OK, I’m calling it: we have reached peak milk. First we had soy milk, then people started milking almonds, then coconuts, and hemp had a moment, then oat milk became the plant-based milk of choice. Now, according to Waitrose’s annual food and drink report, “it is the turn of the potato.” The supermarket chain is going to start stocking a Swedish brand of potato milk called Dug next year.
How exactly does one milk a potato? Do you take the baby potatoes away from their mothers? Do you squeeze the spuds really hard? No, according to Dug, the drink is “a patented emulsion of potatoes and rapeseed oil developed by Professor Eva Tornberg at Lund University in Sweden”. Yum?
Potatoes may be hot now, but the emulsified spud people shouldn’t get complacent. The milk market is fiercely competitive. Any minute now, camel milk might become the hipster alt-milk beverage of choice. And, you never know, old-fashioned cow’s milk could have a comeback: in August, New York Magazine caused quite a stir with the claim that “hot girls” were ditching alternative milks and going back to the full-fat, traditional stuff. Still, it’s going to take more than hot girls to save dairy. One in three Britons drink plant-based milk, according to a recent Mintel report. Alt-milks are very much mainstream now.
Big dairy is obviously less thrilled by this and has been working overtime trying to restrict what “milk” means. Plant-based milks, after all, would be rather less appetising if they had to be known as “nut juice” or “grain water”. Last year, the dairy industry tried (and failed) to get a “dairy purity” law passed in Virginia that would define milk as “the lacteal secretion … obtained by the complete milking of a healthy hooved mammal”. This was obviously udderly mad. Still, if you’re a woman who has ever breastfed an infant you may want to check yourself for hooves …
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
