From Columbus to "Got Milk?": A Brief History of Dairy and Colonialism (By Clara Carter-Klauschie)

Few advertising campaigns are more perplexing than the infamous “Got Milk?” Icons from Britney to Kermit (the frog) sported milk mustaches for the cause, urging Americans to up their already staggering dairy intakes. 

But beyond its absurd, albeit culturally relevant exterior, “Got Milk?” seems to perfectly capture an age-old form of narrative manipulation. It is a government-backed ploy to market cow’s milk as a necessity for healthful living, a luxurious commodity. You just gotta get that calcium (no matter that dairy’s fabulous bone health benefits have been scientifically discredited)!

I could ramble all day (and have) about the devastating rape, family separation, and all-around cruelty cows experience on industrial dairy farms. I could go on about the immense climate impacts incurred through methane production, water and soil pollution, deforestation, and land and water usage. But beyond these classic talking points of my vegan spiel exists a lesser-known legacy. 

The Big Dairy we know today was milked from centuries of twisted narratives. Its shiny, strategic facade of happy cows, expansive pastures, and milk mustaches obscures a curdled, rotten bucket of white supremacy, violent colonialism, and white saviorist imperial campaigns. Frankly, exploitation has always been the industry’s bread and butter. To fully understand the depth of dairy’s impact, we must venture back to the beginning.

It is believed that the regular consumption of milk began some 10,000 years ago. Pastoralists in Western Europe domesticated cows, among other mammals, and began to consume the milk those cows produced. Anthropologists believe that these dairy pioneers likely experienced extreme stomach issues, as they lacked the enzyme lactase, which is only naturally present in the human body during childhood to aid in the digestion of breastmilk. 

However, as milk consumption grew commonplace in certain regions of Northwestern Europe, South Asia, and the Middle East, many evolved to produce lactase well into adulthood, becoming lactose-tolerant. Today, as we deem those who cannot comfortably consume milk “lactose-intolerant,” the truth of this history is linguistically flipped on its head. 

Dairy jumped oceans when Columbus brought cattle and other European crops to the “New World,” immediately asserting the supremacy of the European diet and forcing the adoption of destructive farming techniques. These principles hinged, unsurprisingly, on pseudoscientific claims of racial superiority. Colonizers believed that imposing their diet, religious practices, and way of life upon Indigenous peoples would “purify” and “civilize” them.

During the enslavement of Indigenous populations, colonizers wielded cow’s milk as a tool for increasing productivity: lactating mothers were restricted from breastfeeding for natural periods, and their babies were fed cow’s milk instead to increase the number of hours mothers could work the fields. Ecological colonialism rapidly took hold.  The grazing of ever-multiplying cow herds and the growth of monoculture crops altered landscapes and displaced native vegetation. 

All the while, Indigenous populations contracted European diseases including smallpox, measles, and influenza — all zoonotic, might I add, or transmitted from animals to humans. These diseases first emerged in Europe due to close-quarters living with farmed animals and their waste, and were only exacerbated by burgeoning land privatization (the beginnings of the Enclosure movement) in the 15th and 16th centuries.

By the time of Columbus’s famed voyage in 1492, Europeans had already developed relative immunity to these diseases. The same could not be said for Indigenous communities, which were hit by a roughly 95% decrease in population as a result of exposure to foreign germs. This period of mass death also impelled a shift in the labor force, with the transatlantic slave trade gaining traction. 

Beginning in the early 1500’s, Africans were kidnapped and shipped in hellish conditions across the Atlantic Ocean to work on plantations in the Americas. Cow’s milk was yet again forced upon enslaved people, with infants being deprived of breastmilk and its key developmental benefits. Milk from European cows was said to be purer and healthier for growing babies than breastmilk from Black and Indigenous mothers, a supremacist falsehood that resulted in severe malnutrition, illness, and the death of many children. 

In ironic opposition to the proclaimed “impurity” of Black breastmilk, African women were forced to serve as wet nurses for white children from the early 1600s to mid-1800s in the Antebellum South. With not enough milk supply or time to go around, a deadly mixture of cow's milk and dirty water, the first iteration of formula, was often fed to their own infants.

By the 19th century, consumption of cow’s milk was on the rise globally, as urbanization and the advent of pasteurization in 1864 made dairy products far safer to consume and cheaper for the general public. In the early 1900s, a second age of imperial activity rose, with cow’s milk serving once more as an oppressive centerpiece of colonization by European countries and the United States. Lactating animals were utilized to shift the maternity of native mothers, as breastfeeding into childhood became stigmatized. 

Colonial campaigns in the Belgian Congo to promote animal milk, coupled with the regulation and stigmatization of breastfeeding, aimed to increase fertility and viable workforce. Similar policies were employed by colonizers in Malaya, Sudan, French West Africa, Vanuatu and Fiji, and the Philippines, as breastfeeding was broadly replaced by cow’s milk. Milk depots, which dispensed sanitized milk, gained traction in the Philippines and were utilized by the United States to “enlighten” mothers by instructing them on “proper” infant care. 

The importation of dried and tinned milk to colonial holdings and developing nations during the mid-1900s supposedly aimed to fight malnutrition and disease — which was falsely attributed to a lack of animal protein in native diets. In the Belgian Congo and other colonized territories, the conditions that led to widespread malnutrition were a clear result of colonizing countries’ preoccupation with WWII. Financial losses and instability in Europe led to supply shortages and the growth of disease within colonies. The influx of dried milk and formula only increased reliance on colonial powers, in many cases contributing to the death of infants from contaminated water used in formula mixing.

Today, this destruction of local culture, health, and land is far from resolved. Stigmas surrounding breastfeeding remain omnipresent, disproportionately affecting BIPOC people through systemic racism and historical trauma tied to the forceful proliferation of dairy. In the US, gaps in access to breastfeeding support, the sexualization of breasts and breastfeeding, and the financial pressures of late-stage capitalism contribute to ongoing reliance on formula. 

Dairy culture is only expanding. Nearly every American school cafeteria offers a carton of milk at lunchtime, and RFK Jr. recently inverted the food pyramid, placing dairy and animal proteins at the very top.

How can a product linked to increased rates of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer's, and cancers, including breast, ovarian, and prostate, possibly masquerade as a “healthy” diet staple? Well, it seems that any product can be “healthy” and “ethical” with the right advertising campaign.  

In the end, it comes down to greed and human-created hierarchy. The hierarchy of speciesism, of white supremacy, and of the colonial savior complex. The greed of drinking milk meant for a baby animal, of land theft, of slavery, and of economic, cultural, and ecological imperialism. Ongoing cruelty seems so easily masked and manipulated into normalcy, and so readily cast aside in favor of maintaining habits. Yes, one consumer’s choice cannot change an industry. But wouldn’t it feel good to try?

References:

Alanes, Matilde Nuñez del Prado. “Dairy in the Americas: How Colonialism Left Its Mark on the Continent.” Sentient Policy, 25 Feb. 2022, sentientmedia.org/dairy-in-the-americas-how-colonialism-left-its-mark-on-the-continent/.

Coghe, Samuël. “Between Colonial Medicine and Global Health: Protein Malnutrition and UNICEF Milk in the Belgian Congo.” Medical History, vol. 65, no. 4, Oct. 2021, pp. 384–402, https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2021.28.

Cohen, Mathilde. “Toward a Feminist Postcolonial Milk Studies.” AM. Q, vol. 595, 2013, p. 597, www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/85D23B7D58EE049CE3AF2788B57838BC/S2398772317000666a.pdf/animal_colonialism_the_case_of_milk.pdf, https://doi.org/10.1017/aju.2017.66.

“Guns, Germs & Steel: Variables. Smallpox | PBS.” Pbs.org, PBS, 2019, www.pbs.org/gunsgermssteel/variables/smallpox.html.

Hoban, Rose. “Distant Echoes of Slavery Affect Breast-Feeding Attitudes of Black Women - North Carolina Health News.” North Carolina Health News, 3 Mar. 2016, www.northcarolinahealthnews.org/2016/03/03/distant-echoes-of-slavery-affect-breastfeeding-attitudes-in-black-women/.

Marshall, Michael. “Why Humans Have Evolved to Drink Milk.” Bbc.com, BBC Future, 19 Feb. 2019, www.bbc.com/future/article/20190218-when-did-humans-start-drinking-cows-milk.

Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. “Health Concerns about Dairy.” Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, www.pcrm.org/good-nutrition/nutrition-information/health-concerns-about-dairy.

Switch4Good. “The Twisted History of Milk in America.” Plant Based News, 4 Nov. 2019, plantbasednews.org/opinion/twisted-history-milk-america/.