“Handmaid’s Tale Milk Train.” I typed the words into the search engine after pausing the episode I was currently watching. ‘It can’t be unintentional’, I thought. Two women who had been raped, brutalized, exploited, and then finally had their children taken away from them, had found themselves during an escape attempt, floating in a big tank of milk on a train out of Gilead. I wanted confirmation that I wasn’t the only one to see the symbolism. June and Janine wading through the precious milk of other females who have been similarly mistreated. But seemingly, I was the only one. The articles I found included ‘Questions Handmaid’s Tale Fans Have About The Milk Train’. But these questions didn’t ask anything more significant than ‘Did they come out of the tanker all sticky?’ and ‘Did it make their skin incredibly soft?’
I’m vegan and I’m a breastfeeding mother. I was vegan before I had my baby because I couldn’t stand the thought of dairy cows suffering just so I could enjoy products made from their milk. And because I understood that their milk wasn’t mine to take. But at that point this was more of an idea, or a concept. Now that I have my own little nursling, I understand just how precious every drop of that milk is. And the heartache that would come from being separated from my nursing baby. So of course I would see the symbolism of that white liquid the handmaids found themselves floating in.
But most people don’t appreciate just how precious milk is. Instead, it’s seen as a commodity – mindlessly consumed and wasted. The sheer volume of milk in that giant container also spoke to me of the need and greed of human beings, taking what we want, when we want, without a thought as to where our food comes from, or the consequences of our consumption. Somewhat appropriately, this episode was broadcast in a week when the National Food Strategy was published, an independent review of our national food system. Unsurprisingly, the report found that the way we produce food is a major cause of environmental problems, and offered the shocking statistic that the global mass of farmed animals is 22 times heavier that all wild animals combined. The report also described how dairy farming is responsible for 28% of ammonia emissions, as well as being a major source of water pollution. It also makes it very clear that a vegan diet has a much smaller carbon footprint than any other diet. And none of these arguments for ditching the dairy even start to consider the miserable life of a dairy cow; even without anthropomorphizing these creatures, it would be fair to say that a life of repeated insemination, separation from your newborn, mechanical milking and then culling at less than a quarter of your natural lifespan is a terrible existence.
But the Handmaid’s story tells us not only about what a world without feminism and women’s rights might look like; as well as as taking us back to a society in which slavery is no longer in past, it also warns about the consequences of the self-entitlement of the human race. The situation of the eponymous Handmaid and her associates has arisen because of the belief that those who who are in a privileged position to employ a handmaid are entitled to children and a family. But despite nature having dictated otherwise for the population of Gilead and the rest of this fictional version of earth, they create the world they want, taking what isn’t theirs, with not a care for those they hurt. But when we consider modern food production and factory farming, that’s not so different from the real world, is it?
Perhaps, as my Google search suggests, there is no symbolism in this particular episode of A Handmaid’s Tale. Maybe I just saw a connection because my vegan, maternal brain took me there. But in a week where plant based diets are firmly back in mainstream conversation, it’s a good time to remind us all of the part we play in our wider community. Much like the ‘good guys’ of Gilead who didn’t design the hierarchical social system, and claim to disagree with but clearly benefit from it, if you’re not changing your habits, thinking about your place in this world and speaking up against what’s wrong, you’re complicit. Even without the drama of Gilead and its totalitarianism, complicity could mean the downfall of the human race, destruction of the earth, and the mindless killing and mistreatment of millions of sentient beings. For the many vegans who’ve already made the connection, maybe we’ve already reached our dystopia.