Milking Milk: An Interview with Megan Milks
by Myriam Gurba
On the day I went dairy sober, Megan Milks’s newest book, Mega Milk: Essays on Family, Fluidity, Whiteness and Cows (Feminist Press 2026) arrived in my mailbox. What impeccable timing. Because Mega Milk examines foods that are now taboo for me, I approached each essay as a conceptual replacement for delicious no-no’s, delicacies like tres leches cake, ice cream, and butter. While I no longer eat cheeses, I do ingest Milks’s theses. Written with neurodivergent flair and savvy, Mega Milk invites readers to think slowly, weirdly, intimately, and collectively.
Milks grew up in Chesterfield, Virginia, twenty miles south of a cigarette factory owned by Philip Morris—the conglomerate that bought Kraft, the company synonymous with those lurid yellow squares that look like cheese. The book opens in their childhood home, in a kitchen overrun by cattle. Their mom established this room’s “moo-tif” during a shopping trip; a decorative dish featuring a cow caught Mrs. Milks’s eye, she brought it home to display in the family kitchen, and soon the matriarch had “amassed a whole herd.” That final word functions as Mega Milk’s most vital noun and verb. Milks herds words, ideas, memories, dreams, facts, and fictions onto the page, making sure that none stray. Milks herds their readers, too, keeping us close to them and to each other.
As I turned the pages of Mega Milk, my feet became hooves. This metamorphosis allowed me to become part of the author’s intellectual herd. When I joined them as a conversation partner during the California leg of their Mega Milk tour, I so enjoyed our discussion that I kept it going through email.
Here is our lightly edited correspondence.
Myriam Gurba: In Mega Milk, you write, “It started as a joke to myself. What if I wrote a book about… milk?” Most intellectuals wouldn’t make an admission like that. Given its absurd origins, would you characterize Mega Milk as a work of contrarianism?
Megan Milks: I guess there’s some contrarianism around my consumption of animal products: One might expect the writer of a book about milk to ultimately abstain from dairy (and beef) products, but in fact I consumed more of both while writing it, out of respect for all the labor (both cattle and human) and resources that has gone into them. Is that contrarian?
Myriam Gurba: As a fellow writer of personal essay, I’d like to reexamine the complaints made about our form. Can a cow navel gaze? Can the more-than-human (plants, animals, sky, soil, water) also be accused of self-centeredness?
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