Tag: Food

The Milk Mustache Is Back: Trump, RFK Jr., and the Return of White Power Milk

Corey Wrenn, PhDLeave a comment

 

By Vasile Stănescu

When the White House posted “Make Whole Milk Great Again” beside an image of Donald Trump, it appeared to be another skirmish in an ongoing debate over dietary guidelines. In fact, it drew on a much older political tradition: the use of animal product consumption as a symbolic marker of whiteness, masculinity, and national belonging.

The phrase “Make Whole Milk Great Again” isn’t coincidental. It echoes the same cultural anxieties that, over a hundred years ago, led white working-class Americans to assert their consumption of animal products as a “privilege of white citizenship” (DuPuis, 2002). Then, as now, economic insecurity and immigration fears converged on the dinner plate.

In the 1920s and 1930s, as Chinese immigration increased, milk became weaponized. The National Dairy Council proclaimed that “people who have achieved” were those who consumed “liberal amounts of milk” (Olsen, 1920). Agricultural histories celebrated “Aryans” as “the heaviest drinkers of milk,” suggesting this “may in part account for the quick and high development of this division of human beings” (Hedrick, 1933). Even Herbert Hoover proclaimed in 1920: “The white race cannot survive without dairy products” (Riverside Daily Press, 1920, p. 2). This wasn’t fringe pseudoscience. It was mainstream dietary racism, positioning animal products, and milk in particular, as proof of white superiority (Freeman, 2013; Stănescu, 2016). Against Chinese immigrants portrayed as “effeminate rice eaters,” the right to consume animal products became defined as a right of white male citizenship. The factory farm system, emerging in the 1920s and 1930s, made meat and dairy ever more available and affordable; if eating animals equaled wealth, then cheaper animal products made people feel richer even as their real wages stagnated. Under “slaughterhouse capitalism”, animals were exploited more so that human workers could steadily be exploited more (Stănescu, 2025).

Milk’s literal whiteness also makes it a perfect vessel for white supremacist ideology: a commodity fetish embodying purity, cleanliness, and racial identity. Film directors understand this iconography. In Get Out, a white woman’s glass of milk reveals her commitment to white supremacy. As Jordan Peele explained, there’s “something kind of horrific about milk” as an image (Yamato, 2017). Like Ivory soap in the colonial era, which McClintock (1995) identified as embodying the “civilizing mission,” milk became a visual representation of the fantasy of racial whiteness itself.

Fast forward to 2017: the alt-right storms an art installation drinking milk, Richard Spencer tweets “I’m very tolerant…lactose tolerant!”, and neo-Nazis type “Heil Milk” across the internet (Freeman, 2017; Nagesh, 2017; Swerdloff, 2017). They’re drawing on contemporary academic research about lactose tolerance and race (research published in venues like The Economist and PBS) to justify the same old supremacist ideology in new scientific clothing (Cook, 2015a, 2015b; Harmon, 2018; Stănescu, 2018).

RFK Jr.’s dietary rhetoric revives these patterns. When economic anxiety rises and demographic change accelerates, we witness the same proxy battle: the reassertion of animal product consumption as a marker of white masculinity and citizenship. The alt-right’s favorite insult, “soy boy,” is simply an updated version of the 19th century’s “effeminate rice eater” (Adams, 1990/2015; Sommer, 2017; Stănescu, 2016).

The milk mustache is back. As economic instability deepens and demographic change accelerates, we can expect to see more performative acts of meat and dairy consumption. Now, as before, these are public rituals designed to assert whiteness, masculinity, and citizenship through the fantasy that animal consumption equals wealth, status, and national belonging. Understanding this history reveals that challenging animal agriculture isn’t only about animals. It’s about dismantling the systems of oppression that harm us all.

 

References

Adams, C. J. (2015). The sexual politics of meat: A feminist-vegetarian critical theory (25th anniversary ed.). Bloomsbury Academic. (Original work published 1990)

Cook, J. (2015a, March 28). No use crying: The ability to digest milk may explain how Europe got rich. The Economist. https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2015/03/28/no-use-crying

Cook, J. (2015b, December 3). Got milk? How lactose tolerance influenced economic development. PBS NewsHour. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/got-milk-lactose-tolerance-influenced-economic-development

DuPuis, E. M. (2002). Nature’s perfect food: How milk became America’s drink. New York University Press.

Freeman, A. (2013). The unbearable whiteness of milk: Food oppression and the USDA. U.C. Irvine Law Review, 3(4), 1251–1279.

Freeman, A. (2017, August 30). Milk, a symbol of neo-Nazi hate. The Conversation. http://theconversation.com/milk-a-symbol-of-neo-nazi-hate-83292

Harmon, A. (2018, October 17). Why white supremacists are chugging milk (and why geneticists are alarmed). The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/17/us/white-supremacists-science-dna.html

Hedrick, U. P. (1933). A history of agriculture in the State of New York. New York State Agricultural Society.

McClintock, A. (1995). Imperial leather: Race, gender, and sexuality in the colonial contest. Routledge.

Nagesh, A. (2017, February 21). Secret Nazi code kept hidden by “milk” and “vegan agenda.” Metro. https://metro.co.uk/2017/02/21/secret-nazi-code-kept-hidden-by-milk-and-vegan-agenda-6463079/

Olsen, H. P. (1920). The milk dealer. The National Journal for the City Milk Trade, 10(1).

Riverside Daily Press. (1920, February 5). XXXV(31), p. 2. https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=RDP19200205.2.97

Sommer, W. (2017). How “soy boy” became the far right’s favorite new insult. Medium. https://medium.com/@willsommer/how-soy-boy-became-the-far-rights-favorite-new-insult-e2e988d365c7

Stănescu, V. (2016). The whopper virgins: Hamburgers, gender, and xenophobia. In A. Potts (Ed.), Meat culture (pp. 90–108). Brill.

Stănescu, V. (2018). ‘White power milk’: Milk, dietary racism, and the ‘alt-right.’ Animal Studies Journal, 7(2), 103–128.

Stănescu, V. (2025, October 6). Slaughterhouse capitalism. Current Affairs. https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/how-industrial-slaughter-became-the-blueprint-for-modern-capitalism

Swerdloff, A. (2017, February 21). Got milk? Neo-Nazi trolls sure as hell do. VICE. https://munchies.vice.com/en_us/article/kbka39/got-milk-neo-nazi-trolls-sure-as-hell-do

Yamato, J. (2017, March 1). Jordan Peele explains Get Out’s creepy milk scene, ponders the recent link between dairy and hate. Los Angeles Times. http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-get-out-milk-horror-jordan-peele-allison-williams-20170301-story.html

 

The World is On Fire – Vasile Stănescu

Corey Wrenn, PhDLeave a comment

On March 25th, IAVS affiliate Dr Vasile Stănescu from Mercer University spoke to the University of Kent’s School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research. He gave an impassioned talk to an audience of 80 on the politics of climate change, the silence on animal agriculture’s contribution to the environmental crisis, and major tactical failings of the animal rights movement.

Watch here >>

Abstract below.

The World is on Fire: Animal Agriculture, Climate Change, and the Path Forward

In 2006, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), issued a report titled “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” concluding that animal farming presents a “major threat to the environment” with such “deep and wide-ranging” impacts that it should rank as the leading focus for environmental policy. Recently, these stakes were raised again when the UN determined that the world has only fourteen years to act to prevent catastrophic effects due to climate change. The UN Convention on Biological Diversity estimates as high as 150 species go extinct each day; the UN determined animal agriculture represents the single largest cause of habit loss, species extinction, and biodiversity loss. Most importantly, exponentially more animals are killed, in worse conditions, every year: My first publication in critical animal studies, entitled “Green Eggs and Ham: The Myth of Sustainable Meat and The Danger of the Local” was published in 2010; at that time, the world raised and killed approximately 60 billion land animals each year. Today it is 80 billion; the UN estimates by 2050, the number will exceed 120 billion. The world is on fire.

The response by many, including both advocates for animal agriculture and animal rights, has been three main strategies:

  • Attempts to move toward local, humane, and free-range animal farming based on, in part, a belief that such moves will positively affect the environment
  • The rise of so-called “in vitro” meat which, like claims about humane meat, will also offset the environmental effects of animal agriculture
  • Market based moves to sell new meat substitutes, such as Burger King’s decision to sell the Impossible Whopper.

However, in reality none of these proposed solutions will work. Indeed, most – if not all – will in reality make the environmental effects of animal agriculture worse. Instead, I argue, we need a social justice based approach to animal advocacy, based on directly confronting speciesism and anthropocentrism, that seeks to build solidarity between animal rights and other social justice movements to affect broad based change. We are running out of time. To paraphrase the famous maxim attributed to Marx: As scholars, we no longer possess the luxury to only understand the world; we have to change it.

Pig-Ignorance: The Peppa Pig Paradox

Corey Wrenn, PhDLeave a comment
Peppa Pig ham salad

Affiliate Member, Lynda Korimboccus, recently investigated attitudinal and behavioural contradictions that result in Peppa Pig fans oblivious to the direct connections between their favourite TV character and a ham salad sandwich.

The ‘Peppa Pig Paradox’ developed from Loughnan et al’s 2010 ‘meat paradox’ – that is, the idea that people say they love animals but also love eating animals. In many cases, people have simply been taught to categorise animals differently: as ‘food’ or as ‘pets’, for example. She aimed to apply this where the same species is considered in two contradictory ways: The Peppa Pig Paradox. She considers whether Peppa Pig simply reflects human society in pig form through anthropomorphism (Mills 2017); whether negative pig metaphors skew our views (Goatly 2006) and our use of the language we learn allows us to distance ourselves (Plous 1993); or whether it simply the application of denialism, or ‘strategic ignorance’ (Onwezen & van der Weele 2016) that has so far failed to make the connection impossible to ignore.

Lynda’s vegan daughter, Maya

The social influences upon us are strong and powerful – from family, peers and education through media, government and business – and we’d be forgiven for not seeing the obvious up until now. However, animal eating is a normalised practice at risk from an increase in plant-based eating and Lynda encourages vegan parents to become familiar with both moral and nutritional arguments for this in preparation for the inevitable challenges. She urges non-vegan parents to face their fear of change and embrace the plant-based revolution – not just for their children’s health, but their future environment as well as the lives of millions of non-human animals worldwide. Hopefully, all Peppa Pig fans will one day be vegan, but meantime, it’s vital to raise awareness of inconsistency and help others make connections to overcome their strategic, or ‘pig’ ignorance.

Full article (including references):
Korimboccus, L.M. (2020). ‘Pig-Ignorant: The Peppa Pig Paradox: Investigating Contradictory Childhood Consumption.’ Journal for Critical Animal Studies 17(5): 3-33.

 

Lynda M. Korimboccus is an affiliate member of the IAVS and serves as Student Editor-in-Chief for the Student Journal of Vegan Sociology.