Making Memes for the Global “Oat Milk Élite”

In early 2020, Jonas Kooyman, a journalist from Amsterdam, started an Instagram account called @havermelkelite, Dutch for “Oat Milk Élite,” as a way to share his writing about local cultural trends. He had interviewed the author Elizabeth Currid-Halkett about her concept of the “aspirational class,” a demographic that uses nontraditional consumption habits to signal its identity, and he wanted a similar label to describe Amsterdam’s young urban professionals. At the same time, Kooyman noticed a trend at his local coffee shop in Hoofddorppleinbuurt, a gentrifying area just outside central Amsterdam. “Within a couple of months, maybe seventy or eighty per cent of the people before me in line—they would start ordering oat milk instead of regular milk,” Kooyman told me. The choice, he added, was a way to “project a certain image to the outside world”—a conscientious consumerism and a cosmopolitan good taste. (Kooyman also drinks oat milk, but only, he insists, because he is lactose intolerant.)