Basic B*tch

The ethical dilemma of oat milk

I think, on some level, I knew before he actually

said the words. I’d been here before, you see. I knew the signs. I knew the inauspiciousness of the empty supermarket shelves where Oatly Barista Edition oat milk cartons should be. I tried to remain calm when it wasn’t in the more niche health-food shops either: a sure portent of doom.

And it was with panic rising in my breast that I ordered my habitual oat-milk flat white at my favourite cafe; a hail Mary. But I wasn’t prepared for the visceral horror that consumed me when the barista told me they didn’t have any oat milk. Nowhere did; there was an international Oatly Barista Edition oat milk shortage. Again.

The barista leaned over the counter urgently. “People need to wake up. It’s this vegan consumerism that makes individuals feel better, but they’re still participating in an exploitative system. It’s a lie. You can’t ‘vote with your wallet’, it’s all the same to Them. This is how capitalism works. We need systemic change, not fucking oat milk!”

How could I tell him that my specific thirst was not for the revolution? That my craving had everything to do with the taste of an 8am last sip of milk at the bottom of the bowl when you’ve finished your Cheerios, and it’s 1999, and the world makes sense — and nothing to do with socialist leanings.

For a while, I was an oat evangelist. I was unbearable: I would strike up conversations in shops, cafes — and once with an alarmed mother with dairy-alternatives in her pram.

When people called to me, I would insist on crafting them a coffee and wouldn’t ask how they took it, because I knew that my way was better, and, like secretly grating broccoli into a child’s spag bol, it was my moral duty to forcibly improve them.

But no more. Stick with the semi-skimmed, guys. You wouldn’t like Oatly Barista Edition oat milk. It’s PC gone mad. And how do you milk an oat anyway — am I right?