Contested Milk Mythologies:
An Analysis of Socio-Cultural Dairy Ideologies, and College Students’ Milk Beliefs
This paper was submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts. Below is an excerpt, please email below for the full version.
Introduction
Fluid milk is a staple food of American society, spanning the dinner tables, school cafeterias and media content. Beyond a food commodity, milk has been woven into American culture with layers of meaning. These meanings are grounded in milk’s social history and have been reconfigured and reproduced throughout its existence as an American cultural staple. Since its inception as an American drink, dairy consumption has held socio-cultural racial ideologies. Early milk consumption was promoted along societal refrains about racial purity, maintaining that milk consumption would create a superior white nation. While explicit racial ideologies have disappeared from milk discourse, these notions have been transformed and reproduced in the modern context of milk campaigns and advertising. Mass milk campaigns in the 1990s-2010s promoted under the guise of Euro-centric beauty ideals and understandings of health rooted in White biologies universalized to be true for all bodies. Humans need the enzyme lactase to digest milk, yet most non-white populations do not retain this enzyme after childhood. Despite this, nutritional guidelines and milk campaigns promote milk as an essential health staple, despite proven biological variance across race in “lactase persistence.” The cultural bias that denies the biological reality of non-white populations depicts a concept Andrea Wiley (2010) coins as ethno-biocentrism, and functions to institutionally and culturally uphold White biological normalcy.
Milk’s notorious presence in American households and schools embedded within ethno-biocentric ideologies surrounding health carry strong weight in society, and accordingly have created mass misconceptions, controversy, and skepticism. This paper aims to historically contextualize and explain the cultural beliefs and attitudes associated with fluid milk, critically analyze them within the framework of ethno-biocentrism, and evaluate current perceptions and attitudes in Hamilton College students. In doing so, I am answering the following questions: How do college students receive and perceive ethno-biocentric refrains on milk consumption? What are the key cultural beliefs around milk and health, where do these beliefs come from, who is perpetuating them, why are they perpetuated, and do they hold in college student populations?
To answer these questions, I first describe the survey and interview methodology, and explain the theoretical framework of ethno-biocentrism in my paper. I then give background to the socio-cultural history of milk and pre-existing academic literature, situating college students’ milk consumption and my research in this context. I trace white supremacist ideologies in early consumption and neoliberal government strategies for milk promotion in the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) guidelines, culminating the background with a content analysis of popular dairy advertisements in the 1990s and 2000s. Then, I evaluate results from my survey and interviews on college students’ beliefs and perceptions, comparing them to the prevailing cultural discourse on milk benefits. I find that milk consumption is normative in U.S. society at large, with caregivers, schools, and campaigns promoting milk under ethno-biocentric claims. However, Hamilton college milk drinkers and non-drinkers alike widely reject popular claims made about milk, assuming skepticism about its benefits. Consumers of milk instead choose to drink on the basis of taste and habit. While some participants choose to drink milk, milk consumption is not normative at Hamilton College, exemplified by a campus culture of dairy alternatives. Ultimately, suspicion about the validity of these claims suggests a rising consciousness about ethno-biocentrism in dairy.
