Americans said they were drinking less dairy milk due to health concerns.

A much bigger debate could be had over the healthiness of organic whole milk, or even unpasteurized raw milk. Organic whole milk is replete with omega-3s and vitamins like protein, calcium, vitamin D, vitamin A, vitamin B12, riboflavin, potassium — all of which must be added to oat milk artificially. Most plant-based beverages contain less than half the protein of cow’s milk while being higher in sugar; some, like Oatly’s milk, contain a prolific amount of controversial seed oils. This nutritional disparity has actually led to a rare win for Big Dairy: Wired reported on a recently leaked FDA draft policy that will ban dairy alternatives from using the word “milk” on their packaging. Author Jayne Buxton claims in her book The Great Plant-Based Con that when you calculate greenhouse gas emissions based on nutrients instead of calories, measuring by CO2 per micronutrient content, the environmental footprint of dairy milk is less than a third of oat milk’s.

However, it’s not just an association with climate change, factory farms, and personal health which have dealt the death knell to milk. Unfortunately, but not unsurprisingly, milk has literally become associated with Nazis. Canavan told me that since 2018, “we’ve been seeing white supremacists guzzling cow’s milk in an effort to mock POC who are lactose-intolerant.” She’s referring to a group of racist, shirtless internet trolls who drank jugs of milk in front of He Will Not Divide Us, Shia LaBeouf’s 2017 livestream art installation. Their trollish machinations were based on the widely-circulated statistic that 68% of the world’s population has trouble digesting the lactose in milk, while only 5% of people of European descent are lactose-intolerant. Playing off this meme, white nationalists like Richard Spencer have, in the past, added the milk emoji to their Twitter profiles. “It’s no surprise that a subculture that glorifies violence and sexism would celebrate the dairy industry, which is based on forcibly impregnating cows and stealing their babies,” Canavan said.

Since then, outlets like Mic have concluded that milk is the “new, creamy symbol of white racial purity in Donald Trump’s America.” Vice asked its readers “Got Milk? Neo-Nazi trolls sure as hell do.” “Dairy is a racist drug,” claimed advocates from Animal Rebellion, the same group which encourages young people to do the “Milk Pour” challenge and film themselves dousing supermarket floors with dairy.

Never mind that East African herdsmen also developed a similar immunity to lactose. Or that you could use the same mental gymnastics to connect veganism with white supremacy; see Vice’s article headlined “Why So Many White Supremacists Are Into Veganism.” Veganism, too, can be correlated with psychopathy — the alleged Moscow killer, Bryan Kohberger, was an obsessive vegan. Hitler was history’s most famous vegetarian.

A combination of methane, cholesterol, and lactose appear to have spoiled milk. Who is left to speak for it?

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There remains one vigorous point of agreement between vegans and certain kinds of milk-drinkers.

“I think commercial farming is an abomination,” Raw Egg Nationalist told me. Raw Egg Nationalist, or REN, is a highly followed Twitter anon who publishes the magazine Man’s World, has authored several high-selling books on bodybuilding and health, and recently appeared in the Tucker Carlson documentary The End of Men. “In large-scale dairy systems, animals are treated simply as ‘inputs’ rather than sentient creatures that should be raised in a particular manner in conformity with their nature,” he says. “Cows should be roaming on pasture. Not tied up in a lot.”

The answer? Raw Milk Nationalism. Raw Milk Nationalism is one of the “esoteric nationalisms” shilled by REN and his friends on Twitter: Raw Egg Nationalism, Raw Milk Nationalism, Raw Garlic Nationalism, and so forth, each arriving with its own aesthetic and dietary recommendations. 

The precepts of raw milk nationalism are simple: to build a strong nation, we must drink the best milk. This warrants treating cows in a kind and humane way, with special attention paid to their diets. Raw Milk Nationalists believe that pasteurization — which only became widespread 150 years ago as a response to diseases spread by the first industrial farms — destroys important enzymes, damages milk proteins, and kills vitamins. They attribute a wide variety of benefits to raw milk, including boosting the immune system, regenerating teeth health, and nulling lactose intolerance.

They may be nationalists, but they’re not Nazis. The modern raw milk movement is an eclectic coalition of small dairy farmers, right-wing body-builders on Twitter, holistic health accounts, new-age hillbillies, and trad homesteaders. Some discovered raw milk through the research of Weston A. Price, author of the book Nutrition & Physical Degeneration, and learned more in books like The Story of Milk by Ron Schmidt. In the last few years, raw milk has been featured positively in diverse literature, such as Gothic Violence by Mike Ma or Leave Society by Tao Lin.

Over email, Tao Lin told me about the benefits of raw milk, which he mostly eats in the form of one to two quarts of raw milk yogurt a day. “Many people don’t know that humans evolved eating meat and dairy,” he says. Researchers at Tel Aviv University have confirmed this — apparently, Stone Age humans only ate meat, and gradually moved towards a more plant-based diet around 85,000 years ago, when large mammals became less available. Dairy consumption arose after the dawn of agriculture, but has deep historical roots in cultures around the world, from Mongolian herders to African nomads and European farmers.

“Even though many vegetarians and vegans would view aborigines — our ancestors — as sources of wisdom, somehow aboriginal diets (which included fermented or raw milk) aren’t well-known in culture today,” Tao said. “Because of the demand for vegetarian foods, companies are making a lot of non-dairy milk, which do not provide the vitamins and enzymes and beneficial microbes and healthy fats and other nutrients that raw or fermented dairy does.”

It’s easier to buy weed than it is raw milk. Raw milk remains illegal in seven states, and illegal to transport across state lines. In many states, you can only secure it through loopholes like pet milk consumption or buying shares in a cow herd. Outside of the Washington-based nonprofit Weston A. Price Foundation and a few representatives in Congress, the raw milk movement lacks institutional support. Compare that to Big Dairy, which spent $5.2 million lobbying Congress in 2022. America’s institutions warn against raw milk: according to the CDC, between 1998 and 2011, 79% of dairy-related disease outbreaks in the United States were due to raw milk or cheese products.

But the raw milk movement has one thing that Big Dairy doesn’t: true believers. A rich raw milk ecosystem, both in real life and online, has emerged. Websites like getrawmilk.com help consumers find raw milk in their area. Instagram accounts like @rawmilkanddeadlifts sell “Raw Milk” shirts and “Make Milk Raw Again” bumper stickers. The Twitter accounts of Joshua Rainer, farmer William Wheelwright, and Sollozzo (who runs the pro-raw milk podcast Meat Mafia with Clemenza) publish detailed threads about raw milk: why they believe lactose intolerance is a myth, or why our government should be doing everything it can to promote 100% grass-fed dairy as the basis of our food system.

One notable incident in the milk wars happened on January 17, 2022. Oatly is known for its offbeat marketing campaigns, such as “Date an Oat Milk Drinker,” or a puppet show in which a rancorous, farting dairy milk carton rages on about how life would be different “if all that pesky Science hadn’t gotten in the way.” Under one of their tweets, a trad female account, @kirbylxigh, replied “Keep your rapeseed oil juice to yourself. Raw milk nationalism FTW.” Her tweet received over 2,100 likes, far more than the ~270 likes that Oatly received. This constituted a significant ratio, when the response gets more engagement than the original post. Though in the year since, Twitter has buried the tweet in the replies, and it’s lost hundreds of likes, most likely due to banned accounts. 

Of course, there are also the memes. Instagram accounts like @nutritionwithtomandlauren and Raw Egg Nationalist unleash a steady supply of raw milk memes, usually riffs on the comparison between “virgin oat milk-drinkers” and “Chad cow milk-drinkers.” In the pages of Man’s World, Raw Egg Nationalist runs fake adverts of a raw milk brand called Milk-ly, satirizing Oatly’s “Date an Oat Milk Drinker” campaign with tales about how the Yamnaya, the “most murderous people in history,” fueled their incredible tear across Neolithic Europe with raw milk.

While plant milk memes do exist, they are rarer and, in the author’s purely subjective opinion, not as funny. Progressives are far more likely to use theory, NGOs, and the mantle of Science to dismantle their foes. The Global Network on Extremism & Technology (GNET), which received its initial funding from companies such as Microsoft and Google, recently produced a scary-sounding report on the raw food movement. GNET claimed that the “extreme” diets of eating meat and drinking raw milk every day, as advocated by Raw Milk Nationalists, “can be seen as a far-right form of hypermasculinity.” That, along with other surefire signs of a right-wing extremist, such as avoiding “packaged foods, fluoridated tap water, and seed oils.”

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Information wars over food are nothing new. In the 19th century, battles raged between “slop milk” and “pure milk.” Slop milk was the product pushed by the Big Dairy of that era — harvested from cows who were fed hot waste from whiskey distilleries, and artificially colored white with starch, sugar flour, plaster of paris, and chalk. Slop milk led to outbreaks of tuberculosis, scarlet fever, and salmonella, and resulted in the 1910 pasteurization mandate in New York City. Meanwhile, more conscious dairy farmers placed ads in newspapers for “pure feed and pasture milk” from cows that were fed “no swill or any other feed, which can in any manner… be deleterious for the human constitution or injurious to the milk.”

Today, the war between “pure milk” and “slop milk” continues, in different forms, with a new challenger approaching: vegan milks. Every few months, headlines appear about a popular insect ice cream made from black soldier fly larvae, or a novel method of 3D printing milk, or a 120 million dollar investment in “cow-free” milk made by microbes in vats. The headlines are inevitably screen-shotted by raw milk drinkers and shared on social media, used to demonstrate the nature of their foe. 

While, generally, the political left tends to be more plant-based, and the right more animal-based, horseshoe theory still applies in the milk wars. That is, if you go far-left enough, you will find anti-vegan sentiment. Social justice and anti-capitalist account @wokescientist writes critically on their Substack that

Mainstream veganism (dominated largely by white, privileged people who have limited practical knowledge about growing and producing their own food) advocates for ‘green capitalism,’ falsely claiming that a global switch in personal diet choices to plant-based foods is sufficient to thwart climate change. This is a form of modern-day colonialism that continues to destroy the planet under the guise of social justice and animal rights. It also ignores the devastating environmental impact of plant-based diets (crop production) under capitalism and the vegan industry itself.

Like the geopolitical realities of the early twentieth century, great alliances are being made and broken, new fronts are opening, and inevitably a new equilibrium will emerge. Allegiances will switch — boomer conservatives could go vegan, dissident leftists might embrace animal husbandry — as society transitions from a left-right dichotomy to a localism-globalism paradigm. The production and procurement of raw milk is deeply local; plant-based beverages necessitate an industrial, global system. Milk is but an early front of the future culture wars over food, which will be fought over farming, meat, eggs, and even, apparently, gas stoves.

If the plant-based milk-drinkers win, we’ll live in a society where children will drink oat milk and eat “cow-free” Mars bars, we’ll snack on fried grasshoppers at baseball games, beef dishes will disappear from cooking websites, and meat will no longer be expensable on work trips. In an article published by the World Economic Forum titled “What will we eat in 2030?”, UK professor Tim Benton writes our diets will consist of more “vegetarian food or new alternatives (soya products, or perhaps insects or artificial meat), and less fried and sugary things. We’ll still eat meat, but, perhaps more like our parents and grandparents, see it as a treat to savour every few days.” He goes on to recommend the genetic engineering of commodity crops to feed the world. “‘Ultra-processed’ foods need not be unhealthy,” he concludes.

We might not have much of a choice in choosing this vision. Climate change ultimatums continue to cull the world’s farms. The Netherlands’ goal to reduce livestock numbers by 30% has led to civil unrest and highway blockades by enraged farmers. Last year, New Zealand proposed a first-in-the-world tax on cow emissions, which is predicted to drive many farms out of business, and led to over 50 protests across the country in October 2022.

If animal husbandry becomes outlawed, citizens will no longer be able to independently farm nutrient-dense foods like liver, organs, and milk from cows. The food supply would fall entirely into the hands of governments and corporations. The only way for humans to get essential nutrients would be through patented, industrial-grade processes of vitamin fortification. This would allow governments to control the climate change emissions of agriculture down to a tee. But at what cost?

As for the visions of the milk-drinkers, I asked Raw Egg Nationalist what victory looked like in the Great Milk Culture Wars. “Raw milk served in every school canteen. Milch cows and goats grazing freely on neighborhood lawns. Public trials for the mass-murder profiteers of industrial agriculture…

…Until then, I’ll settle for ratio-ing Oatly on Twitter.”

-Zachary Emmanuel