We Need to Talk About Oat Milk
And why the Internet can't absolve our existential dread.
HI
I won’t beat around the allergen-friendly bush: I’m sick of oat milk. I find its flavor decidedly meh, and I’m exhausted by its relatively sudden ubiquity in American coffee-shop culture—especially at the expense of needlessly maligned products like soy milk. As a child of the ‘80s and ‘90s with a certifiable pre-TikTok-era #almondmom, I grew up drinking and loving soy milk. My after-school treat of choice was a frozen foil pouch of WestSoy’s malted milk (preferred flavors: cocoa-mint, almond, and carob). Soy’s creaminess, its frothable heft, its smooth mouth feel: all this made it a perfect substitute for cow’s milk.
That is, of course, until the media (incorrectly) convinced the public that soy would wreak havoc on our hormones, cause cancer, and make men grow breast tissue and (correctly) revealed the socio-environmental tolls of factory farming monocrops. Cue the rise of almond milk through the late aughts and 2010s (blunted by ecological backlash), and the stratospheric popularity of oat milk thereafter.
Today, it can be difficult to get any plant milk except oat at some coffee shops. In the late 2010s, oat milk sales increased ten-fold in the U.S., and in 2019 alone they ballooned over 300%. By 2020, oat became the second most highly consumed plant milk after almond.
But I’m not just a counter-culture scrooge about oats; oats are delicious (unmilked, please), and more environmentally friendly than other alt milk crops. I’m in a bad mood about oat milk because I believe that its industry dominance (and the cooling trend I see) is linked to the frenzied, uninformed, and sometimes dangerous way that internet trends sink their teeth into American culture—from food to wellness to politics, and beyond.
Ever hear of girl dinner? How about bed rotting? Butter boards? Balsamic vinegar Coke? Curious to try mouth taping, or the sleepy girl mocktail? Ever consider a forehead reduction? Or maybe just glazed donut skin and permanent freckles. Have you tried sunscreen contouring? Or suctioning your lips in a bottle for the Kylie Jenner Lip Challenge? Perhaps you should start mewing instead of getting braces. And try some budget Ozempic, since there isn’t enough of the drug to supply the diabetics anymore.
Trends are nothing new. But our heightened use of social media means that the volume of social pressure—“everyone is doing it, so shouldn’t I?”—is louder than ever. And though experts, doctors, and journalists do hold court on social media platforms, the majority of accounts aren’t concerned with objectivity, fact-checking, context, scientific studies, nutrition labels, or side effects. No one is immune to the dopamine-addicting elements of social media, and stone-cold facts don’t always make for viral content.
What does go viral is content that is sensational, craveable, outrage-able; hacks and ideas and products that play into our fears about weight, aging, diet, exercise, beauty, and morality. We want content that soothes existential dread, that sublimates angst about hypercapitalism and mortality into algorithm-backed, influencer-approved solutions to cut through the cacophony of consumer choice. We want gorgeous lattes that are perfectly frothed, plant-based, anti-factory farm, and climate friendly. As a friend recently quipped, “Hope sells.” Right alongside fear.
Oat milk’s frothability and creaminess made for good latte visuals, swiftly wooing influencers, baristas, and consumers around the country. The fact that oat crops require much less water than almond trees conferred a moral superiority to oat milk consumption—something else that sells well, particularly with wellness influencers eager to prove they know the right way to live. It sold so well, in fact, that oat milk shortages roiled the country during the COVID-19 pandemic.
But then came the Oatly boycott, fueled by those same morally righteous influencers and consumers who were now furious that the Swedish oat milk megalith sold a 10% stake to private-equity firm Blackstone. Blackstone’s vibes were decidedly off: their leadership has multiple links to former President Donald J. Trump, and the firm was notoriously associated with devastation in the Amazonian rainforest. And then, in 2022, oat milk’s nutritional assassins entered the chat.
The ingredients that make oat milk creamy and delectable in lattes are oils: emulsifiers like canola (or rapeseed) oil, which give great froth. Oats aren’t inherently froth-makers, and it’s the addition of these oils that made products like Oatly so different. But the added oil content (and the type: canola is an RBD oil—refined, bleached, deodorized) was objectionable to many, as was the fact that the processing required to turn oats into milk turns oat starch into maltose, a simple sugar.
Last year, I began noticing (with unabashed glee) food industry insiders sharing their distaste for oat milk. Four-time book author Phoebe Lapine says, “When I started researching my book CARBIVORE—which is all about embracing carbs without suffering from some of their metabolic pitfalls—I really started to understand the health argument against oat milk. The problem isn’t necessarily that it’s the highest carb milk on the market. It’s that most people (as I did) use it in their morning coffee or tea, on an empty stomach.” Lapine’s research reveals that simple carbs and sugars on an empty stomach (especially in the morning, when we have fasted overnight) are going to be most harmful for our blood sugar metabolism, leading to unstable energy, fatigue, and cravings.
Marisel Salazar, food writer and author of the forthcoming Latin-ish: More Than 100 Recipes Celebrating American Latino Cuisines, says the “double whammy” of “drinking liquid starch (why does it have to be so delicious!)” and “highly inflammatory seed oils” was “more than enough to put my glass of oat milk down.” She now prioritizes making cashew milk from scratch—even when time is limited.
In a series of Instagram Stories last fall, award-winning chef, cookbook author, and bakery owner Nicole Rucker also confessed her “uneasy preference” for oat milk—and her dismay at discovering that an 8-ounce serving of it purportedly contained as much oil as a serving of McDonald’s French fries, and the same glycemic load as a 12-ounce can of Coke. Rucker found that she felt sluggish if she didn’t eat a full meal alongside her oat milk latte, “the telltale signs of a possible blood sugar crash.” She is now weaning herself off of oat milk with a blend of macadamia and oat.
Rucker’s dream alternative, though, is an Australian soy milk called Bonsoy. She’s searching for a U.S. equivalent, something that “steams perfectly,” is “lightly sweet and velvety, with no bean flavor.” And it does all that with no added oils.
So why did we ever say goodbye to soy? Soy has been a staple of Asian diets for millennia. Its milk rose to mass popularity in North America in the 1980s, and by 2008 reached its peak market share of $1.2 billion in sales. Soybeans are full of protein, fiber, and minerals, as well as isoflavones and phytoestrogens, and early scientific studies showed exceptional health benefits, from cardiovascular wellness to cancer prevention. “Soy Boys,” a recent episode of the Maintenance Phase podcast, details the misogyny, anti-Asian racism, and sociopolitical bias that influenced the ill-informed campaign against the bean.
Our love-hate relationship with soy has been determined largely by media moods and industry fearmongering—much the same way that social media influencers guide trends, often with little or no data to back themselves up. Cue posts like this from masculinity mogul Joe Rogan, circa 2014, who quipped to his (now 19.1 million) followers:
There will come a day when androgynous men sanctioned by our robot overlords promote the pacifying benefits of estrogen-soaked soy-based meat substitutes, guiding us into our inevitable transition to emotionless, passionless electronic hybrid beings that reproduce through state sanctioned genetic engineering.
A viral 2019 op-ed in Tri-State Livestock News by cattle veterinarian Dr. Jim Stangel, about soy protein being the key ingredient of the Impossible Burger, inspired headlines like “IMPOSSIBLE BURGER MEAT HAS 18 MILLION TIMES MORE ESTROGEN THAN BEEF.” Stangel’s subsequent retraction and apology clarified not only that his estrogen math was flawed, but that he was not, in fact, part of a right-wing conservative think tank.
Where, then, should we go for purity and certainty of thought? Which alternative milk should we buy to save the world, and ourselves? Would we be better off without the chaotic miasma of ceaselessly iterating TikTok trends, or the culture-shifting powers of outraged Instagram influencers? Would we know more, and make better consumer choices, if we only listened to peer-reviewed scientific studies and industry-backed experts? Perhaps.
I hope one day to see soy on equal market footing with its Aryan alt milk counterpart, oat. I hope one day our brains learn to withstand the onslaught of social media dopamine addiction, to rebuild neural pathways of sovereign thought.
Until then, I’ll be doing what I’ve done since 2008: blending milk from hemp seeds and water at home, a personal strike I began to nurture my own sense of moral superiority and, ostensibly, avert landfill waste. Perhaps, though, I’m just doing what so many of us are—fruitlessly assuaging the guilt and privilege of too many choices. Scrolling for answers and absolution. In a bad mood about bourgeois milk.
SOME HOT LINKS
Come hang out.
Today (Saturday June 22. 2024) at 3pm, I’ll be co-hosting my friend Brent Love’s book launch at Barnes & Noble in Kahului, Maui, for his riveting coming out and coming-of-age memoir Leap. I’ll be signing some of my books, too!
To read.
, author of No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating, got down to brass tacks about soy milk a few weeks ago on Substack (her newsletter is a longtime fave).Swan Huntley, writer and illustrator/humorist, sent me a copy of You’re Grounded: An Anti-Self-Help Book to Calm You the Fuck Down, and—yes, please. Swan’s novel I Want You More (a romantic psychological thriller) also just came out, making these two a perfect pair for the nervous system sensitive.
To listen.
One of my favorite Peabody-nominated podcasting outfits, Scene on Radio (of “Seeing White” and “MEN” fame; from Duke University’s Kenan Institute of Ethics), has a new season launching later this week: On “Capitalism”. They’re reliably brilliant, and this season will be cohosted by business and economics reporter Ellen McGirt.
To watch.
I had a lot of fun watching Hannah Einbinder’s bisexual Jewish comedy special, “Everything Must Go”.
STAY SANE
Be honest: Do you dabble in oat milk? I’ll still love you.
xo,
Lily
Soy milk has so much protein! Old school boxed Eden Soy contains nothing but soybeans and water and has 12 grams of protein per cup 💕
I have no problem with soy milk, as such. I prefer not to use soy milk because I eat a lot of soy in other forms and I like to vary my food sources. I prefer oat milk because it is easy and cheap to make, is the most neutral of flavors and not gritty like every nut milk I have ever made (or consumed as a commercial product) aside from cashew. Which is expensive and not really something I like to use as a staple.
It is unfortunate the ways that internet fads contribute to moral smugness, as well unsustainable food fads that wreak havoc in so many ways, and how internet "influencing" occludes or misdirects the ways that capitalist commercial production and packaging alters the original food source and its nutritional profile. And that includes soy milk.