The Devil’s in the Dairy
Walk down any dairy aisle in the Western world and you enter a moral landscape. Butter is ‘pure’, yoghurts are ‘guilt-free’, and ice cream is ‘sinful’. The language seems playful at first, but the more you look, the more you start to see something else: the foundations of an uncomfortable structure where pleasure requires permission and appetite demands supervision. Somewhere between the probiotic promises and the pastel tubs, eating becomes a question of virtue.
Let’s step back to 1993, when a US Dannon advert claimed that its Light ’n Fit yoghurt was ‘proof that there is a God and she is a woman watching her figure’. In this moment, God was reimagined as a dieting woman – low-fat yoghurt, her divine provision – and the idea seemed to stick.
Food is not supposed to function this way. Even Christian scripture insists that eating carries no moral weight: ‘Let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink,’ writes Paul the Apostle. ‘We are no worse if we do not eat, and no better if we do.’ But contemporary food advertising reverses this position. Across the Western dairy aisle in particular, a borrowed religious vocabulary has reorganised appetite into a system of judgement, where foods are divided into virtuous and sinful, and eating becomes a daily act of self valuation.
But why dairy? Part of the answer lies in fat. From the late twentieth century onwards, saturated fat was cast as the dietary villain in Western public health media, implicated in heart disease and early death. Public health campaigns and diet books turned butter and cream into suspects, and advertising followed suit. If fat is dangerous, then abstention is, by extension, virtuous. The leap from ‘bad for you’ to ‘sinful’ is, after all, a short one.
Fat provides the premise, and purity provides the promise. Butter, in particular, is keen to cleanse itself; the Irish brand Kerrygold wraps its blocks in pastoral gold and crowns them, at times, with halos, the word ‘pure’ appearing with devotional insistence. Häagen-Dazs offers ice cream that is ‘pure […] with nothing to hide’. The message is clear: what enters your body carries moral weight and a pure product produces a pure consumer. Food becomes not just a signal but a vessel for sin and virtue, the ingestion of which – perhaps even merely the trolleying to the checkout – confers these moral traits.
The weekly food shop, in this light, takes on a faintly liturgical quality. The chilled aisle becomes a kind of chapel; the act of choosing, a subtle declaration of intent – and even of self. ‘Forgive me, yoghurt, for I have sinned,’ (some) women whisper confessionally as they place a zero percent fat pot of Fage into their baskets, having enjoyed a scoop of ice cream the night before.
And if purity is the promise, then heaven is the reward. Philadelphia cream cheese offers ‘a little taste of heaven’. Halo Top is even less coy: ‘we can take you there’ their adverts insist, printing the words in gold above a swirl of ice cream arranged like a mountain ascent. A staircase winds its way to the top, where a woman in white hovers, poised in a posture of worship. The suggestion is clear enough: eat this and celestial elevation will follow.
The word ‘there’ is doing expansive work. It may, perhaps, signal heaven, but also a smaller dress size, a better self – wherever ‘there’ is for you. Dairy stands in as mediator, the pasteurised becoming the pastor-ised, guiding the consumer towards transformation. But this promise comes with conditions. Perusing the frozen aisle, your attention is arrested by the gold-lidded tub; you virtuously place it in your trolley – it's going to take you to heaven, after all. Later, lifting the lid, you are met with a seal that commands: ‘STOP WHEN YOU HIT THE BOTTOM’. You may eat freely, Halo Top jokes, but you must also know when to stop. Freedom is granted, then carefully fenced.
This moral architecture does not address everyone equally. Its primary subject is the female body. The Dannon advert makes that explicit. God is a woman, and a woman ‘watching her figure’ at that. The joke depends on an old story: that women are governed by appetite and must therefore govern themselves – or be governed by others. In Christianity, sin enters the world through a woman who eats the forbidden fruit; a narrative that has long been used to frame female desire as unruly and in need of discipline. Dairy advertising drops the theology but it keeps the outline.
Many of these adverts are subtly – and sometimes unsubtly – feminised with cursive fonts, pastel palettes, and floral motifs. Even heaven, when visualised, tends to be populated by women: in Halo Top’s imagery, it is a woman who stands at the summit. When guilt is invoked, it is most often hers.
By contrast, adverts for dairy products aimed at men tend to sidestep morality altogether. Here, dairy is fuel as protein-packed yoghurts promise strength and butter becomes energy. In one television advert for Danish butter brand Lurpak, a voiceover urges viewers to say ‘yes to life.’ On screen, a woman declines food at a picnic – ‘No, I shouldn’t’, words as familiar to many women as ‘please’ and ‘sorry’ – while a man bites decisively into a pastry. The visual grammar is blunt. Women hesitate; men act. Men represent the body that has always consumed what it wants. There is no internal debate, no weighing up of pros and cons, no need for reform. Why would there be? They are not the ones being asked to atone.
This moral framework is gendered and so too are its permissions. What, then, are women allowed to eat? The answer seems to be: foods that deny themselves. ‘Guilt-free’ has become a supermarket staple; dairy-free brands push this idea further, presenting the absence of dairy as liberation from shame. But even dairy-rich products adopt the language of absolution. Low calorie ranges promise indulgence without consequence, pleasure without fall. The consumer is invited to eat, but only within carefully drawn lines.
When products cannot claim virtue, they embrace the opposite. Ice cream becomes ‘irresistible temptation’; butter urges us to ‘give in.’ This might appear to dismantle this symbolic structure – go on, it says, eat the real thing – but temptation only makes sense within a moral frame. To give in is still to transgress. The binary holds. Magnum understands this well, its global advertising leaning heavily on the language of temptation, often paired with imagery bordering on the erotic – pleasure heightened by its proximity to guilt. If Magnums are ‘for pleasure seekers’, then their audience is an emphatically postlapsarian one: already fallen, already open to temptation. The invitation is not to escape the moral system, but to revel briefly within it.
Even brands that present themselves as rebellious remain tethered to the same structure. To call something a ‘vice’, as New York ice cream shop Ice & Vice did, is to accept the existence of virtue. Within this structure, food is never just food: it is a moral declaration of who we are or who we are trying to be.
Part of its effectiveness lies in its lightness. Halos hover above tubs, devil tails wag jovially from straplines – as in a Yeo Valley print advert that reads, ‘Not naughty but nice’, the hook of the ‘g’ metamorphosing into a devilish appendage. The tone is playful, self-aware, even. But repetition turns play into pattern and over time, the question shifts from ‘Do I want this?’ to ‘What does wanting this say about me?’
Mid-century dairy advertising across the Anglophonic West tended to celebrate flavour, freshness, and abundance. In the decades immediately following wartime rationing and food scarcity, butter, cream and ice cream signified prosperity and pleasure: ‘Heavenly’ described quality rather than salvation, as in a 1950 advert for US brand Sealtest, where strawberry ice cream was the ‘smoothest eating this side of heaven’, while ‘pure’ referred simply to ingredients and freshness. But from the 1960s onwards, nutritional advice increasingly reframed saturated fat as a health risk, while advertising more broadly shifted towards selling identities as much as products. Dairy campaigns, and the language they relied upon, changed accordingly.
And recently, another shift has begun to reshape our supermarket aisles. Where low fat once moralised through absence, high protein and high fibre have now started to moralise through optimisation. The tone has changed, but the underlying structure has not. Eating is still being organised into a system of better and worse selves. Only now, virtue lies not in restraint but in efficiency. Food is merely fuel; it is appetite, a problem to be solved. If the low-fat era asked us to deny ourselves, the beckoning protein era asks us to ‘improve’ ourselves. In both cases, eating is pulled away from real pleasure and placed in service of an ideal. What is lost, in both architectures, is the possibility that food might simply be itself. Neither a tool nor a moral instrument: just butter, just yoghurt.
The devil, it turns out, was never really in the dairy: it was in the story Western advertising built around it.