The Year Cow Milk Won — or Did It?

In 2024, we watched tradwives milk cows, bought milk perfumes, and generally thought way too much about raw milk

Cow milk’s resurgence has been building for years. In 2021, Emily Sundberg wrote for Grub Street that — at least anecdotally — whole milk was back, with public sentiment on plant-based milk starting to curdle at coffee shops and online, not unlike almond milk in hot coffee. Sundberg referenced a tweet: “Hot girls are ditching the alternatives and are going back to basics.”

Though a 2023 Purdue University analysis found that sales of dairy milk have, in fact, decreased between 2018 and 2022, at least on a vibes level, cow milk has seen a wave of new champions.

This year, “why I went back to whole milk” videos made the rounds. So did videos of “milk mukbangs,” in which the creator Peggy Xu scooped the thick cream top from bottles of Straus Creamery milk, causing a surge in sales for the longstanding California dairy. In an episode of the hugely popular Subway Takes video series, comedian Danish Maqbool claimed that “America has gotten soft ever since we stopped drinking whole milk.” On TikTok, that clip now has over 8 million views and 1.3 million likes, with commenters co-signing things like: “He is actually speaking facts,” and “Organic Whole Milk is the new wave.”

Some of the renewed interest in cow milk seems fueled by growing fears around ultra-processed food, which has been a major talking point this year. Cow milk is natural, its fans claim, unlike non-dairy milks with their oils and additives. The rise of raw milk took this distrust of food-processing and the federal government to the next level, despite the fact that bird flu has recently been detected in raw milk, causing California to declare a state of emergency.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s ascension as President Trump’s pick for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services only emboldened raw-milk drinkers, with Kennedy citing raw milk as one of several things being aggressively suppressed in the FDA’s “war on public health.”

Dairy milk has become a kind of cultural flag, especially among conservatives. That Ballerina Farm’s Hannah Neeleman — who is perhaps the most prominent face of the current tradwife moment — had such a successful year fits seamlessly into this. Though the video in question was uploaded in 2022, one of the enduring images of Neeleman is of her making mozzarella cheese from scratch, using raw milk from her own farm, with her children — she has eight — audible in the background. Through milk, farming, and family, Neeleman has offered a conservative fantasy of American life that’s resonant in a society that’s shifting toward the right.

For trad-leaning types who post on X about “Western civilization,” the tradwife, whose feminine aesthetics often channel milkmaids, continued to represent the type of culture that they see as in need of defending. Consider that one well-known trad influencer goes by the name “Gwen the Milkmaid”: A former OnlyFans model, she now touts “faith, femininity, [and] holistic health” and shills “grass-fed tallow skincare.” (It’s been a big year for cows, as a whole: Tallow, too, has had a moment recently and is poised to rise further.) Continuing this connection between milk and femininity, milk also made up one of the biggest women’s fragrance trends of the year.

Naturally, this culminated in the year’s final gasp of milk-adjacent discourse when the conservative women’s magazine Evie released its “raw milkmaid dress” last week. The dress’s description reads: “Designed in the French countryside and inspired by the hardworking dairymaids of 17th-century Europe, The Raw Milkmaid Dress is handmade from luxurious organic cotton and 100% feminine energy.” It’s also not exactly modest, which highlights the fact that for all milk’s ties to family, tradition, and purity, the whole milkmaid thing seems to be at least a little tied to sexual fantasy too. Of course, academics have argued that, especially in Western society, milk is a symbol of female sexuality and has thus become “sexy” itself.

And with that we can end on what seems to be milk’s last big, sexy moment for the year: the forthcoming movie Babygirl, out in theaters on Christmas. Babygirl centers on a CEO, played by Nicole Kidman, who’s struggling with her own desirability and begins to explore the submissive fantasies she’s hidden her whole life after meeting one of her company’s new interns.

At one point, as part of this new dynamic, she publicly chugs a big glass of milk, so thick and white it’s unmistakably meant to be dairy. Though the production eventually switched to using dyed water, shooting the scene involved drinking “huge amounts of milk,” Kidman said in an interview. The hot girls, it seems, were the canary in the coal mine.