How milk has become a fraught political and economic project

Milk is one of the most familiar things in the world – comforting, wholesome, ordinary. But beneath this common perception lies something far more complicated.

Examining the UK and Kenya, our project Milking It! explores the deep cultural, historical and emotional attachments to milk, and how these collide with the realities of industrialised production, environmental pressure and its colonial past.

We’ve spoken with dairy farmers caught between economic survival and public expectation, traced milk’s heritage through museum collections and archives, and listened to personal stories where milk evokes intimacy, memory and loss.

We’ve found that milk is never just milk. It’s saturated with meaning, emotion and contradiction. People can feel intensely about it: it stirs strong responses,