Oat milk fad over, Brooklynites buying cows

The cultural forces that shaped oat milk’s rise and fall and cow milk’s roaring (mooing) return

I’ve spent over $600 on upcharges for oat milk in coffee shops. I actually sat down and calculated it: I caffeinate outside of my home on average twice a week, I started requiring oat milk in my cappuccinos in the winter of 2017, and it cost me one dollar each time I eschewed cow’s milk for oat. Hence, $624. I could have done a lot of meaningful, sensible, and fun things with that money. I could have bought a round trip plane ticket to somewhere kind of interesting (provided I bought the ticket a month in advance, which I never do). I could have saved an additional two dollars a week and, with interest rates being what they are, had like $20k by now. I could have upgraded my iPhone, which terrifies me, because the app I use to store the unsolicited nudes people send me now requires a cloud subscription if I want to access them on a new phone. With $624, I could have gone on four really nice dates, or about seven if I wasn’t super excited about the people I was taking out. I could have done a lot of things with that $624, and I could have also prevented 624 barista eye rolls if I hadn’t inexplicably jumped on the oat milk bandwagon. Why did I start drinking oat milk? 

I am not lactose intolerant.

I tolerate lactose like a fucking champion. I could suck milk right out of an udder on an empty stomach and then crush an ironman triathlon. I could eat whole milk yogurt (eat never seems like the right word for consuming yogurt - we need a word between eat and drink) for three meals a day and have cottage cheese for dessert with nary a single fart. I process dairy like a ravenous midwestern 6-month-old. 

I am not particularly bothered by the environmental implications of the 1,024 ounces (8 gallons) of frothed milk I consume each year in espresso drinks. I do not drink milk in any other format or context, because I’m over the age of 13 and I’m not a frontier vigilante who lives with his grandmother in Nevada. So really, how much methane is emitted by a cow in the time it takes to produce the paltry 8 gallons of milk I drink each year? To save OCD dairy-haters the trouble, I googled that for you. The whole milk cappuccinos I gave up for five years saved a scrape under 10 pounds of methane. Giving up cow milk in my coffee didn’t exactly make me an environmentalist. 

Lactose and environmental concerns ruled out, it would be reasonable to assume that I started drinking oat milk because it was trendy, but I derive more pleasure from mocking trends than following them, usually at my own expense. For example, I think guys look ridiculous in those billowy, drop-crotch, bedoin harem pants, but I cannot deny their inexplicable sexual magnetism: if you put harem pants on a scarecrow at dawn they’d be around its ankles by dusk. Did I fly to Bali and buy a pair? Absofuckinglutely not. Same with man buns. I have yet to see an aspirational man bun, but just try to find a guy with a man bun who doesn’t have four supermodel girlfriends. I’d probably have at least one catalog model girlfriend if I had a man bun, but I’d rather be celibate than be a guy with a man bun. When everyone was moving to Williamsburg to “create community” and ended up meeting the loves of their lives at floor parties and then marrying them at Burning Man, I bought an apartment in the West Village and got to know the vendors at the farmers market across the street. I’m probably still single as a result (the many other reasons I’m still single will have their own post). I am not a man who follows trends. My oat milk upcharge habit wasn’t because it was cool. 

I truly have no idea why I started drinking oat milk. 

One day I just woke up and had a violent disdain for cow’s milk and felt a fierce allegiance to oat milk. I think the same thing happened to millions of other people who are not lactose intolerant environmentalist trend whores. I have some theories. 

Beauty.

The more beautiful someone is, the more insufferable and excruciating their dietary restrictions are, provided they’re American and from a blue city (everyone beautiful in America ends up in a blue city or gets fat). In America, beauty correlates to trivial but tedious dietary decisions. This isn’t true elsewhere. Beautiful Europeans will literally eat pork schnitzel, duck fat french fries and an entire block of cheese followed by twelve cigarettes and still be totally chill. Not beautiful Americans. If there is an edible substance that has a more expensive or difficult to find substitute, a beautiful American will feel entitled to it everywhere they go. I think oat milk was added to the portfolio of irritating substitutes demanded by beautiful people, and people wanted to belong to the rarified club of entitled beautiful people who could get away with off-menu ordering a grilled lemon with wild-harvested salmon roe and vegan sour cream at Del Friscos. Asking for oat milk at a coffee shop became tantamount to saying, I’m beautiful enough to be annoying and get away with it. 

Scarcity. 

Related to the previous trend, scarcity drove demand for oat milk. There was a time when oat milk existed but wasn’t available in the United States. It was like when you could only get Spotify prior to 2011 through your annoying British friend’s VPN. Similarly, I remember being in Waitrose in London in 2016 and spotting Oatly on the shelf. I was so excited by this rare and innovative beverage with playful, self-deprecating carton copy that I stashed a gallon of it in my checked luggage and paid an excess weight fee to fly it across the Atlantic. It was probably the most expensive gallon of milk ever purchased, but I had to have it because it was hard to get. That initial frothy (pun!) scarcity drove demand for oat milk, and even after it was no longer obscure, it still wasn’t the default milk at coffee shops, so it still felt scarce.   

Sweden. 

Oat milk was invented in the early 1990s by a Swedish food scientist called Richard Öste. Because oat milk was Swedish, everyone wanted it. Name one bad thing that comes from Sweden. I’ll wait a few weeks for you to think about it. You’re back empty handed? Exactly. Literally everything that comes from Sweden is amazing. Abba. Volvos. Prefabricated houses. Meatballs. Subtle socialism. Cheap unpronounceable modern furniture that takes longer to assemble than it lasts. It became known that oat milk was a Swedish export, and suddenly everyone who described their aesthetic as “clean” had switched to øat milk. 

MAGA. 

Trump was elected in 2016. Between 2017 and 2019, oat milk sales increased ten fold. Coincidence? I think not. Trump and his MAGA zombies represented good old fashioned American values. Trucks. Steak. Misogyny. Incest. And yes, dairy. Could you imagine Donald Trump asking for oat milk in his coffee? No, you couldn’t, partially because he doesn’t even drink coffee, but also because he has the diet of a petulant seven-year-old boy.

I think anyone who hated Trump instinctively, reflexively gravitated to anything that was antithetical to him. Switching from cow’s milk to oat milk was a political statement, an act of rebellion. If Trump had lost in 2016, oat milk would have lost, too.

 Woke mylk. 

Prior to 2014, very few people knew what oat milk was, and very few people knew what “woke” was. Before it was weaponized by both ends of the political spectrum, staying woke in the Black community meant being aware of institutional deception and evolved into a watchword for activists on the lookout for police brutality and injustice in law enforcement. For a few minutes, woke was a productive rallying cry to combat racism and the marginalization of all minorities. Woke was then co-opted by privileged white people who wanted to feel victimized by the system that afforded them the privilege to feel victimized. These white people started drinking oat milk because it kind of rhymes with woke milk, because they decided that any industry that could have the word “Big” in front of it was inherently evil, and because milk that wasn’t dairy could have an alternative spelling, which woke white folks go apeshit for. Thus, oat mylk - with a “y” - became the elixir of political correctness run amok and the official beverage of annoying white people who sequestered themselves into an echo chamber of righteous ultra-left ideology and turned a blind eye to the fact that they were alienating swing voters away from voting blue and driving them into the clutches of the political party that preys on the fear of children dressing in drag at Christmas mass. Woke white people will abandon oat milk for pea milk in 2025 when they realize that their appropriation and dilution of woke single-handedly got Ron DeSantis elected. 

Oat milk is as over as Silicon Valley Bank.

All of the forces that propelled oat milk into the spotlight have withered. Oat milk is so common that even unattractive people drink it, Oatly is now made not in Sweden but in China, there’s a democrat in the White House, and with the economy looking like the Hindenburg and scared raccoons at the helm of the Fed, no one has an extra dollar to burn on the oat milk upcharge. People have slid down from the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, where the performative woke flag had been planted, all the way to the bottom where simplicity reigns supreme.  

The world is gravitating to what it can understand. Have you ever looked at the back of a box of oat milk? So many ingredients, and some even have triggering names: oats, water, low erucic acid rapeseed oil, dipotassium phosphate, calcium carbonate, tricalcium phosphate, sea salt, dicalcium phosphate, riboflavin, vitamin A, vitamin D2, vitamin B12. Like the failing startups that SVB lent $200B to, that shit is way too complex for these uncertain times. Have you ever looked at the ingredients label of a gallon of cow’s milk? Of course not, because the ingredient in cow’s milk is cow’s milk, and that’s the kind of no-bullshit (pun!) milk people want right now.

When times get weird, people go back to the dark ages, which today is buying $12 a quart raw cow’s milk through friends who have houses Upstate because raw milk - which is having a moment with yoga influencers and stay-at-home girlfriends on TikTok - can only be purchased on the farm where it’s produced. I think the synthetic milk backlash will be so swift and the allure of wholesome milk straight from the family udders so strong that Brooklyn hipsters will buy their own cows.

I can see the Park Slope listings on Douglas Elliman now: “backyard space for not only your cow but also your goat for households with lactose-sensitive family members - room for all your ruminants!” Hooved milkable animals will become bigger status symbols in NYC than flying out of Teterboro to Aspen. The ultra-rich will keep buffalos on their own floors in Park Avenue penthouses and stock their Hamptons compounds with camels and yaks. Wine cellars will be replaced with milk cellars. They’ll host exotic milk tastings in Southampton and play milk drinking games like, Guess Which Endangered Animal My Milk Mustache Came From. 

The closest I’ll get to any of this will be a raw cow’s milk mustache in the West Village. Maybe if I wear it outside my apartment I’ll finally attract a supermodel.