Rina Santos //
At one point or another, milk – in its natural or artificial variety – was our only source of nutrients. It is safe to say that after this phase, many of us grow up regularly drinking milk – no longer our mothers’ but, generally speaking, cows’ milk. The fact that we are the only species that still consume this food after infancy, and not only that, but that we are the only ones consuming milk from other animals, raises a very interesting topic worthy of debate. However, for the purpose of this article, my focus is on those who cannot digest milk – or rather, the ones obsessed with this defect, as they would call it.
In recent years, unpasteurised milk has gained significant relevance in far-right online spaces. From the tradwife craze, with cases such as the Ballerina Farm, to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s outspoken support for the beverage, there have been many instances in which raw milk has been directly associated with the far-right quadrant of the political spectrum. The origins of this trace back to Nazi Germany (and beyond), with Werner Kollath as an important propagandist in this scheme, when he coined the slogan “Keep our food as natural as possible!” What at first glance appears as an innocuous concern for health and the effects of processed foods hides a deeply eugenicist intention. Having taken notice of how Northern Europeans, namely Scandinavians – after whom they modelled their Aryan ideal –, presented very low lactose intolerance levels, the Nazi regime took this as a public health strategy, jumping to the unfounded conclusion that a people who regularly ingested such a heavily lactose-rich food as unpasteurised milk was a strong people, in other words, Aryans. The heavy machine of Nazi propaganda was all encompassing and all consuming, especially when it came to the creation of their “Master Race” ideology, thus it wasn’t just a matter of natural, raw food, such as unpasteurised milk, it was also the ideas of Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil) and a fetishization of the rural and agrarian as virile and racially pure, devoid of any moral corruption.
Currently, milk has become a dog whistle for these ideals. We’ll find far-right figures all across the globe posting videos and casually reaching for a glass of milk, or see online usernames with that emoji. The use of these symbols isn’t innocent nor a mere coincidence; they’re part of a series of signals used by these groups to recognise each other. In an age where online spaces are being rapidly usurped by far-right forces, it is imperative to know and easily identify these dog whistles.