If you drink chocolate milk, are you engaging in antiracism and decolonization?
Now experts are asking whether milk is racist as part of a tax-payer funded research project into connections between milk and colonialism, Daily Mail, June 23, 2024
Now experts are asking whether milk is racist as part of a tax-payer funded research project into connections between milk and colonialism https://t.co/ZwDSeTMChA pic.twitter.com/F6i1pbB5uf
— Daily Mail Online (@MailOnline) June 23, 2024
A taxpayer-funded project is set to research connections between milk and colonialism, Academics at an Oxford’s History of Science museum will research the ‘political nature’ of milk and its ‘colonial legacies’.
One of the experts involved has previously argued that milk is a ‘Northern European obsession’ that has been imposed on other parts of the world.
Dr Johanna Zetterstrom-Sharp [Email her] said the assumption that milk was a key part of the human diet ‘may be understood as a white supremacist one’, as many populations outside Europe and North America have high levels of lactose intolerance in adulthood.
The new project, ‘Milking it: colonialism, heritage & everyday engagement with dairy’, has won funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
The council itself is funded by the Government through the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.
The exhibit will establish “a vital framework for understanding how colonial legacies influence contemporary issues and affect people’s lives.”
‘Through milk diaries, archival research and participatory podcasting, it will investigate historical engagement with milk.”
The project will question both the imagined and real aspects of milk, revealing the intimate and political nature of this everyday substance.’
So for those keeping score at home: at one point the tagline was “Milk. It does a body good.”
Now it’s “Milk: Just another legacy of white colonialism.”
