Got Milk: The Semiotics of Milk Supremacy

There’s something strange about milk.

Not the drink itself—although let’s be honest, drinking the lactations of another species is hardly intuitive—but the way it keeps appearing in political discourse.

At some point in the last few years, milk—yes, milk—got political. A drink once associated with cartoon-ish strong bones and breakfast cereal somehow found itself in the middle of a cultural identity crisis. On one side, you’ve the got oat milk girlies, climate activists, and lactose-intolerant diaspora kids. On the other, white supremacists proudly chugging whole milk on Twitter, daring the libs to flinch.

If this sounds absurd, that’s because it is. But it’s also revealing.

Over the past few years, white nationalists and online trolls have proudly claimed milk as a badge of identity. Social media posts feature smirking men chugging full-fat glasses on camera, invoking both irony and “ancestral superiority”. At first glance, it seems bizarre—just another internet stunt designed to wind people up. But the joke, as always, is doing real ideological work.

The cold, white stream of milk and meaning leads us to semiotics. At its simplest, semiotics is the study of signs and sign systems—or more plainly, the study of meaning.

And semiotically, milk has become heavily loaded. It’s a signifier: an object that stands in for an entire cluster of ideas. It carries with it associations of purity, strength, nationalism, and—most of all—whiteness. This is where semiotics becomes useful: not just to decode advertising slogans or art films, but to analyse the cultural objects hiding in plain sight. Semiotics helps us understand how meaning is made—and milk, right now, is overflowing with it.

Its whiteness is not neutral. The visual purity of milk—opaque, cold, clean—is already doing symbolic work in an already racialised world. Couple that with decades of advertising linking milk to growth, vitality, and moral health, and you start to see how a mundane drink becomes a container for ideology. In a culture obsessed with cleanliness and order, whiteness has long been linked to moral purity, physical cleanliness, and hygienic superiority. Milk slips into this tradition effortlessly—not just as a symbol of whiteness, but of a body imagined as intact, inviolable, self-contained. And of course, white.

But there’s another layer to this lactose obsession. Not content with pasteurised dairy, a new vanguard—from wellness influencers to trad dads—now celebrates raw milk as the ultimate elixir. Unprocessed. Undiluted. Unpenetrated. It’s not just about taste or nutrients. It’s about returning to a supposedly untainted state. Before the body was interfered with. Before the system stepped in. Raw milk becomes a metaphor for natural order—purity unsullied by the state.

This isn’t just fringe health chatter. In spaces where vaccine scepticism, anti-government rhetoric, and nostalgia for a pre-modern lifestyle converge, raw milk is more than a drink. It becomes a boundary object between the “pure” self and the contaminated outside world. It plays on fantasies of bodily autonomy: complete sovereignty over what enters the body. Nothing injected. Nothing modified. Nothing foreign.

This is where milk, especially raw milk, collides with the politics of penetration. The fear of being “entered” by something foreign is a recurring anxiety in the anti-modern imagination. And when white supremacists meme themselves as milk-drinkers, they’re not just joking about digestive enzymes. They’re laying claim to a legacy of normativity: we are the default; we are the strong; this was built for us.

There’s some pseudo-scientific scaffolding behind all this. The ability to digest lactose into adulthood is more common among white Europeans due to a genetic mutation. Globally, lactose intolerance is actually the norm, particularly among Black, Asian, and Indigenous populations. But in alt-right discourse, this mutation is reframed as superiority—lactose tolerance becomes proof of evolution, strength, even divine favour. It’s race science with a splash of calcium.

It’s tempting to shrug it off. To say it’s just another internet provocation, another meme, another culture war skirmish. But symbols matter. They shape perception. They build consensus. A glass of milk, when wielded this way, isn’t just a beverage—it’s a boundary. It says: this is who belongs. This is who we built this for. This is the body we had in mind.

So what do we do?

We name it. We take the symbol apart. We acknowledge the uncomfortable truth that even something as mundane as a glass of milk can be squeezed from the teat into a political narrative.

Because meaning isn’t inherent. It’s made. And we can unmake it too.