Milk matters: the social imaginaries of plant milks in children’s diets

Cow’s milk has long occupied a privileged status in the dietary guidelines and social imaginaries of the Global North, especially regarding children’s health and development. Recently, the rise of plant-based milk has disrupted this dominance, generating debate and anxiety about its place in children’s diets. Through critical discourse analysis of government, industry, and advocacy materials from the United States and Switzerland—two historically “lactophile” nations—this paper examines how various actors construct and contest the meanings and values attached to cow’s and plant milks. We find similar discourses in both countries: a pro-cow’s-milk stance affirming cow’s milk as a nutritionally unique and essential food, and a pro-plant-milk position promoting plant milks as suitable alternatives to cow’s milk while emphasizing the taste and choice benefits of these milks, their place in culturally diverse diets, and suitability for children with milk allergies or lactose intolerance. Notably, we find these discourses are grounded in nutritionism, reducing debates to the quantity, quality and what we call “molecular harmony” of nutrients, and often centering cow’s milk as the point of comparison. However, these discourses obscure broader social inequalities related to race, class, and access: dietary guidelines and milk promotion tend to implicitly privilege White, healthy, and affluent children, rendering issues of affordability, cultural foodways, and lactose intolerance invisible. We conclude that, while plant milks seek to disrupt the status of cow’s milk as the “perfect food” for children, core social imaginaries about health, diet, and childhood remain rooted in exclusionary ideals.