Used to be able to drink raw milk. But now you can’t. Because of WHOke.
Fascist-coded food and consumption as identity
The suburb of Moorabbin, just south of Melbourne, is not famous for much bar the murder of two police officers in the late 1990s. The name allegedly comes from the Boonwurrung language and means ‘mother’s milk,’ denoting that it was a creche of sorts for mothers and their babies while men went to hunt. This etymology is ironic, considering that Moorabbin’s lesser-known legacy is triggering the widespread use of pasteurisation here in Victoria in the 1940s, after a spate of typhoid deaths from raw milk.
In Australia, there is a blanket ban on the distribution of raw milk products, and it is one of only two countries in the world to do so. Granted, the 1940s was a very long time ago now. The Australian Raw Milk Movement insists that, owing to modernised farming methods, the consumption of unpasteurised milk is perfectly safe. One of their only cited sources is an interview with microbiologist Dr Ron Hull for The Bovine, both of whom I’m sure are completely free of vested interest in the topic. But in 2014, seventy years following the last milk-related typhoid outbreak, a toddler in Victoria tragically died after being fed Gippsland raw milk that was legal to sell as it had been labeled ‘bath milk’; three others succumbed to kidney failure brought on by E.coli, and others became sick after contracting campylobacter. Apparently this is fine and no cause for concern, according to one New South Wales father, because even a humble lettuce can take you out with norovirus.
But after a deadly pandemic that arose from zoonotic disease, and the WHO’s recent announcement that the H5N1 strain of bird flu had been found in raw milk, gastrointestinal problems that you have brought on yourself are likely the least pressing concerns in a laundry list full of them. I’m perfectly happy for adults to play tuberculosis roulette: exercising your inalienable right to make stupid decisions that only harm yourself is fun, and if they haven’t heard of natural selection by now, they’ll soon get to know. I would also be marginally more comfortable drinking raw milk in Australia, where biosecurity laws are some of the strictest in the world, or in France, where far more care and consideration is taken over food and farming, than in, say, the US. But where I have a problem is when other people are put at risk, and especially when children become implicated in the petty ideological posturing and scientific illiteracy of the adults around them. Is it really worth inducing kidney failure in your children, who cannot make their own decisions about their consumption, to demonstrate to everyone around you that you are ‘all-natural’ or ‘based’ or ‘owning the libs?’
As a disclaimer, I don’t even drink pasteurised dairy milk. I will eat it in chocolate or cheese or baked goods, or ice cream if I’m feeling brave, but even too much of these will make me feel ill. Something about cow’s milk in its unchanged form renders me incapacitated, bloated to the point that even my jeans with an elasticated waist struggle, and I have been on soy and oat since the age of eight, to the point that I have negatively polarised myself into thinking cow’s milk tastes like shit. Maybe this means I would never understand people’s motives for drinking raw milk, since I rarely put pasteurised milk in my body, but even if it is safe in the majority of cases, or is more nutritious, or tastes better, why is this their hill to die on? Who cares? The sense I get — ironically, considering the frequent crossover between these people and an abject aversion to identity politics — is that they have wrapped their identities around what they consume to such an extent that it becomes them. Criticism of their mode of consumption is an affront to them as people, their way of life. It is understandable when this critique is aimed at food consumption influenced by ethnic background or nationality, but the inextricability of food, culture and identity does not just pertain to these markers of belonging.
Eating denotes a necessary assimilation of ‘the other into the self.’1 If you have to put a foreign object into your body and make it part of you to survive, in many ways you would want it to be something most familiar, something you could look at and say, this is me, recognisably. Elspeth Probyn captures both the self-actualising power of food and its social dimension in her book, Carnal Appetites, positing that
eating conjoins us in a network of the edible and inedible, the human and non-human, the animate and the inanimate. In these actions, the individual is constantly connecting, disconnecting and reconnecting with different aspects of individual and social life.2
We tend to think of food and eating with others as having a very fundamental social and community-building function: we sit with acquaintances or friends or family; the food is a vehicle for conversation and intimacy; we acknowledge that this or that dish is from our community that we belong to and solidifies our bond as a group; alternatively, we say here is a dish from my culture, there is one from yours, we are sharing them to show care and affection and acceptance, and so on and so forth. But how often do we spare a thought for the political or national identity-building capacity of food?
There is a long history of mythology built around dairy in the West, which also contributes to the construction of national identity, particularly in the United States. Melanie Dupuis describes the image of the milkmaid as the ‘mediator’ between the rapidly urbanising American populace and nature during the 19th Century; then, following the Civil War, milk-related advertising became child-centred, presented as a viable alternative to breastfeeding for the wealthy, and began to incorporate bird imagery, including depicting eagles mothering their young.3 Milk consumption thus became inextricable from both the nuclear family and the nation, before its advertising became increasingly masculinised and dominated by male industrial figures, from farmers to veterinarians. The binding up of the United States’ economy and its dairy industry led to the US Department of Agriculture buying a certain amount of dairy farmers’ excess produce in order to stabilise supply and demand, and in 1972, after a gas crisis that drove up food prices passed on through rising production costs, President Jimmy Carter pledged to buy up all excess dairy to the tune of two billion dollars. The resulting stockpiles of redundant cheese led to a very aggressive pro-milk and cheese government PR drive that lasted decades: from the got milk? campaign to to Domino’s pizza going cheese-mad, dairy was and is the quintessential American food group.4 Base and superstructure immediately come to mind here, as the economics of the Government Cheese crusade and the productive forces behind it was thrust directly into the cultural realm in order to reinforce its legitimacy, which in turn reinforced the economic impetus to keep pushing cheese at all costs.
Widespread availability of dairy produce is very much a staple of the global north: venture into many countries in Asia or Africa and many traditional food items are devoid of it; travel north and you will find the lowest rates of lactose intolerance in the world. There are myriad self-deprecating jokes about the Jewish tendency to be lactose intolerant, with one study of Israeli Jewish youth finding 62% of them were ‘lactose malabsorbers,’ and the graph above from the World Population Review putting Israel’s figure as high as 89%. When my uncle’s first wife came over to the UK from her mountain village home in Thailand, she became a voracious cheese eater, as her regular diet rarely incorporated anything like it. This was much to our bemusement — cheese is nice, but even to the lactose intolerant among us, it is like eating bread, or drinking water, and not really anything to write home about. As one viral Tumblr post from the mid-2010s would suggest, cheese has solidified a certain reputation as a ‘white people food.’5
There is, however, a darker underbelly to this. The Western mythology constructed around milk and dairy is one of exclusion, intentionally or not. Iselin Lambert and Tobias Linné’s article for The Conversation is a great primer on the history dating as far back as 1920 between the extreme right and milk consumption, and really captures the political zeitgeist of 2018. The coinage of ‘soy boy’ as an insult and its unflattering younger cousin, the ‘soyjak’ meme, are based off the theory that soy stimulates oestrogen production in men and therefore renders them effeminate; the two authors are spot on in identifying the misogyny here, as well as the racism inherent in delegitimising and emasculating soy-heavy Asian diets. But six years on from the alt-right’s peak recruitment era and Trump’s first presidency, the discourse has evolved significantly, and the obsession with dairy (and specifically raw dairy) has broken into the dimension of free market deregulation, wellness and appeals to nature. It is now more of a symptom, a tip of the iceberg of a certain political persuasion, rather than an overt synecdoche of white supremacy. The signalling has become smarter. There is a faint whistling noise, and the dogs are barking.
Mark Novicoff for Politico describes the raw milk resurgence as being fuelled by ‘a worldview that was increasingly skeptical of credentialed expertise.’ Raw milk purchasing being largely restricted to an underground black market is great fodder for a persecution complex, arising from regulation fatigue, a breakdown of the social contract accelerated by COVID, and being sick of experts. On a more mainstream political level, the nebulous figure of the ‘expert,’ a shadowy hand hovering over your hard-earned freedom and all too prepared to point and laugh at you condescendingly, has all but destroyed any consensus that the government is giving you freedom from — now people want freedom to. Freedom to consume without government interference, freedom to make their own choices. I can respect that on some level, despite not agreeing. But mistrust in government regulatory processes, as opaque as they are, combined with conspiratorial tendencies provides an opening to a rabbit hole that leads to some pretty unsavoury conclusions, moving away from freedom from the nasties in unregulated food, past freedom to make independent consumer choices, and looping back around to demanding freedom from supposed malicious forces at the heart of the state. We encounter what Maya Vinokour terms ‘lifestyle fascism.’
I have written before about ‘zogslop,’ an offshoot of the Zionist Occupation Government conspiracy where the evil cabal of Jews who run the Western world are responsible for pumping dangerous chemicals into the food supply to poison the poor unsuspecting goyim. It’s one of the more interesting neo-Nazi conspiracies that combines classic Protocols of the Elders of Zion lore with more modern conceptions of a (((global elite))), with a dash of blood libel thrown in for good measure. The way a good proportion of antisemitic tropes operate, and what sets them apart from, say, abhorrent anti-black racism that is predicated on its perpetrators believing wholeheartedly in their own supremacy, is that antisemites generally believe they are punching upwards. It is insidious, couching itself in the language of the masses versus the elite, of ‘just asking questions,’ of ‘ask yourself why there are so many Jewish doctors and Jews in media and Jews in government.’ It is about conveniently ignoring the fact that through history, Jewish people have had to keep their assets liquid and their livelihoods transferable to other locales due to the threat of pogroms and expulsion. It is, at its most rotten and ugly root, Umberto Eco’s eighth criterion for identifying fascism: the enemy is simultaneously powerful and powerless, weak and degenerate and universally persecuted* but also part of an elite cabal that allows them to enact white genocide.6 In this way, the extreme right’s undermining of public health consensus and avoidance of any state interference in their own consumption comes from a place of feeling threatened, and if they can control the minutiae of their lifestyle, they can regain a sense of control over a force they feel is bigger than them. Vinokour summarises it well: ’If in Walter Benjamin’s day, fascism was aestheticizing politics, contemporary fascism has lifestylized it.’ Their consumptive identity and way of living is one of false victimhood.
Drawing boundaries around what you won’t eat is a form of identity curation, too. We see this in religious and cultural dietary rules: halal slaughter; kashrut laws; no meat on Fridays; vegetarianism and veganism, and so on. In refusing food we place a boundary between us and what we do not want to become part of our identity, the sorts of consumption and behaviour we do not tolerate, and occasionally (and perhaps most interestingly) the sorts of people we refuse to be associated with. Breaking bread with others is a deeply intimate act which renders us vulnerable to judgement on what and how we eat, and so is coming to respect other people’s modes of consumption and adapting accordingly. It is also partly why eating disorders are such violently isolating diseases. However, when this exclusion becomes bound up in a political ideology that is undoubtedly anti-human, that serves only to bolster the sense of identity of the excluder, and is rooted in disgust, we encounter another form of lifestyle fascism.
Seed oils, soy, PUFAs, processed food: these are just a few of the ingredients on which the new right has declared war. Much of this is rooted in a fallacious appeal to nature — the West was never naturally meant to eat this stuff. It’s not in our nature. We’re supposed to be eating raw meat diets and drinking milk and consuming things that are nutritionally complete to make us strong, to perfect our image, and to lock in our supremacy against the global south. The fixation within fascism on designing one’s own body, or that of others, is almost ubiquitously and insidiously present, but we tend to think of it in external terms rather than in terms of eating. In his brilliant article, ‘Fascism of the Skin,’ Marvin Prosono illustrates it using bodybuilding and Arnold Schwarzenegger as his prime case study, but the ‘discipline and transformation’ present in lifestyle fascism is also channelled through regimented and exclusionary eating.7 Both cases require a physically gruelling sense of abnegation, and a commitment to enduring pain and asceticism to achieve a specific and narrowly defined aesthetic end goal, whether or not our bodies are predisposed to looking that way. In this way, the appeals to a ‘natural’ way of living or conditioning our bodies are a strictly constructed illusion.
But there’s also a certain fear and disgust driving this. It is often a fear of these substances causing a nebulous and unspecific ‘inflammation,’ of poisoning, contamination, looking weak, not being in control. Looking like a soy boy. Being sick and fat and inflamed because all of your food is pumped full of chemicals that aren’t natural and are out of your control. By all accounts, excessive consumption of any fats or oils is not good for you, but it will not cause you to spontaneously combust: Guy Crosby for Rolling Stone clarifies that ‘It’s the amount of food that people consume that is deep fat-fried that is the issue. Not the oil itself.’ It is all too easy to scapegoat specific ingredients as carcinogenic and fattening and harmful. It is more difficult to come to terms with the fact that life is short and something will get you in the end, no matter how stringent your diet is, or how much you avoid the foods you believe will cause you harm. This fear has only snowballed since COVID and its subsequent vaccine skepticism, at which point Joe Rogan gave airtime to ‘seed oil expert' and carnivore diet adherent Paul Saladino on his podcast, and more recently when the worst Kennedy child made it one of his causes célèbres. The urge to optimise their bodies in this way is reminiscent of, if not bound up in, disordered eating behaviour, but it also completely guts the human body of pleasure and its worthwhile consequences. The body becomes, in the words of George Mosse describing the Third Reich’s ideal Aryan body, ‘purely representational’ — devoid of indulgence, sensuality or sexuality, or the enjoyment that comes with risk.8 An empty, politicised husk.
None of this is to say that those of us who haven’t been radicalised don’t use food to communicate identity. Being a picky eater isn’t a conservative trait in and of itself, but I do like to believe that my own openness to trying any food is an indication of my openness to places and people and ideas that are unfamiliar to me. I’m a real proponent of the idea that you cannot adequately begin to engage with another culture without a) knowing the language, or b) trying the food, and when the former is often difficult and time-consuming, the latter is the least you can do to show respect and receptivity. However, there’s a sort of sneering from people who earnestly believe in the concept of ‘luxury beliefs’ and the failure of multiculturalism that dabbling in a wider range of food cultures is a marker of class: specifically, of being of a higher social class than those who stick solely to their own. I’m old enough to have been starting my second year of university when Waitrose’s ‘student essentials’ list went viral thanks to the incredulous reaction that followed. As it turns out, people are very resistant to the idea that any student could possibly be willing to fork out for a glass jar of rose harissa paste or tamari soy sauce, because students should all be living in squalor and eating slop and instant noodles like in a pastiche of the Young Ones. Never mind the fact that many students now will have grown up with these staples in their cupboards, regardless of their socioeconomic background, and regardless of whether these items are part of their own food culture or that of their extended family, their friends or their local community. The socio-gastronomic exchange facilitated by multiculturalism should be something purely classless, not only because it leads us into an entire world of joy and openness and discovery, but also because there is something distinctly uncomfortable about the automatic association of cosmopolitanism with wealth.*
Call me woke, or part of the metropolitan elite, or a chubby degenerate with terrible seed oil skin, but I can’t find it in me to care. I always have been and always will be willing to try just about anything, and that is an inextricable part of who I am as a person — our existence here on Earth is short enough that it would be a crying shame to die having suffered with a case of terminal incuriosity. I draw the line at raw milk, though. I won’t be interested in contracting campylobacter any time soon.
Kathryn Robson, ‘Bodily Detours: Sarah Kofman’s Narratives of Childhood Trauma’, The Modern Language Review, 99.3 (2004), pp. 608–21, doi:10.2307/3738990.
Elspeth Probyn, Carnal Appetites: FoodSexIdentities (Taylor & Francis, 2004).
E. Melanie DuPuis, Nature’s Perfect Food : How Milk Became America’s Drink (New York University Press, 2002).
Wendigoon did a very detailed video on this recently
I hate this phrase and would have gone into more detail about why, but this piece was getting very long and Jenny Zhang already wrote a brilliant article about it for Bon Appétit
Umberto Eco, ‘Ur-Fascism’, in Five Moral Pieces (Secker & Warburg, 2001).
Marvin T. Prosono, ‘Fascism of the Skin: Symptoms of Alienation in the Body of Consumptive Capitalism’, Current Sociology, 56.4 (2008), pp. 635–55, doi:10.1177/0011392108090946.
George Lachmann Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (H. Fertig, 1985).
*I do not condone these organisations’ conflation of anti-zionism with antisemitism, but these were the best explanations of the ‘109 countries’ and ‘cosmopolitan elite’ tropes I could find
So interesting! I was literally on a tour of a local creamery this weekend and someone asked about raw milk. The owner said “we used to offer it, someone got sick, we got sued. It’s not worth the risk for us.”
Unsurprisingly maybe my favourite of your essays yet. Making a note of all the references to dig into!!