Got Milk? You Could Be a Colonizer

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In case you need something else about which not to care, the Olympics will be getting underway soon. I mention the Olympics because ideally they serve as an opportunity for people of different nations to come together in the spirit of friendly competition and realize that we have more in common than we may know (*BIG SMILE!*).

I use the Olympics as a metaphor since no one (outside of NBC employees and a handful of mass-media consumers) gives a tin you-know-what about the Summer Games. Honestly, the last time I cared about the Olympics was in 1976, when Franz Klammer took the gold medal in the downhill. And that was only because I wanted to grow up to be Franz Klammer. In the era of electronic communications, we don’t need the Olympics to highlight our similarities. It is all too obvious that there are just as many agendized and clueless politicians, academics, and activists across the pond as there are here in the good old U.S. of A. 

For today’s example, we head to England, which seems to be doing its level best to augur straight into the ground and leave a smoking crater in place of what used to be a country. 

The Daily Mail notes that a new project is in the offing. It will be headed by Dr. Johanna Zetterstrom-Sharp, who is a University College London associate professor at the Institute of Archaeology. It will be based at the History of Science Museum in Oxford. The name of this study? “Milking it: colonialism, heritage & everyday engagement with dairy.”

Yes, it is every bit as ridiculous as it sounds. The museum released a statement regarding the scope of this *ahem* research:

By focusing on communities intersecting industry, aid, and government regulation, the project aims to centre on heritage as a vital framework for understanding how colonial legacies influence contemporary issues and affect people’s lives.

 Through milk diaries, archival research, and participatory podcasting, it will investigate historical engagement with milk, building networks with consumers and producers in Britain and Kenya.

 The project will question both the imagined and real aspects of milk, revealing the intimate and political nature of this everyday substance.

I didn’t even know there were such things as “milk diaries.” 

The Mail said that in the past, Zetterstrom-Sharp has opined that milk is a Northern European obsession that has been imposed on the rest of the world. The good doctor also contends that since many adults outside of Europe and North America are lactose intolerant, the assumption that milk is good for one’s diet is racist. I confess to never having read any of Zetterstrom-Sharp’s papers, but I assume her premise must be something along the lines of the following:

Milk is white.

White supremacists are also white.

Therefore, milk is racist.

The project is being funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, which gets its money from the government’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. This means that the punchline is that the taxpayers of Britain will be the ones footing the bill for this folderol.

Zetterstrom-Sharp is either one of those leftist academics who could find evidence of racism in an empty goldfish bowl or a leftist academic who sees the chance to get her hands on government money. Or possibly both. The characteristics seem to go hand-in-hand. There’s no shortage of them here, and in a rather twisted way, it’s nice to know that kind of naked avarice is something that is shared across the globe. 

What do you know? It is a small world after all!