In a cappuccino belongs milk. regular milk. But what is normal anyway? A lot of people don’t understand the question. Cow’s milk, of course. But not only in trendy metropolitan cafés it can sometimes happen that the coffee specialties there are exclusively prepared with oat milk.
This sometimes leads to arguments, not only when a TV presenter tweets about it. Evil paternalism, some find. A right move, the others. Yes, opinions differ on a little thing like oat milk. But why actually?
On the surface, oat milk stands for a lifestyle. A lifestyle in which you can buy yourself a good conscience, with oat milk that costs three euros a liter (a liter of organic whole milk cost 1.69 euros in the supermarket). You hang out in hip cafés in Frankfurt’s Westend, slurp oat milk cappuccino, eat banana bread and type on your laptop. You don’t have to change much to belong here – just a little sip of milk in your coffee to feel like a better or at least ecologically conscious person. You can get angry about that. But it’s not really worth getting excited about.
But if you take a closer look, such an oat milk incident represents a major social debate. It’s about our status quo. To answer the question: What is actually normal? The coffee with oat milk or the one with cow’s milk? Is your own normality, the one in which a latte is prepared with cow’s milk, perhaps just a perceived one – while everyone else thinks it’s cool and normal that their coffee and cake is based solely on plant-based ingredients?
On the other hand, cow’s milk stands, superficially, for something that was thought to have been overcome long ago: unhealthy nutrition that is unnecessarily at the expense of animal welfare. Everybody says that no adult needs cow’s milk, and of course that’s true to a certain extent. But no grown-up person needs avocados or apples to survive.
If you take a closer look again, cow’s milk also stands for more for the people who like to drink it: When it comes to nutrition, it’s never just about enjoyment and instinctual gratification, but about culture, about one’s own roots, about tradition.
It’s not just about self-improvement and health, it’s about comfort and the feeling of coming home. Sometimes it’s also about the fact that you’ve always done or drunk something that way.
A highly emotional affair
Eating and drinking is a highly emotional matter for many people, for a variety of reasons. So it’s no wonder that things get agitated when coffee drinkers are suddenly served something that shakes their own world order as a matter of course.
The controversy surrounding its accurate naming alone shows how much the milk and its origin matter: it is not oat milk that is on the packaging of brands such as Oatly or Alpro, but oat drink, according to an EU regulation. And that, although today every bakery chain and ice cream parlor is allowed to advertise with “homemade” products.
Now the oat milk side accuses the cow milk side of a lack of progress, while the cow milk side feels patronized by the oat milk drinkers. Both see themselves on the morally correct side: The oat milk drinkers think of animal welfare and the fact that oat milk has a better ecological balance than cow’s milk. The cow’s milk drinkers are reminders of the right to choose what to put in their coffee. And the fact that the cycle of agriculture, especially in organic farms, is also dependent on livestock farming.
The cow’s milk side complains about the universally rampant “wokism”, so it’s really just upset about the banana bread milieu in which oat milk is so popular. It’s just hard to accept a new normal. Nobody, even if they hardly think about nutrition, likes the feeling of being patronized and lectured. Or just to accept that in addition to one’s own normal, there can also be another, possibly vegan, normal.
So the dispute over oat milk is, to a certain extent, political. That’s why it’s good that it’s managed – it just doesn’t help anyone if some woke up at the other and the others are just old, white boomers to some. And there’s not much use arguing about oat milk when half the planet is burning.
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