Back in September, when we were brainstorming ideas for the first issue, milk was one of the first themes to come up. We can’t recall what first brought it to mind, but once it got there, it wedged itself in, and we couldn’t imagine starting off with anything but. It was a far more efficient editorial meeting than I think either of us expected.

Why milk, you may ask? Because the role that milk plays in our lives almost belies encapsulation: it is at once a nutrient-dense emulsion, a bodily fluid, a source of calcium, a political signifier, a religious marker, and a global commodity. Milk is used to usher in people who are like us, and separate people who are like them; it justifies hierarchies within and between human and animal, it nourishes life and it inflicts pain. Milk speaks to the past and the present, the permeability of progress and regression, to the dark edges of history and to promises of a shinier future. 

Women in particular are bound to the liquid through the breast, the bottle, and the shopping cart. In applying a feminist perspective to milk, we can see the often hidden ways that it has shaped and placed us as individuals, societies, nations, and as a whole. It is our hope that these insights will unite us in yearning for, arguing over, and working towards a fairer world, where milk is not the architect of any living being’s oppression.

A feminist perspective on milk, of course, attends to many confronting, sometimes seemingly contradictory, questions. What does it mean to love an animal while being the master of its pain? (In an exploitative capitalist system, who is the master, really?) Who wins and who loses in the transition toward a different kind of dairy industry, one built not on mammalian breasts but on moneyed, women-led biotech? How can milk ascribe and reify normative versions of femininity while simultaneously evidencing the “supremacy” of cisgender white males? Why are we so afraid of what milk, animal or alternative, can do to our and others’ bodies? How did cheesemaking go from being pastoral “women’s work” to a large-scale, male-dominated industry?

These are some of the issues that MILK attempts to explore, through the talented voices of our first writers: Apoorva Sripathi, Adhiambo Edith Magak, Ingrid L. Taylor, Lauren Gitlin, Julia Norza, and McKenzie Schwark. We also have three pieces by yours truly: by Isabela here and here and by Zoë here (with her brilliant illustrations featuring throughout the issue).

A few weeks ago, we were blessed by a brilliant — essential, even — essay by Astra and Sunuaura Taylor, Our Animals, Ourselves: The Socialist Feminist Case for Animal Liberation. It aptly notes how milk is both a noun and a “verb that means to exploit for profit.” We hope you will make your way through our MILK issue with both of these definitions in mind. MILK should guide you in thinking about the systemic forces and individual choices that shape our relationship to milk, and how we can work to manifest a feminist milk paradigm.

This is just the start for Feminist Food Journal, and we’re forever indebted to everyone who has shown us their support so far. We’re looking forward to seeing where this journey takes us. We’ve moved to Substack, and while this issue is available for free, full access to our future issues — along with a monthly newsletter, invitations to community-only events, and access to exclusive behind-the-scenes clips — can be yours for US$5 per month or US$45 per year. This will allow us to keep publishing, and keep paying our writers fairly.

WAR, our second issue, will be coming out in May 2022. We’ll be opening our call for pitches very soon. In the meantime, please let us know what you thought about MILK — or what MILK made you think about. You can find us at hello@feministfoodjournal.com, on all the requisite social channels, or quite frankly, sleeping in for the next few weeks before we get ready (with unbridled joy) to do it all over again.

On matzo ball soup and maternal love

Listen on our podcast here.

Through the lens of her mom’s non-kosher kitchen, Feminist Food Journal editor Isabela reflects on what it means for mothers to sacrifice for their children.

On the “Unbearable Whiteness” of Milk

Examining the gendered and racialized dimensions of milk

Listen on our podcast here.

Our editor Isabela sits down with Alice Yao, an associate professor with the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, to examine the gendered and racialized dimensions of milk.

Does milk make a nation?

In many cultures across the world, dairy has been one of the building blocks of civilization. As Paul S. Kindstedt writes in Cheese and Culture, milk first became a part of the human diet as sustenance for infants and young children, who were still in possession of lactase, the transient enzyme required to digest it. For them, “milk was an invaluable food.” Evidence suggests that adult humans started drinking milk some 6,000 years ago, perhaps even before some of us became lactase persistent. Lactose malabsorption in adults was almost universal until sometime between 7000 and 6500 BC, when we started to domesticate animals and drink their milk. The discovery of pottery helped us store and transport warm milk in pots, which also gave us yogurt, cheese, and butter — products that helped ease adults into milk consumption. Or as my colleague at CHEESE, the magazine of culture, Anna Sulan Masing put it: “Cheese was the gateway drug.” 

Today, milk is revered in itself, and is the beverage of choice for many children growing up. From public health mandates and school programmes to TV advertisements and the rebuking of parents, the importance of milk in the diet of a child is hammered home. There is simply no escaping milk.

Sometime in late colonial India, writes William Gould in Hindu Nationalism and the Language of Politics in Late Colonial India, cow’s milk became associated with the purity and strength of the nation, and the concept of the “mother cow” was mirrored with that of “Mother India”; both the cow and its milk simultaneously became life-giving. If drinking milk makes children into strong adults, who in turn become symbolic of a nation’s strength and power, then perhaps milk does make a nation. But first, a nation must make milk. 

***

As a commodity in Indian culture and life, milk has been present since the time of the Harappan civilization. However, the issue of milk and nation-making became an urgent necessity after Independence. The government’s plan to increase both the production and consumption of milk, especially among the poor, resulted in the great dairy development scheme of the 1970s, Operation Flood. To this day, Operation Flood, also known as the “White Revolution”, is heralded as the country’s landmark agricultural project. By making use of donations from European countries and the United States through the World Food Programme (WFP), it transformed India from a milk-deficient country to the largest producer of milk in the world. Writes Andrea S. Wiley in Cultures of Milk:

Europe’s dairy industry had been generating massive gains in milk production, which had resulted in a vast surplus at home that threatened to destabilize local milk prices. The WFP was a way of disposing of this surfeit without causing the collapse of local dairy industries in Europe and the United States, and it could do so with an ostensibly humanitarian purpose. 

Initially, the WFP’s food aid, in the form of surplus milk, was supposed to help reduce the price of milk in India by increasing supply. Eventually, Dr. Verghese Kurien, chairman of the Indian National Dairy Development Board (NDDB), convinced the WFP to allow the formation of a milk producers union, known today as Amul, to reconstitute milk powder from the surplus, sell the milk, and use the profits to expand the dairy industry. Operation Flood, which sought to revolutionize milk production and marketing, eventually expanded its mandate to include improving the organized dairy sectors in India’s four metros, increasing rural incomes, expanding milk outlets, forming village co-operatives, and so on. 

Although its legacy is lasting — India is now the world’s largest producer of milk — the narrative of Operation Flood as a success is somewhat dubious. Not only did the funds from the sale of milk to urban consumers go towards importing European bulls and heifers and investing in high-yielding and crossbred cattle in a kind of ecological imperialism1, but the linear narrative of progress masks the reality that while some benefited from Operation Flood, others did not. Foremost in this narrative is its “success” in empowering rural women, which has taken root in public rhetoric in recent years. Critics of Operation Flood note that despite the fact that women are responsible for taking care of cattle, collecting fodder, and milking, they’ve had limited access to new technologies due to the industry’s focus on men, and their role in the program has not been adequately recognized. In actuality, Operation Flood alienated rural women with its modernizations, destabilizing their incomes by selling butter, ghee, and other milk products through Amul. This undermined (and removed) their subsistence economy, and transformed it into a capitalist commercial enterprise, while lowering their status in society and family, writes Greta Gaard in Toward a Feminist Postcolonial Milk Studies.

One legacy of Operation Flood is that simply, more milk is available than before. And more people consume it. Amul, the largest dairy cooperative to come out of Operation Flood, held its own against dairy giants like Nestle and Glaxo, thanks to the (then) newfound production of skim milk powder made from the country’s abundance of buffalo milk. India’s milk production grew by 36 percent between 2014-15 and 2019-20, and today, the dairy and animal husbandry sector constitutes four percent of GDP. So, in a sense, milk did make this nation.

But what kind of nation did it make?

***

Post Independence, India’s focus was on self-sufficiency through programmes like Operation Flood and the Green Revolution (which saw the industrialization of agriculture in India). The impact of both has been fiercely controversial. 

The post-independence period in India was haunted by the ghosts of insufficient agricultural productivity, land reforms made without the requisite changes in power patterns or economic disparities, and droughts leading to frequent famines. Of course, it also saw the displacement of about 20 million people as a result of Partition, which shifted borders to suit religious differences and created irreversible fault lines between the countries of India and Pakistan and their residents. 

The impacts of Partition, and the large-scale communal violence, riots, and the abduction and rape of women that it entailed, continue to reverberate in India today, manifesting as in mob violence against the Other — violence that is closely tied to the consumption of bovine bodies. The “beef lynchings” of Muslims, of Dalits, Adivasis, and people of marginalized castes, are vicious expressions of hatred by those who don’t eat the cow against those who do. “Lynching is an old crime here, often committed against those of so-called lower castes and marginalized tribes, in order to reinforce brutal social hierarchies,” writes Supriya Nair in a piece on India’s beef lynchings for The Atlantic.

These “brutal social hierarchies” are what helped build, and continue to build, the framework for a nationalist India. And crucial to these social hierarchies — besides taboos on cow slaughter and meat, mob violence, and a Hindutva ideology that endorses all of the above — is also viewing the cow as the “vulnerable” mother that requires protection from so-called “predatory” beings who consume its meat. 

The cow has been adored by and widely celebrated among many of the world’s religions and cultures: Ancient Egypt had a maternal cow goddess; depictions of Greek and Roman feasts show cow-head rhytons; cows appear on pottery from China’s Qing dynasty, whose reign prohibited the slaughtering cows and horses; and 19th-century  ivory cow figurines (or netsuke) from Japan reflect a time before the Meiji reign when meat was not only considered to be unsafe, but the Buddhist principle of reincarnation forbade eating beef and drinking milk (it was seen as akin to drinking blood). 

But none come close to the obsessiveness of India’s bovine protection squad. 

Cow vigilantes, as they’re called, are self-appointed Hindu fundamentalist groups who carry out violent attacks against those — predominantly Muslims — who consume and slaughter cows, or are in possession of beef. One such act in 2015 came to define the country’s continued structural violence against the Other. A violent mob dragged Mohammad Akhlaq, 52, from his house and beat him to death after a Hindu temple in his village of Bishahra, in Dadri district in Uttar Pradesh, announced that he was in possession of and had consumed beef. A year later, in 2016, cow vigilantes flogged seven Dalits for merely carrying out their occupation of skinning dead cows. From 2012 to December 2018, there were 99 official instances of violence related to cow vigilantism.

Beef consumption — considered by Hindu upper castes as “morally problematic” “impure”, and “non-vegetarian”2 — was actually a part of Hinduism during the Vedic times; the taboo grew during the rise of Buddhism and Jainism as a way of positioning Hinduism in opposition to those religions. Today, beef consumption is prevalent in most regional cuisines and religions in India, including Hinduism in some cases, and has become a form of political resistance to state power. Meeting this resistance are forceful deterrents: a ban on cow slaughter in many Indian states, heftier punishment for those caught violating the law, and horrifying extralegal attacks by cow vigilantes, whose obsessiveness and reverence of the cow as a cosmic being and mother in Hindu thought and tradition run deep. 

Like Nair writes, lynching is an old crime in India and is one of the many ways employed by caste Hindus in their attempt to claim superiority over Muslims and the lower and marginalized castes they consider “inferior”. Constantly dehumanizing the Other — for swimming in a well, for riding a horse, for sitting cross-legged, for sitting in a train after enjoying Eid festivities — creates a social hierarchy that keeps power concentrated at the top, all the while squeezing out wealth, labour, pleasure, the right to eat beef or to marry someone of one’s choosing. This is how upper-caste and Hindutva machinations work to forge a nationalist identity. 

One of the key instruments of this nationalist identity lies in the control of bodies, both bovine and woman, which are sites of Hindu patriarchy and nation-making. Just like how the control of the bovine, in the form of “protection” from the Other, is in the hands of a few powerful, so is the control of women. Women have been fighting men and the patriarchy world over for control of their own bodies, for higher pay, for political representation, for religious and personal freedom. But in India, this fight is also against Hindu conservatism, centuries-old caste hierarchy that is upheld by endogamous marriage, which in turn supports the country’s “outrageous culture of son-preference…widespread reproductive control, including but not limited to illegal sex-selective abortions and female infanticide,” and its hesitation to criminalize marital rape. 

***

It is no surprise then that what one eats and whom one marries are critical in the making of a homogenous Hindu nation. Netflix’s Indian Matchmaking, an eight-part series featuring an elite matchmaker trying to find “suitable” matches for her wealthy clients,  was a prime example of that. It gave the world a taste of India’s ‘familial values’ — code for caste, religion, and morality. Marriage in India is still governed by the holy trinity of caste-religion-class and overseen by the Indian family (both one’s immediate and the society at large), a powerful social unit that upholds oppressive structures. It is why arranged marriages are still the norm and inter-caste marriages are low, at around five percent. Caste endogamy may be viewed as a means to maintain the ‘culture’ of a group or minimize conflict that may arise from customs, rituals, and everyday rules, by upper-caste Indian families. But it is more than that.

Caste endogamy, arranged marriage, marrying within the same caste or community — whatever the name, the practice is fundamental to the structure of the caste system, and in maintaining the status quo. It is also fundamental in depriving women of their agency. Failing to comply with the rules can result in brutal violence, where sometimes people pay with their lives. In 2019, the relatives of an upper-caste woman killed her Dalit husband in Gujarat in retaliation for marrying her against their wishes. Five days earlier, a gang murdered a couple in Tamil Nadu for marrying across caste lines. In another incident from 2019, a father allegedly doused his daughter and her husband with kerosene and set them on fire because he “vehemently opposed” their union. In the last five years (not including 2021), there have been a horrific 195 cases of honour killing (the term for the murder of a woman/man who is said to have brought dishonour/shame on the family) across the nation.

“Marriage, especially between ‘dominant’ and ‘untouchable’ castes, can pose a threat to that [caste] hierarchy. That explains why people in dominant castes often carry out brutal violence against their own family members who dare to marry outside their caste, particularly if a partner is Dalit,” writes Yashica Dutt, whose memoir Coming Out As Dalit dealt with her journey of coming to terms with her identity while also taking the reader through the history of the Dalit movement. “Of course, many marriages arranged by the parents and families of the couple turn out to be perfectly sweet and happy. But many also come with a loss of agency, especially for the woman, who must be ‘flexible’ and ‘adjust’ to the norms of her husband’s family, as the show [Indian Matchmaking] points out.”

***

“Motherhood” in Hindu patriarchy, and in the construction of a homogenous Hindu nation, is an exploitation of both bovine and human. No animal comes close as to what the cow can provide — from hides for leather and dung for fertilizer and fuel, to bones for refining sugar, milk and beef for food — and its value as a resource in agrarian societies is unmatchable. Cows are seen as sacrificing mothers who give freely to their children, even if it means denying milk to their own children. The resource-giving cow is framed as a primordial mother. 

This primordial mother-cow association goes back to Gandhi, an upper-caste vegetarian, and to the iconic image of Kamadhenu, a divine bovine-goddess depicted as a cow's body studded with Hindu deities, which has been printed on calendars and pamphlets since the early twentieth century. The cow in Hindu religion and patriarchy is reproduced as political and religious capital, even though materially, the animal is merely an economic asset, forced to bequeath its milk, meat, and labour. In the beef-spurning Indian nation, milk is the symbol of inherent goodness and purity; it is commodified as “divine”, and is a source of “vegetarian” protein. Milk and milk products are a part of every Hindu ritual and practice. The cow’s udder is objectified as “exhaustless and all-sustaining”; it can pour “a thousand streams” and “give milk to feed us.”

Cows are also burdened “as guardians of Hindu purity”, writes Yamini Narayanan for Hypatia. Nevermind that drinking cow’s urine is permissible as medicine or spiritual therapy but eating its meat is considered sacrilege. Longstanding taboos on cow meat go hand in hand with taboos on marrying across caste lines; it is, after all, the woman who is considered the keeper of traditions and cultures through marriage and food. It is through the maternal figure and motherhood that the sensory experience of food is transmitted. It is the mother who nurtures bodies through food (including breast milk), especially in early human life, and it is through her that the lineage continues, bearing the burden of the household’s “honour” and “shame” alike. But the labour of constructed love (for both the cow and the woman) to build a Hindu society does not take into account the labour of bodies that are involved in this economy; it actively devalues their labour, while inflicting violence upon their bodies. And it burdens them with being the cultural guardians of this nation-state.

Both bovine and female bodies are sites of exploitation and capital for the Hindu patriarchy and ethnonationalism. Not only is the bovine body worshipped as a Mother Cow or even Mother India, but “her motherhood itself is mobilized as a resource for exploitation.” Similarly, it falls to women to comply with society’s need for “good” daughters, sisters, wives, and mothers, marrying as per family rules or observing modesty in dressing, behaviour, and thought. Generally, a woman is of “value” only if she serves the purpose of labour, in giving birth and working for the house, like the bovine. Interestingly enough, it is also women who are largely responsible for the labour involved in taking care of livestock. Intertwined in this gendered oppression are notions of caste and religion which regulate intimacy, desire, and politics. 

In Gender and Nation, a searing analysis on gender and the construction of a nation-state, Nira Yuval-Davis describes how women give birth to nations biologically and symbolically, referring to them as both “cultural transmitters as well as cultural signifiers” of the collective nation. Where does this leave the bovine, whose milk is ubiquitous across cultures and nations, and which offers a narrative about India’s urbanization, economics, consumer culture, and patriarchy? Milk may have built this nation, but the burden of gendered oppression and nation-making lies with the cow and the woman.

Apoorva Sripathi is a writer, editor, occasional poet, and the co-founder of the independent magazine CHEESE. She also runs shelf offering, a food and culture newsletter that's currently on sabbatical.

Acknowledgments

This essay would not have been possible to write without the works of other authors, namely: C Sathyamala, Shanti George, Vandana Shiva, Claude Alvares, Carol J Adams, Greta Gaard, and Arjun Appadurai, among others.

Further readings

Gaard, G. (2013). Toward a Feminist Postcolonial Milk Studies. American Quarterly 65(3), 595-618. doi:10.1353/aq.2013.0040.

Gould, W. (2004). Hindu Nationalism and the Language of Politics in Late Colonial India, Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press.

Wiley, A.S. (2014). Cultures of Milk: The Biology and Meaning of Dairy Products in the United States and India, 75. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England. 

A long time ago lived a supreme sorceress and healer who was revered for her power: Isis. 

One of the best-known goddesses of the Egyptian and Kushite1 pantheons, Isis was the child of the earth god Geb and the sky goddess Nut. She married her brother, the god Osiris, and the pair ruled the world. 

Osiris and Isis, it was said, were in love with each other even in the womb, and therefore born as husband and wife. As king, Osiris was respected by both those who lived on earth and the gods who dwelled in worlds beyond. As queen, Isis was supportive and loving towards her people. She taught women to weave, bake, and brew beer. But her and Osiris’ royal bliss was not to last.

Seth, their younger brother, envied Osiris for the respect he commanded from both human and god alike. In a jealous rage, Seth transformed himself into a vicious monster and set upon Osiris, killing him before cutting him into pieces which he spread across the kingdom. With Osiris dead, Seth claimed the throne.

But Isis, who had magical powers, refused to capitulate to this new state of affairs. She roamed far and wide searching for her husband, collecting the pieces of his body to assemble them. Using potent spells, she breathed life into his reconstituted body and resurrected him. Together again, they had a son, Horus. After this, Osiris went back to rule the underworld. To help renew Osiris in the afterlife, Isis would frequently travel to his tomb where she would give her milk as libation. Her sacred milk had the magical ability to not only sustain her infant son Horus but also to give Osiris life during his rebirth in the afterlife.

***

For ancient Egyptians and Nubians alike, the breast milk of Isis gave salvation, divinity, and life in both worlds. In epithets, they described her as “Isis, Giver of Life”. Sacred inscriptions carved in tomb walls of pyramids instructed the deceased to “Take the breast of Isis, the milk provider.” Isis was revered as a compassionate, maternal goddess, having overcome her husband’s death and sustained her son. Her breast milk had the power to solve many problems. Chief among them was healing the sick. 

As a child, Horus was vulnerable to wild animal bites and diseases, but Isis could heal him with her divine milk. The people, therefore, believed the goddess’ milk was medicinal. As a result of the story of Isis, the milk of any woman who had borne a son became a fairly common medicine. Ancient medical papyrus documents the use of breast milk as a treatment, where it was referred to as the “milk of Isis”. 

People often stored the milk in vessels in the shape of a woman with a limp child on her lap. It symbolized the vital power of milk for the health of the child.

But its medicinal applications were not strictly limited to children’s ailments. As Maria Ivanova writes in Milk in Ancient Egyptian Religion, eye diseases were treated with “black eye paint, fat of a duck, milk of a woman who had borne a male child.” Breast milk was also used to treat burns; applying Goddess-milk to the body of a burn sufferer would make the fire leave their body, and they would be healed. 

The power of breast milk to heal went beyond the earthly realm. At Bigge, where Isis visited Osiris’ tomb to give him milk libations in the underworld, ancient decrees read:

O, Osiris, great lord of Bigge, take to you libations of your sister Isis, it is milk, no water is in them… libations to her brother which is in them, for cooling his heart, rejuvenating his limbs, growing of his new body, a medicine to his majesty, she has ferried to Bigge, for giving life to the great sycamore.

Following Isis’ lead, Nubian widows would pour milk on their husband’s graves on the second day after their deaths to symbolize their rebirth in the underworld.

***

As Horus, Isis’ son, was the first king, all who ruled after him symbolized the incarnated son of Isis. 

Both Egyptian and Nubian kings demonstrated their legitimacy to rule by tracing their female line back to esteemed foremothers. Isis conveyed divine kingship to Horus by nursing him, and so breast milk became the vehicle by which divinity was transmitted from a deity to a monarch. When a ruler was crowned, the king’s mother or sister needed to be present. She would be identified as Isis, who had nursed Horus, the king. Identifying the queen mother as Isis, who gave and legitimized kingship, created a divine basis for the king’s power. 

As such, women exercised significant influence because they were the bearers of the offspring of the gods. Because of the powerful influence of women figures, and since women too could produce this divine breastmilk, Nubia produced many more powerful queens. Six queens ruled with their husbands; ten were sovereign. These warrior queens include Amanirenas, Amanishakheto, Amanitore, among others. Ritual objects and temple walls depicted them bare-breasted, signalling the potent power of their breast milk.

Milk was so sacred that if one stepped on it, the spirits would punish them. The proper response was to pick the dirt where milk had spilt and carry it to the Nile River. 

***

With Osiris in the underworld and Seth still king, Isis hid Horus in the marshes of the Nile until he was old and strong enough to avenge his father. It was there that she defended him against snakes and scorpions, healing him with the milk from her breast. When the time came, Horus made a case before the gods that he, not Seth should become rightful king. A competition followed, where Seth cheated Horus out of victory. Isis decided to help her son to set a trap for Seth. But when Seth was ensnared, she took pity on him and allowed him to escape.

Enraged by his mother’s compassion, Horus beheaded her. 

But, Isis was to survive to fight another day. Another God, Throth, from whom Isis commanded admiration and respect, used his magic to replace her severed head with that of a cow. Isis would go on to join Osiris, whom she had for so long sustained with her breast milk, in the underworld. Horus, despite having angered the gods by his act of violence against his mother, would eventually claim his birthright as king, aided by a good word from his father. 

Isis’ legacy was not diminished by her miring in boorish family feuds. Today, her story lives on, in some ways we may not even fully understand. The Roman Empire embraced Isis, and temples dedicated to the Goddess of Milk were built in Iraq, Greece, Rome, and even England. Scholars continue to debate whether Isis worship in late Roman times was the primary influence on Christianity’s adoption of the Virgin Mary iconography. Some even claim that Paris, the French capital, was named for a Roman temple dedicated to a large idol of Isis, near Saint-German des Prés. The Latin quasi par Isis (“similar to Isis”) became Par-Isis. Today, Isis continues to be worshipped by pagans and Wiccans as a divine goddess of love, protection, and restoration.

As a woman, Isis defied categorization: fierce and compassionate, loyal and manipulative, a devoted wife and mother who made magic. In her image, ancient Egyptians and Nubians revered women for their ability to sustain life and to provide a direct connection to the divine. For thousands of years, the sacredness of Isis’ breast milk has symbolized life and salvation — and it will continue to, in this life and the next.

Adhiambo Edith Magak writes about African history, culture, and arts. Her writing has appeared in Meeting of Minds UK, Africa in Dialogue, Narratively, OkayAfrica, Talenthouse, Critical Read, among others. You can find her on Twitter @oedithknight.

Further reading

Ivanova, M. (2009). Milk in Ancient Egyptian Religion. Uppsala University. <https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:713303/FULLTEXT01.pdf>

Kneller, T.L. (1993). The Role of Women in Nubia. University of Pennsylvania. <https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Role_Women.html>

Listen to an audio version of this piece, read by the author, on our podcast here.

Well before human senses can perceive the subtle shift from summer to fall, goats can detect the shortening of the days. The summer heat is still oppressive when the does begin to fight amongst themselves, mounting one another in a feigned choreography of courtship, while the bucks start to emanate their distinct cologne and contort their faces into near-comical paroxysms that only a female goat could love. The heavy, humid air diffuses the bucks’ musk, perfuming a formidable radius of the barn with its pungent hazelnut aroma. It is breeding season. I begin to track individual does for signs of estrus, their heat cycle: vocalizing, vaginal discharge, a recognizable coquetry in and around the vicinity of the buck pen. I do the math, working backwards from when I’ll feel ready to inhabit the role of doula. I take into account the long winters, the frigid springs, the toll that labour can take on a body even without the complications of arctic temperatures, and the more nuanced calculations of my own body’s resilience. When the babies start to drop, the new season officially starts, and from then on there is no rest or respite. It is 150 days from the time the doe and buck are joined to the first signs of labour and the gruelling hours of parturition. When will I decide, as the hand of God, to start the clock? 

Man’s — or rather, woman’s — relationship to dairying dates back centuries, millennia. Goats were among the first mammals to be domesticated, and the division of labour around their husbandry up until the era of industrialization was strictly the province of the female. Beyond the economic reasons for this arrangement, there was (and is) a more profound simpatico between women and their lactating charges, a recognition and sensitivity that transcends species. As dairying evolved beyond the point of subsistence and became commercial, this relationship became less reciprocal and more unilateral. I discovered when I began my life as a dairy producer that even with the best of intentions and the most heartfelt commitment to the animals’ well-being, this relationship is fundamentally exploitative. 

There is, then, always an undercurrent of tension, a moral quandary at the root of my daily interactions with my animals. When, in 2014, I left my city life behind along with my professional history — populated largely by men in power and intelligent, capable women playing second fiddle I marvelled that within the tiny ecosystem of the farm, females were valued far above males. But what I realized quickly was that their value was critically bound up with their reproductive capacity. Their milk was a locus of extraction. Their worth was relational — as long as they were creating a commodity to be consumed, they earned their keep. Their empowerment was their enslavement, contingent as it was on an “Other” who wanted what they were making. This contingency is familiar to anyone who has entered a strip club, flipped through a glossy magazine, or watched a Hollywood movie. In countless guises, a woman’s power is achieved through her objectification, her success in being either literally or figuratively consumed. 

I am not the first to draw these parallels. I was introduced to the idea of the female body as a commodity broken down and packaged for consumption by Carol J. Adams, whose work, The Sexual Politics of Meat, I encountered as a graduate student. Her thesis crackled in my brain, heady, astute, and searing when I first read it, but it did not land in my viscera until my second kidding season, when I could not escape the cries of the does whose babies had recently been wrenched from them, whom I tried to comfort even as I bled through my underwear in the pasture, recovering from an abortion. I had become pregnant almost as a challenge to my body, to see whether it would work in the way that it was designed to. But the reality of my life made the decision to terminate my pregnancy a foregone conclusion. I had committed myself to gruelling physical work and very little money, a set of conditions that would have made single parenthood exceptionally challenging. I understood then that my choice to terminate that pregnancy likely extinguished the ever-waning possibility of becoming a biological parent. It was surreal in that moment to contemplate the way that motherhood had eluded me while I was surrounded by female bodies giving birth.

It is no accident that a woman’s sex appeal — at least in a cisgender and heterosexual context — is inextricably tethered to her perceived fertility. Rather ironically, when I embarked on my career as a dairy farmer, I was at the tail end of my childbearing years, and my choice to pursue this trajectory was, I know now in hindsight, what solidified my status as a non-mother. Rather than bearing a child of my own, I began to be both child and mother to the animals I tended, simultaneously offering comfort to them when they were in distress, and being the catalyst of this distress as I manipulated their natural cycles and became a sort of milk magpie, swapping myself in for their kids in order to collect their life-giving fluid. Like them, I was — am — a childless mother, though for them this status was never a choice. By continuing to pursue my livelihood, I am doomed to bear witness to their pain season after season. I am the architect of their suffering and sorrow. 

Pregnancy and labour are indisputably the most life-threatening processes that a female goat experiences, whether due to the attendant risks of a malpresenting, a too-large fetus, or the aftershocks of the bodily trauma that can manifest as metabolic imbalances. Even when they survive the perils of pregnancy, these ceaseless cycles of breeding, parturition, and lactation degrade and deplete their bodies, shortening their life spans. And it is this punishing cycle upon which the dairy industry is built. When I had been merely a city-bound daydreamer, fantasizing about pastoral scenes of frolicking in green pastures and stirring large cauldrons of milk beatifically, I had not counted on the living, breathing collateral that this work demanded. 

In the years since I have started working in dairy, I have considered my own value as a woman who is no longer “in her prime”, and the ways in which that value is further depleted because I have not transitioned smoothly from maiden to mother. I am now, it seems, a crone. My body has begun to degrade, as all of ours do, but the particular ravages it has been subjected to cannot be explained away by the mitigating conditions of motherhood. I have nothing to show for these wrinkles, this paunch, these saggy breasts. I have no milk to offer, no progeny imprinted with my DNA.

My animals have, since I began this farming life, become my reason for living. I have ceased to exist for myself alone, much the way I imagine a mother does when she has a child. And yet, the cornerstone of our relationship is one of extraction. How can I claim to love these creatures as my family when I engage in systematic cruelty toward them for my own gain? I don’t have a resolution for this hypocrisy. I still have to confront the awareness, every fall, that I am putting into motion a domino effect that will result in the certain suffering and possible death of the living beings I love. And I still have to rifle through the catalogue of excuses I have invented when I watch them contort themselves in the agony of childbirth and ferry their young away, leaving them bewildered and searching, eyes wide and confused, nudging the ground as though to unearth their stolen babies. 

The only small, fleeting comfort I can take is the knowledge that until such time as our society abandons the strange and singular practice of stealing the milk of other species, I can approach my role as a thief with an empathy granted by my own status as a childless mother, a perpetual state of heartbreak scarred over, strengthened, and girded with the fierce and deep love I have for my animals. After all, parents of human children also consign their heirs to lives unknown, pockmarked by pain and punctuated by delight. We all suffer at each others’ hands, the more so when our hearts are raw and open to one another. The cycles of suffering and solace aren’t all that different across species, amongst the mothers and those who would wish to be. Milk, more than blood, is what binds us, a tangible measure of maternal love and the myriad things — grief, sacrifice, compassion, care, transcendence — that love has the capacity to contain.

Lauren Gitlin is a former food scholar, journalist, and wine professional. She currently owns and operates Villa Villekulla Farm, a goat microdairy in Barnard, Vermont.

A single piece of decor (if you could call it that) hung in my elementary school’s lunchroom in the heart of the milk-loving American Midwest. For both breakfast and snack time, we were required to choose a baby-sized pink, green, or blue carton from an open fridge just under a giant poster of Britney Spears with a milk mustache, standing over a young dancer. The then-iconic phrase “got milk?” was printed just below her low-rise, studded leather pants. 

Milk consumption was at an all-time low when celebrities from Taylor Swift to Kermit the Frog donned the iconic milky stache. On any given day roughly 80% of U.S. consumers were confronted with that simple question: got milk? The historically uncool beverage was suddenly on everyone’s lips.

Around that same time, researchers at the University of North Carolina published a study in the journal Pediatrics that suggested American girls were hitting puberty earlier than was previously considered “normal.” Absent fathers, obesity, and even the popularization of sexual imagery like low-rise jeans were all put forward as possible reasons for this trend. 

Scientists and the public were also quick to place milk in the lineup of suspects to blame for the cases of precocious puberty. The anxiety around milk emerged from a distinctly American confluence of unrelenting capitalism, a deep mistrust of the food system, and an obsession with the bodies of women and young girls. What happens with our food and what happens with girls’ bodies tend to be questions we care a lot about but don’t have clear answers for. That opens the door to conspiracy theories that tend to obscure the real problems with American society and our food system.

Precocious puberty

I grew up in a one-glass-of-milk-with-dinner household. I got boobs in the fourth grade. Years later I thought these things might be related. I’d heard somewhere that dairy cows were being pumped full of hormones in order to produce more milk, and those hormones could have seeped into my pre-pubescent adolescent body and changed it.

Precocious puberty is defined as “the appearance of secondary sex characteristics”, such as pubic hair, at an abnormally early age. Until the 1990s, standard medical assumptions about when girls should begin showing signs of sexual maturity were based on a single study that followed 192 white girls’ ascent into puberty in an orphanage in England in the 1960s. It found that girls generally hit puberty sometime after age 11; sexual maturation before age eight only occurred in about one percent of girls in the study. 

While working at a pediatric clinic in the 1980s, Marcia E. Herman-Giddens, an associate professor of public health at the University of North Carolina, noticed something peculiar about the girls coming into the clinic. They were showing signs of puberty at a younger age; she was seeing girls with pubic hair and recently developed breasts at ages seven, eight, and nine.

Following these observations, Herman-Giddens led a study of 17,000 American girls between the ages of three and 12 years old. Her team found that “the average age of breast-budding among white girls was 9.9 years while for Black girls it was 8.8.” 

“I was very surprised to see how many girls were developing earlier than expected,” said Herman-Giddens. “It was a little shocking and disturbing to see how young a lot of these girls are. It's hard to think that little kids can't just be little kids.”

The differences in findings between white and Black girls could very well have been due to the fact that only 10 percent of participants were African-American. One of the limitations of scientific studies is that there is no way to sample an entire population while taking into account all factors that could skew the end result. Herman-Giddens was no exception. Socio-economic status, food security, mental, emotional, and physical health all play a role in a person’s health and development. Though the sample size was much larger in the American study than the earlier English one, it didn’t prove that girls were hitting puberty earlier so much as it provided a more accurate estimate of the age at which most white American girls hit puberty. But the public’s reaction was much more alarmist. 

What makes milk untrustworthy?

For as long as milk has been helping to sustain human life, it has been a seemingly mysterious, and often feared substance. 

Drinking dairy milk is a fairly modern endeavour. For most of history, it was primarily used to make food products, but in the 18th and 19th centuries, drinking milk became more popular among Europeans and Americans. That led to a whole bunch of people and babies dying.

Prior to industrialization, drinking milk posed serious health risks, including tuberculosis and scarlet fever. When people began moving away from nursing babies with wet nurses, to giving them cow’s milk, babies began to die at alarming rates: the milk was crawling with bacteria.

In the early 20th century, as pasteurization became common in the US making milk much safer for human consumption, milk’s popularity among the American public grew. 

The insatiable American appetite for milk — according to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), Americans consumed 655 pounds (297 kilograms) of milk products per capita in 2020 — means that dairy is a big business.

For dairy cows to be at their maximum profit potential, they are subjected to an unnatural upbringing that involves being treated with artificial growth hormones. The widespread use of recombinant bovine growth hormone (rbGH) in dairy cows began in 1993, to increase cow milk production. This was thought, by some, to be the reason girls were developing pubic hair and breasts roughly a year earlier than science had defined as the norm.

“Organic milk is a must,” one parent said in an interview with New York Times reporter Lisa Belken, who was reporting on a story on the Herman-Giddens study. “You know, all those hormones in non-organic milk are the reason for early puberty.” None of the mothers could explain how they “‘knew’ this; they just knew,” the article reads. 

Milk was, and remains, one of the most highly regulated foods on the American market. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requires all ingredients and any additional vitamins in milk to be clearly listed among other things like pasteurization, and each state has individual requirements for its production and sale. But even regulation of the food industry is a sore spot for many Americans who don’t trust the government to protect their best interests over corporate power and capital gain. Despite this lengthy list of governmental requirements, or maybe because of it, controversies and conspiracies about milk have never really gone away, they’ve just changed to reflect changes in the world around us.

In the US, we often don’t know much about where our food comes from, which leads to wild conspiracies and mistrust from consumers. One of my aunts told me hot dogs were amputated cow’s lips and I actually believed her because I’ve seen enough Netflix documentaries to entertain just about any food conspiracy. And I’m not alone. Organizations like PETA purport that the US government has been trying to sell off excess milk products since World War I, when it created a demand for milk to send to soldiers overseas. Others believe that the government is stockpiling cheese surplus to keep prices high.

Food manufacturers, food producers, and special interest groups all influence governmental dietary guidelines and food regulation. It leads consumers to wonder: how can you trust an industry to take proper care of you when their bottom line is to make a buck? 

When the USDA released updated dietary guidelines in 2015, many experts felt that they had been overly influenced by lobbyists, including Big Dairy’s lobbyists. Big Dairy had ramped up their efforts in the 1990s and 2000s, giving millions to members of Congress, just as those “got milk?” posters hit schools across America. This may have had significant influence over the government’s decision to include milk as such a prominent part of its those dietary guidelines, even though according to Dr. Walter Willett, chair of the Department of Nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health, “there’s just no scientific evidence to support such large amounts of dairy consumption.”

When it comes to nutrition, the hard reality is that the science is constantly changing as we study and learn more, and what we are fed (figuratively) is often what a diet industrial complex and special interest groups want us to eat (literally.) That back and forth reinforces distrust, as does the fact that the diet and nutrition industry is a profitable industry. 

In 2001, Dr. Paul Klapowitz, the author of “Early Puberty in Girls,” conducted his own study on precocious puberty’s links to milk. His research concluded that even if the hormones were making their way into the cows’ milk, it would have no effect on America’s girls. The hormones would have to be injected rather than digested to affect the age of puberty. 

Despite being debunked, the legacy of the puberty and hormone scare can still be seen today, with the many commercial dairy products that market themselves to consumers as rbGH-free. Why did this theory strike such a nerve in the American psyche?

Obsession and demonization of female bodies in media 

Americans are bizarrely obsessed with the bodies and sexuality of girls and women. Our culture’s complicated relationship with sexualization in the media illustrates the tensions between our demand for sex on one hand and our regulation of it on the other, especially if it involves young feminine bodies. A study conducted in 2011 by the University at Buffalo found that 83 percent of women depicted in Rolling Stone magazine were sexualized compared to just 17 percent of men. But anyone who consumes media already knows that. 

In 2022, we’re more used to seeing this type of sexualized content, given we have it on-demand in our pockets. You just need to read the comments on a model’s Instagram page to see how obsessed people are with exerting control over the way women use their bodies. But around the time that the milk-hormone theory emerged, the world was changing in big ways: technology’s reach expanded, media became more omnipresent, and girls and young women seemed to be on every magazine cover and MTV video wearing higher cropped tops and lower cut jeans. This so-called sexualization of girls and young women led some in the American public to panic.

It is not too surprising then that milk, a staple food for American children got caught up in this anxiety. It was the perfect scapegoat for those unsettled by the increasingly visible sexualization of young women, even those showing up on the “got milk?” posters. But what was so scary about girls reaching puberty a year or so earlier? 

Even Herman-Giddens acknowledged the controversy surrounding her study, which she likened to “The Lolita Syndrome”. It seemed there was a fear that if girls reached sexual maturation earlier, they’d engage in or be subjected to sexual acts earlier. And there is a valid element of that fear, though the proper solution isn’t cutting out dairy. In a country that seems incapable of implementing any kind of useful public sexual health education, vehemently opposed to ensuring universal access to sexual and reproductive healthcare, and uninterested in addressing the systemic causes of sexual assault and abuse, it makes sense that people would worry about young girls looking more “sexual” at a younger age. Although conspiracy theories, like the milk hormone theory, help to confirm those fears, they don’t do anything to help the very real danger of being a young girl in this world. 

Looking back at that “got milk?” poster of Britney and the dancer that hung in my elementary school, I noticed another piece of text. Above the smaller girl’s head, a line of text reads, “Grow up.” The ad is meant to encourage young people to drink milk to accelerate their path to teenager-dom, to look more like Britney Spears. Picturing myself gazing up that poster, as an eight-year-old in the middle of grabbing my daily two-percent carton, is a more sinister scene to me now. 

McKenzie Schwark is a writer living in Chicago whose work focuses on reproductive health, chronic illness, and health as a feminist issue. For more, visit mckenzieschwark.com or find her at @schwarkattack.

The dairy industry is fraught with ethical, health, and environmental concerns. But what if milk could be produced without using animals? 

In recent years, food tech start-ups have been asking just that question. Dairy, as it stands, is big business: Around six billion people globally consume dairy, either as milk or in other products such as infant formula. But this demand for dairy hurts our planet. Worldwide, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from dairy have increased by 18 percent over the past decade, contributing to three percent of total global emissions. 

In addition to its environmental costs, there are ethical issues with the dairy industry and its treatment of animals. The situation is particularly dire for industrially farmed cows, who provide half of the dairy produced in the US. These cows are held in crowded and stressful conditions, repeatedly impregnated, separated from their calves so their milk can be sold, and sent to slaughter at a fraction of their lifespan. All the while, they suffer from injuries and diseases arising from unnatural levels of milk production.

The stakes for transforming the dairy industry are high. And that’s where cultivated milk comes in. Produced in a laboratory using mammalian cells or microbial precision fermentation, cultivated milk’s value proposition is seductive: recreating the taste, nutrition, and feel of dairy, while offering a solution to both the ecological destruction1 and the ethical dilemmas associated with consuming dairy products. 

In the male-dominated world of tech start-ups, women leaders have emerged at the forefront of innovation in cultivated milk. There are many women in scientific and leadership roles in cellular agriculture, but given cultivated milk’s connection to lactation and motherhood, it may have a particularly powerful draw. Mothers Against Dairy, an advocacy organization that tells the stories of vegan mothers, frames the way animal mothers are commodified and exploited in the dairy industry as “an assault on motherhood and female bodily sovereignty”. Cultivated milk is an opportunity for women scientists and entrepreneurs to uncouple milk from these gendered power structures.

Two woman-led companies, BIOMILQ and TurtleTree, are aiming to bring their cultivated milk products to market in the next few years. Michelle Egger, co-founder and CEO of BIOMILQ, isn’t surprised that women gravitate to cellular agriculture. 

“Cultivated milk is very deep tech,” she says, “and women tend to see application-based sciences with a lot of promise, because we like to solve problems that have a positive impact on the world.” 

BIOMILQ is developing cell-cultured human milk to replace dairy-based infant formula, which contains additives like palm oil, sugar, and soy solids. The idea for BIOMILQ was born when Egger and her co-founder Leila Strickland recognized that parents are often stigmatized for putting infants on formula, despite the lack of other options. Human-based choices for feeding infants might reduce some of this stigma. They also saw cultivated human milk as an environmentally friendly alternative to dairy-based formulas, which make up 15 percent of the global liquid dairy market. 

How BIOMILQ creates cultivated human milk 

1. Mammary cells are placed in nutrient-rich cell cultures. 

2. The cells grow and multiply. 

3. Cells are moved to bioreactors that mimic the breast. 

4. Cells absorb nutrients that trigger lactation. 

5. Cells continue to consume nutrients from one side of the bioreactor and secrete milk into the other side. 

6. The milk is collected and tested for safety.

Fengru Lin, CEO and co-founder of Singapore-based startup TurtleTree, attributes her love of cheese to getting her into food tech. When she discovered the cruelties inherent in the dairy industry, she founded TurtleTree to offer kinder and more sustainable dairy products. TurtleTree was the first company to cultivate milk by inducing lactation in cells. Lin aims to launch her first product, a milk protein called lactoferrin that can replace farmed animal protein in other products, in 2022. She believes that with more women in the cultivated milk industry, there will be more choices available to serve the needs of women — like cultivated human milk, a product that TurtleTree also has in development. Lin wants everyone to be able to “enjoy the amazing nutritional benefits of mammalian milk” with options that are more efficient and ecological than animal agriculture. 

Navigating capitalism and justice

But how can we ensure that everyone has access to these benefits? Food tech startups like TurtleTree and BIOMILQ are still working within entrenched capitalist systems, which present barriers to equitable distribution and access. Depending on price points and the availability of new products, some people may be unable to afford or access them. (Perfect Day, the only company so far to bring a cultivated milk product to market, debuted its ice cream for US$20 per pint, though it’s now available in the US for around $6-8 per pint.) Furthermore, patents held by food technology companies may result in people losing even more control over the production of the foods that they eat. These are deep, systemic issues, with no simple solutions.

For Amy Huang, University Innovation Manager at the Good Food Institute, that’s why the food tech industry can’t just be about feeding people using new technologies. “We have this opportunity to rewrite how our food system is structured to account for gender and racial equity,” Huang says. “Food technologies must be economically, ecologically, and culturally nourishing to the communities the food is produced in and served to.” But it won't be a given, Huang admits, and there is a lot of work to do to ensure alternative proteins like cultivated milk are successful in building a more sustainable and just food system.

So how can pioneers in the cultivated milk industry come through on food justice?

“This question keeps me up at night,” Egger confesses. To increase the autonomy she has over the impact of her product, she’s careful about who she takes on as an investor. Food technology companies are often dependent on venture capital and buy-ins from investors to get their projects off the ground, but these buyers may not always share founders’ visions of who benefits from the product and how. 

“You can’t do innovation without capital,” she points out. “But it doesn’t mean you have to take venture capital money from just anyone.” For instance, Egger won’t accept funding from any investor that doesn’t have at least one high-level female partner. She cautions that women should be selective about their investment partners, and not give up any of their capabilities for the wrong fit. 

Developing cultivated human milk means there are particular considerations around equity. Long-standing racial disparities in breastfeeding — 85 percent of white mothers breastfeed their babies, versus 69 percent of Black mothers — demonstrate how systemic racism affects the breastfeeding practices of racialized women, who face discrimination in healthcare and may need to return to work more quickly after giving birth.  

“Our challenge is to bring down the cost and increase the accessibility of our products, and we take that very seriously,” says Egger. She acknowledges that BIOMILQ is just one small part of a solution that requires innovation-driven companies working with multiple stakeholders to improve access to infant nutrition products. Her company is continuing to learn from experts from racialized communities about the bias and racism that permeates maternal healthcare, and the impacts of this on breastfeeding practices.

TurtleTree’s vision also centers on accessibility and inclusivity. Lin’s goal is to scale up the production of cultivated milk products to make them affordable. This strategy includes finding new collaborations, such as her recent partnership with a solar-powered bioprocessing plant to reduce costs and increase production capacities. 

The future of cultivated milk

The widespread availability of cultivated milk products on the market is surrounded by many unknowns. One has to do with speed: Given the environmental devastation brought on by climate change and the need for sustainable food solutions, the cultivated milk industry may not move fast enough to make the kind of urgent, immediate changes that are called for. Another has to do with the scale of the transition: there’s the risk that cultivated milk may fail to capture a significant enough market share from animal dairy to make an impact on climate change and animal welfare. And there are also questions of how to handle the knock-on effects of the transition to cultivated milk fairly for people, like dairy farmers, whose livelihoods will inevitably change. 

Egger doesn’t think cultivated milk will completely replace dairy production, particularly in areas of the world where subsistence and artisanal farming occur. But she does believe that BIOMILQ and other cultivated milk products can make a dent in the harmful practices of industrial animal agriculture and provide people with more sustainable dairy options. She thinks of it as identifying “places where dairy doesn't have to be the primary player and coming up with a better solution that fits people’s needs.” 

Lin believes that reducing our dependence on animal milk will disrupt the traditional dairy industry, freeing up land for more sustainable production systems like agroecological farming. Cultivated milk is also a smart investment in the future; since production takes place in bioreactors, it is protected from the effects of climate change. Lin points out that cultivated milk can offer people more choice and flexibility in their diets while meeting their nutritional needs. Given these benefits, the potential for cultivated milk to play a role in transforming our food system is significant. 

“We have the opportunity to harness markets and technologies for the betterment of society and to build a restorative economy,” says Huang. Because of this, any discussion on the scaling of cultivated milk “has to be very nuanced.” Cultivated milk is one tool we can use to “shift the needle and help society transition away from animal agriculture and toward alternative proteins.”

Most cultivated milk companies are likely still years away from replicating all the components of milk’s cellular structure and getting their products widely distributed onto store shelves. For now, cultivated milk’s impact on our food system, and our lives, remains to be seen. The potential for cultivated milk to support ecological sustainability and social equity relies, in part, on the innovative women driving its technology forward. But it also depends on our own willingness as consumers to embrace new paths in how our food is produced and distributed and to hold those with the power to shape our food system to account.

Ingrid L. Taylor is a writer, poet, and veterinarian whose work has appeared in the Southwest Review, Ocotillo Review, Sentient Media, and others. To learn more about her work, go to ingridltaylor.com.

I was born lactose intolerant. Lactose-free milk made me sick, too, I think: it’s hard to pluck the truth out of the web of family hypochondriasis that had me, age nine, always taking homeopathic treatment for something. What I do remember is being an early adopter of soy milk. Soy milk was free from pesky animal proteins and grotesque feed residue. It was organic, which was better for you. It came in flavours like Vanilla, and Very Vanilla.

I remember the face of the Silk carton better than any box of breakfast cereal. The bottom right corner had a stamp from the Non-GMO Project, which promised that the soy was free of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). There were offers of this much calcium, that much protein, and, on the left side, “A Promise From Silk”: nothing artificial, everything grown responsibly on rolling verdant fields photographed at early sunset.

The message was clear: Soy milk wasn’t just the ideal choice for my health — it was saving the planet.

In the years that followed, my mother would replace half our pantry and medicine cabinet with the sorts of products whose logos feature beech leaves in dancelike configurations, purchased from American grocery stores across the Mexicali border. I played guinea pig for an increasingly involved series of alternative health experiments, from Bach flower remedies to magnet therapy, thankfully all harmless in their inefficacy. (I consider myself lucky: I could’ve grown up in the era of horse dewormer.)

Then, in my early teens, soy milk was gone from the pantry. My mother swapped it out for almond milk as fulminantly as she had in our original move away from cow. Why? To me, almond milk tasted worse, and it was more expensive.

Well, soy milk has phytoestrogens.

As far as this particular scare was concerned, the operating word was estrogen — the hormone responsible for forming secondary female sexual characteristics in humans. It wasn’t healthy for a strong, young man like me to be putting all that girlhood in my body; that’s as much of a response as I remember getting when I asked my mother why we were experimenting with drinks I’d never even seen before, and which now dominated the fridge aisle by the pallet. All of the promises of health and ecological righteousness from soy had been projected onto almond and coconut. They were even sold by the same brand: New great taste, same no-cow, and zero risk of feminization.

At thirteen years old I had already inherited the pop-science myth that would determine the course of the milk market for decades to come: Estrogen is bad, and testosterone is good. (And I learned it from a woman, no less — internalized misogyny runs deep.)

Evidently, my mother was too late to save me from soy. Today, I’m in my second year of taking daily estradiol valerate, an actual feminizing hormone. I often find myself thinking of that bygone soy milk era. Wouldn’t it be grand if hormone replacement therapy really was prescription-free, supermarket-accessible, and Very Vanilla?

Like so many 21st-century trans people, I've transitioned concurrently with a rising Western reactionary movement, masses of neoconservatives campaigning for a “return to tradition.” I came to accept my gender identity a little before the 2018 US election. I left the closet a year later, by which time the 45th president had encouraged cult-like, neo-fascist groups to take to the streets by the hundreds, with the express mission of stamping out people like me. As these groups gained notoriety, I was one of the few people not confused by their favourite neologism: “Soyboy”.

Conservatives Against Estrogen

As a shorthand for failed masculinity, soyboy — a pejorative with origins in imperialist, colonialist, and racist sentiment that sought to emasculate the Asian, soy-eating “other” — has several contemporary acceptations. The (relatively) less derogatory usage evokes urbanite white-collar males, stuffed full of liberalism and five-dollar dairy-free lattes. This boy’s imagined sexual orientation is of little import. The crux of the insult is soy as a proxy for the weak of body and fat of pocket, who consciously eschew animal protein and its cultural ties to manliness. (Exempli gratia: This photo of animal rights activists excited about plant-based KFC, which was rapidly meme-fied into an exploitable ‘soyjak’1.) No man in their right mind would choose this fate, of course; the description accompanying a  $19.99 “Proud Soy Boy” T-shirt on Amazon even goes as far to suggest that endocrine disruption is to blame for men’s embrace of the “liberal agenda”.

More overt soyboy caricatures are, well, not boys at all. The true, and deeply transphobic meaning of soyboy is, simply, a transfeminine person. In a now-deleted video parodying anti-fascism, the alt-right personality James Allsup claimed that soy milk will “give you a nice, effeminate body.” Given my family’s history with alternative beverages, the idea that soy could forcibly transform you into a girl was not new to me. What did surprise me was seeing the beliefs once espoused by my mother, a nouveau-traditional housewife, being wielded by a wave of violent conservatives who, by the sounds of it, would prefer cisgender women confined to kitchens and transgender women to graves.

For alt-right conservatives, theories on the decline of masculinity are de rigeur. The Proud Boys, for example, believe masturbation is the West’s ruin — all those men taking testosterone out of their body, and not even for procreation! Variants of this thought can be found everywhere, from the best-selling rhetoric of pickup artists to the throngs of anonymous profiles with Greek sculptures for profile photos that I’ve blocked on Twitter over the last half-decade. Reactionary thought enshrines social constructs, such as gender roles, as essential qualia. When social constructs fall, it appeals to the “rules of nature” as immutable bedrock (as if these, too, are not social constructs). 

The mythology of phytoestrogens, then, is unsurprising. What’s strange is its origin and evolution. Over a decade, soy milk went from proto-superfood to the root of America’s gay evils, from holistic ambrosia to the ideological poison of Men Going Their Own Way. How did we so easily switch from reverence to villainization? 

Soy Milk and the Health and Food Industries: A Case of Whiplash

It all started with cholesterol. In 1995, the New England Journal of Medicine linked soy milk to reduced LDL and increased HDL (“bad” and “good” cholesterol, respectively). One year later, WhiteWave Inc. unveiled the first soy milk product to enter the United States market, and in 1999, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized a health claim that allowed for soy milk to be marketed as a heart-healthy product. The same year, soy milk sales had skyrocketed by 600 percent. Soy milk, the industry claimed, strengthened bones; it staunched menopause symptoms, and it stopped breast cancer, prostate cancer and heart attacks. And, of course, it made you lose weight, a point hammered home by the impressively low calorie count highlighted on the front of the box.

Health claims are the diet industry’s dominant spores. They pollinate not just food, but medicine and media, preying on the self-image these institutions collaborate to distort. And the industry preys primarily on women, among whom eating disorders are more common, and who have been historically subjected to more restrictive beauty standards. A health food that can make you lose weight? Yes, it’s true! Enter soy milk, the shiny new alternative to the full-fat cow stuff. Now go and stock up the pantry.

But the idea of soy as a food that was “good for us” died when it came to light that daidzein and genistein, the compounds responsible for soy milk’s miraculous properties, were phytoestrogens. On the chemical level, phytoestrogen molecules resemble estrogen, a pop-science fact that led to all sorts of malign implications. Suddenly soy milk didn’t prevent breast cancer, but in fact, caused it. It made us weak and listless and, worse, fat, by lowering our testosterone levels. It made men infertile, or didn’t — by their own admission, studies into the matter lack the size and quality control to draw meaningful conclusions. The same issues hold true for the quality of research done on all of these claims.

As I typed the preceding paragraph, I found myself tempted to follow up with a corollary: of course there were issues with the quality of research on the adverse effects of soy milk because the forces of Big Soy would have had an interest in stunting it. And there it is: The fear of an all-pervading economic and political system, in which information can’t be trusted, that reactionary thought takes advantage of. It’s not unjustified. Science has a history of being sponsored by interested parties, championed when its discoveries agree with market values and discredited when they don’t. In the United States, government-sponsored science has lied to the public and engaged in outright human experimentation too cruel to do justice to in this article.

Profiting Off Paranoia

Pointing out the profit incentives in science doesn’t mean that forces opposing scientific thought are acting without profit incentives.

Profit, in fact, is their singular uniting motive. Four years of podiuming a paranoid businessman as a president blessed the snake oil industry with bigger, better, and more profitable conspiracy theories than ever before. Suddenly, Alex Jones wants to sell you cures that don’t heal anything; so does the guy from the yoga studio whose sweat smells like patchouli.

Amidst this storm of conspira-noia, the myth of feminizing phytoestrogens changed hands. The health and food industries turned their backs on soy milk, which capitulated its market lead in 2013 to almond milk (which, it ought to be noted, was marketed just as aggressively as a weight loss product). In 2017, the FDA reneged on its official position that soy can reduce the risk of heart disease, saying it was now unconvinced by the quality of the studies it had once trumpeted. By 2020, oat milk, too, proved more profitable than soy. 

Along with the newfound lack of evidence for soy’s role in preventing heart disease, it’s hard to imagine that the legend of Evil Estrogen wasn’t at least somewhat to blame. Less bombastic scientific developments have been swept up and forgotten; the FDA continues to stand by its claim that soy can play a role in a healthy diet. But such scientific conclusions are too banal to clear its name. Having lost its superfood crown, the only role left for soy milk is a free non-dairy option in a Starbucks latte, and as a linguistic tool for marking those we fear as the other. 

The alt-right has weaponized the common “knowledge” that purportedly immutable “male” characteristics can be feminized with daily doses of estrogen. The idea that a mere milk alternative could change one’s gender, strangely, does nothing to defeat their bioessentialist thought. Rather, it has resulted in blaming a simple molecule for the rise of trans visibility, giving biological roots to a phenomenon that is in reality sociological. 

Misogynistic and anti-feminist groups like the Proud Boys, r/MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way), and incels (“involuntary celibates”) attraction theorists, all fall prey to the remnants of the same marketing tactics that lead women concerned for the health of their children and the planet to non-GMO superfoods: the world would work the way it’s meant to, if we could, in the words of Alex Jones, just stop “putting chemicals in the water that turn the freakin’ frogs gay.”

Soy milk was introduced to the right-wing in the incredulous tone of all conspiracy theories. From these origins, it spread through the charismatic leaders of alt-right radio shows and all-male hate groups, adding to their long list of beliefs about what makes men lesser. Finally, by the sheer virality that turned once-fringe conservatism into mainstream rhetoric, soy became a class of boys. Soyboys — with their alternative milks, feminal politics, and audacious gender-bending — encompass all those that have failed manhood, having been duped by soy just like the cisgender women who, a decade ago, were taken in by promises of heart health and flat bellies. 

The forces that created an amalgam of lies and bad science to market soy milk no longer have a use for the myth, but the myth remains. Pseudoscience shakes loose the shackles of its mad creators; and in the tradition of science fiction monsters, once irresponsibly created, it is impossible to contain, and preys on the alienated and the vulnerable.

Julia Norza is interested in borders: between countries, genders and minds. First-hand witnesses have described her work being featured in Blood Knife, An Injustice! Magazine, and Deconreconstruction.

Further reading

Shurtleff, W., & Aoyagi, A. (2013). History of Soymilk and Other Non-Dairy Milks (1226 to 2013). Soyinfo Center. <https://www.soyinfocenter.com/pdf/166/Milk.pdf>

Speaking to three women in cheese I learned about cheesemaking in the past and in the present and the important ways that women have shaped — and continue to shape — this craft. Carina Reckers is a Berlin-based cheesemonger and maker, writer and educator,  interested in the stories that surround milk in all its forms. Andi Wandt is a cheesemaker, a passionate steward of artisan cheese serving on the Board of the Vermont Cheese Council, and the Production Manager at Jasper Hill Farm’s Food Venture Center Creamery in Vermont. And Mary Casella is a cheesemonger living in New York, a championer of women in the dairy industry, and an advocate of the history, culture, and relationship of humans and ruminants. Although the history of cheese, like many other foods and food cultures, reflects the co-opting and professionalization of traditional knowledge by patriarchal, capitalist powers, there remains a passionate community of cheesemakers and mongers around the world reflecting on this history and championing a more just, ethical, and delicious approach to cultured milk. This piece shares their reflections on the cheese industry in the US and Europe and the multidimensional connections between women and cheese. Although they were not interviewed together, I have aimed to put these women’s insights into conversation with one another. Their quotes have been edited for clarity.

I remember the first time I made cheese. Peering over the edge of the large pot of milk, I eagerly waited as the temperature crept upward. I watched as, through some unknown magic, the liquid seemed to thin into a cloudy bodiless fluid and from it emerged a mass of thick white curds. “There is a bit of magic in it. You have to admit it,” Carina explained to me over a Radler in a loud Berlin restaurant. She was reflecting on the intangible beauty and uncertainty of the process of turning milk into cheese that remains part of this process despite its “sciencification.” 

Women’s work

Long before we knew the scientific explanations as to how cheese works, agrarian women around the world were producing cheeses of all types. Cheesemaking kept women close to the home and suited the rhythm of their busy days taking care of the children, tending to the house, and caring for the smaller farm stock. “Before it was commercialized, it had always been women's work,” Carina told me. Mary explained, “The word ‘dairy’ in English literally stems from ‘female servants’. Now that's something that we use, not only to describe an entire food group, but an entire industry that comes from labour that women did.” “Where this all changed,” Andi said, “was the Industrial Revolution, when cheesemaking went from being dominated by farmhouse cheeses to being produced in a plant — in a factory.” Carina said, “As soon as it got out of the private sphere of just sustaining a family or a smaller community, it got more into the male sphere”. 

The industrial revolution fundamentally changed the food systems of Europe and North America, beginning the shift away from total reliance on small-scale food producers. With economies of scale on their side, industrial cheese producers were able to make more cheese for cheaper. Slowly, cheese (like so many other food products) became a big business. 

Mary: “Men kind of swooped in and saw an opportunity. They were like, ‘we’re going to take all of this intergenerational knowledge — we're going to mine it from you — and then we're going to apply it and make it better’. And there were women who would teach or educate [cheesemakers] in factories, but cheesemaking became this mechanized industrialized product, and women were kind of just pushed to the wayside. Arguably you can say this freed women to pursue other things, which is fantastic, but the lack of recognition is definitely problematic.” 

Industrialization also came with advances in scientific knowledge and understanding of food safety which changed the way foods, like cheese, was produced. Mary pointed out that women were largely excluded from participating in and learning about scientific discoveries which pushed them even farther to the margins of this changing industry. 

Mary: “You mostly hear about men in the industry. Why is that? There are so many women making cheese… I've had women [cheesemakers] tell me that people are like ‘oh, you make this in your kitchen?‘ Or like, ‘oh, this must be your husband's farm‘. And it's like, no, these are, these are my animals. And no, this isn't like Suzy Homemaker just making some cupcakes. No disrespect to that, but this is my profession. I am a professional, I am knowledgeable in this and this is my job. It all comes full circle to seeing women‘s work is not work. Men are the consummate professional — you know, it's chef versus housewife, hobby versus profession. Why do we never take what women do seriously? Women's work is so often ignored or undervalued… It is kind of incredible to me that several cheese books have sections about women in the industry, but there's no comprehensive history of what women have done.”

Andi: “You know, there's a, there's a book about cheddar by a cheesemonger named Gordon Zola Edgar. And he wrote in his book that ‘there are only a handful of female cheddar makers in the United States’. At that point, I was the head cheesemaker at a cheddar plant, and I wrote to myself in the margins, ‘I can name seven right now’. His point was that because cheddar production has become this very labour-intensive thing, women have gone out of it. I thought his statement was not only inaccurate, but a little short-sighted in some ways because it has become a real male-dominant field, but I don't think he is seeing the whole nuance of it. At the time, and even I think when he [Edgar] wrote that book, the head cheesemaker at Shelburne Farms was a woman and Shelburne Farms is a nationally recognized artisan cheddar cheese producer.”

Although Andi has, throughout her career in cheese, worked with and learned from many other women, in her current job at Jasper Hill Creamery, she is the only woman on her team. “We don't really get a lot of female applicants and I've asked myself a lot, ‘why is that?’ I think some of it is cheesemaking has become extremely labour intensive. There's a lot of heavy lifting. There's a lot of machinery… It has become work that is more stereotypical of men's roles in the workforce.” This is a direct result of the industrialization of cheese production. In the US, women make up a very small percentage of cheesemakers; according to statistics compiled by Zippia, an online career information platform, in 2021 only 22 percent of all cheesemakers in the US were women.

Andi went on, “Unfortunately, we don't instil in young women and girls — in general — that kind of comfort with working with tools, and so I think women entering this industry face an intimidation factor. I used to have a lot of imposter syndrome. I think I was insecure about some of those things, like am I going to be seen as not knowing what I'm doing because I'm a woman, and that's a terrible way to feel, right? Am I not technically inclined because I'm a woman? No, absolutely not. Anybody can learn anything. But it's kind of these stereotypical roles surrounding mechanics and very heavy lifting.”

Mary, who is currently an affineur (someone who ages cheese) at Crown Finish Caves told me that the physical element is something she particularly likes about working in cheese: “I'm not really like sit behind a desk person. I like to be active and on my feet.” Having worked across the industry from cheesemonger to shop manager, in small-scale and large-scale environments, Mary is no stranger to the ways in which women’s abilities and skills are subject to scrutiny from colleagues and customers alike. “The number of times I've either been working behind the counter or delivering something and someone sees me either lifting something heavy or using a knife and makes some kind of comment like, ‘Oh, be careful’. Or ‘Oh, you've got that?’ Or frankly, just questioning my knowledge. There is a lot of mansplaining and presumptions of what you know, or what you're capable of.”

Andi, on the other hand, told me she has “never really been mansplained in the cheese industry,” a huge contrast from her earlier career in beer. (She later remembered one former job where she was frequently mansplained by her boss, but this was the exception, not the rule.)

Carina, Andi, and Mary all spoke about the importance of other women in shaping their careers, building a sense of shared community, and carrying forward the artistry of cheese. As Carina put it, “It's given me role models of how, as a woman, you can create your own space in the cheese world.”

The goat ladies

Andi told me that although the industrial revolution changed things, there remains a real artistry to making cheese, and in the US, women were at the forefront of reviving this craft. Mary explained, “The rebirth of artisinal cheesemaking here in the States really came about through the [second wave] feminist movement and back to land homesteading… the idea of going back to land and providing for your family with food that is healthy and nourishing and you know where it comes from.”

Both Mary and Andi referenced the ‘goat ladies‘, who were part of the Second Wave movement that started. These women are credited with pioneering the craft of goat cheese production in the US in the 1970s and 1980s. According to New York City cheesemonger Anne Saxelby’s “5 Minute History of Women in Cheese”, in these early years, neither the goats nor the equipment for milking them were available in the US since the dairy industry was overwhelmingly focused on perfecting the production of cow milk and cow cheeses. Although Andi mentioned the physical size of goats and the scale of their milk as perhaps part of the reason the women chose to work with these animals, she thinks it was more than just that: “I think these women were thinking creatively about entering this new market and kind of thinking outside the box.“ 

Carina too spoke about women goat farmers in Germany. “Sabine Jürß, her dairy is called  Scellebelle, she does everything herself. The agriculture part, she takes care of the animals, milks them twice a day. She has a herd of around 60 goats that she milks… Sabine is working with a herd of Poitevine, which is a French breed of goats and she's also working with a German breed, but she's making these classic French styles [of cheese].”

Carina brought this up in the context of explaining her interest in the way cheese connects different histories and creates new traditions that are firmly rooted in place. Her thesis, which she wrote while studying at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Bra, Italy, examined the interconnection between humans, animals, and landscapes. She discussed how landscapes are shaped by the history of pastoralism and how that, in turn, influences the practice of pastoralism in a given area. 

Andi too reflected on the interconnected histories of humans, animals, cheeses, and landscapes: “All of the styles of cheese that we have today reflect the socioeconomic conditions of the place that they were invented… making this connection — we have this distinct style of cheese because of  X, Y, and Z factors — to me was like ‘Aha! Wow, cheese is fucking cool.’”

Bra also happens to be the city where the biggest festival dedicated to raw milk cheeses in the world is hosted each year, which both Carina and Mary attended in 2021. That year, the event dedicated greater attention to women cheesemakers than in previous iterations; reading through the profiles of women cheesemakers available on the Slow Food site, it is interesting to see the ways these women are portrayed as deeply connected to land on which they farm, and as maternal, “guardians… of traditional knowledge”. 

“You know, women lactate too… I'm not saying that women are inherently better farmers or cheesemakers because they have the intution, but it's not for nothing.” Mary explained “One woman I spoke to, was talking about how she was still breastfeeding her son and sometimes in the middle of the day she needed something to boost her energy or feel better. So she was like, ‘I have a piece of chocolate,’ and so for her goats who had just given birth, she gave them some extra feed other than their typical grass diet. A little treat. Again, I would like to stress that I'm not trying to polarize and generalize too much, but men probably don't have that intuition of what a mother goes through. What does a body feel like when you've given birth or you're breastfeeding or lactating?”

She went on, “You can get a little heavy-handed with the connection between human females and female animals but that connection only goes so far. There are plenty of men who are very good with their animals, but the connection [between women and female animals] shouldn't be ignored.”

Mary, who is in the process of conducting research on women in the dairy industry, funded by the Daphne Zepos Research Award said that in her work, she aims to “acknowledge the inherent connection between women and animals, while also making sure that it continues to be about the work that they're doing… [women should be] recognized for the work that they do because it's good. Not because they‘re a woman doing it.”

To milk and be milked

Although the connections between humans and animals run deep, there is no getting around the fact that the dairy industry fundamentally relies on, as Astra and Sunaura Taylor put it, the“sexual, reproductive, and economic exploitation of animals.” 

“It has a cruelty in it, that's not to deny.“ Carina said. “I wouldn't know how to explain to a vegan how [milking and killing animals] is a fine thing to do.“

Andi: “I was a vegan for a period of time. I read that book, Skinny Bitch, when I was a freshman in college and was like, ‘Oh my God, we're mistreating the animals. This is terrible.’”

Mary: “It is an unavoidable factor that you have to take the calf away from the mother in order for it to be milked. But there, there are plenty of farmers who do this in a humane way.”

Andi: “Cows have been domesticated by humans for millennia at this point. The way that I view a responsible farmer is that when you have cows you're entering into a social contract with those animals: I will take care of you and you will take care of me. I think factory farms clearly do not prescribe to this notion. But when I talk about the farms that we work with at Jasper Hill, the farm I worked at Shelburne Farms, those animals are so beloved. And so taken care of. Every animal is named. They live a beautiful life of 10, 12, 15 years, which when you look at factory farms is closer to three, four or five. They provide milk. The milk is turned into cheese and the farmer in return provides a comfortable, happy life for this animal until it is retired. And yes, of course, it is going to become meat but we do that most humane way possible. I view it as this unspoken social contract and every good farmer I have met feels it… I think respecting animals is of the utmost importance.”

Carina: “Maybe it's not just the simple math of what do they get out of it, but it is… a symbiotic relationship that has been developed over thousands of years because we've created all of these breeds wouldn't exist without human interconnection… And I think if you want to weigh it out, I think the value [making cheese] in a traditional way, in relationship to the country, the landscape, the soil that you're working on, the animals, in the best sense, it's creating more biodiversity. It's creating also biocultural diversity. And then maybe the price that we're paying is some pain that we're inflicting on animals. But also I think if you're working closely with the animals, you're feeling with them. It's not like you don't give a shit.”

Mary: “There‘s a huge human legacy behind dairy… I think the cultural importance is too great to just kind of say, oh, we should not eat cheese anymore, or you should not drink dairy anymore.”

Carina: “It is very, very delicious, and beautiful, and it makes lots of people happy. People are going to eat cheese anyway so if we all agree we want to eat cheese, then why not eat good cheese coming from people who do it with lots of love towards the animals.”

Diversity in dairy

There is no doubt that eating small-scale artisan cheese is the more ethical and environmentally friendly option, however, the reality is that these products remain out of reach for many people.

Mary: “Obviously it's not accessible for everyone and it can be very expensive.”

Andi: “That does give it a level of classism. We deal with things like food deserts in the United States, right?  Like the only place you can go to buy food is a dollar store, where you're paying maybe a 50 percent markup on everything you buy and you can only buy processed foods. The cheeses we sell at Jasper Hill, you know, if you are on food assistance, that is not where you're going to choose to put your benefits. Unfortunately, the cost of these cheeses is an accurate reflection of the labour and inputs that go into them.”

Carina: “Making cheese is such intense work.”

Andi: “I think this leads us to a larger conversation about how some food is in a lot of ways is artificially cheap in our country [the US], at least the good food. And it all ties into a larger conversation of how people are underpaid, unfortunately in our country. And that cheap food is artificially underpriced… It's a problem across our food system. So we are dependent on this underpaid and undervalued labour to eat well. It's not unique to dairy.”

In both Europe and the US, the agri-food industry relies heavily on migrant labourers. The drive to produce cheap food relies on the exploitation of these vulnerable groups. In this sense, not only is the dairy industry built on the exploitation of women’s and animals labour, but in the US in particular, it is also dependent on the labour of marginalized and racialized communities. 

Although more than 50 percent of all labour in the dairy industry is performed by immigrants, the cheese industry in the US remains very white. Mary explained: “There are like extenuating circumstances where most of the cheese culture happens to come from predominantly white countries. But you know, we live in a day and age where anyone should have equal opportunity… I think [diversity] is still something that the industry and community really need to work on. How can we make this a space and environment and welcomes a more diverse group of people into the community? One of my overarching goals with being in this industry is to make cheese more accessible.”

The marginalization of racialized people in the cheese industry stems from the fact that their work tends to be concentrated at the earlier stages of milk production and dairy and is therefore largely invisible and undervalued. As Andi put it: “The cheese industry is diverse if you go to the root of where milk is coming from, but these people are not being highlighted in our industry. And that is part of the problem… the cheesemaker is not necessarily the most important person. They may be a person turning your milk into something that instead of being able to charge US$20 a hundredweight as liquid, you can now charge US$30 a pound as cheese, but without the milker, your business collapses. If you don't have somebody to milk, your cows, what the fuck are you doing?”

Andi described an experience of working at a creamery in California. “All of the staff were Mexican families… we lived in farm housing with all the other farm workers. My partner and I were the cheesemakers and all the other people who lived on the farm or the farmworkers — I feel like the story will illuminate what I'm trying to say — basically, due to a fire, we were going to lose power at the farm and the owner provided a generator for myself and my partner, and he was like, ‘Why are you giving us a generator and not all the other families?‘ And he's like, ‘You guys are the cheesemakers you're the most important employees‘. And [my partner] turned to him and said, ‘Ray [another worker] is your most important employee. He milks the cows. And without him, I cannot do my job.’ The owner of the ranch did not see it this way… He viewed [my partner] and I as the white cheesemakers, making significantly more than anyone else working for him, as the most important employees because we made the cheese. But without Ray who was paid below California minimum wage, we could not do our job… the real disconnect is that in many parts of the country, cheese is supported by Hispanic America… it does not happen without them.”

Women’s legacy in cheesemaking

There is no doubt something magical and mystical about cheese. The 12th-century mystic Hildegard von Bingen compared cheesemaking to the miracle of life, through which the insubstantial coalesces into a solid form. Similarly, in his book, The Cheese And The Worms, Carlo Ginzberg compares the appearance of cheese from milk to the formation of the universe: “All was chaos, that is, earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together; and out of that bulk a mass formed – just as cheese is made out of milk – and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels.” Given the traditional associations between women and creation, perhaps it is unsurprising that in the pre-industrial period in Europe and North America, cheesemaking was considered “women’s work.”

Cheesemaking was an integral part of pastoral women’s lives. This connection went beyond the conveniences of dairying alongside keeping the home. In their powerful socialist-feminist critique of the meat and dairy industry, Astra and Sunaura Taylor argue that this presumed connection between women and lactating animals was rooted in an understanding of women’s bodies (namely breasts) as innately animal. In their telling, this link between women and animals served to justify women’s subordination; in contrast, men’s bodies were set apart from the animal kingdom and therefore, superior. 

The legacy of women in cheesemaking has resisted co-opting by the patriarchal forces of industrialization, although it remains rife with tensions, challenges, and complexities. Despite the fact that women’s work in the cheese industry is so often undervalued, there’s a resurgence in women-led dairy; a 2017 New York Times article on the changing culture of cheese called independent American cheesemaking “an obvious if undersung exemplar of the ultimate matriarchal workplace.” By creating their own space in the cheese industry, women cheesemakers like Andi, Carina, and Mary are also creating opportunities to question the status quo and strive for a more equitable future. The magic of cheese continues. 

Zoë Johnson is a founding editor of Feminist Food Journal.