Gen Z has gone full-fat – let me nudge them further down the path to decency
Frightful news from Waitrose. Apparently the oldies, shifting slowly down the dairy aisles to get their mitts on some good old-fashioned full-fat milk, are being elbowed out of the way by the young.
The Telegraph, investigating the matter last week, dispatched a reporter to a branch. There she found a despondent elderly gent looking forlornly at an empty shelf. “They buy it as soon as it comes in,” he said, before displaying some quite extraordinary modern media insight. “They’ve found out about it on TikTok, that video thing,” he added.
Indeed the stats back up his (slightly stooped) hunch. Sales of whole milk are up 2 per cent year on year, which represents millions of litres of milk, and is in line with a similar trend of younger people, reported by Waitrose, of switching from low-fat to full-fat dairy products in 2023.
The great persuader (which is a better term than influencer, by the way) is apparently one Bobby Parrish, who calls himself The Grocery Guy and appears on TikTok (@bobbyparrish), and who has been preaching that “if you’re buying fat-free milk you are doing yourself an injustice, because if it’s good quality dairy what lives in the fat? Omega-3 fatty acids.” And Gen Zs apparently like Omega 3, quite why I’m unsure, but maybe it’s because they think it makes them more irritating. After all, Omega 3 helps the cells in one’s body function. And if you’re functioning you can make a better fist at being annoying.
But, apart from the downsides of denying old people their vitamins, the news that Gen Zs are lapping up full-fat milk is good. It’s promising. It shows that they are on a trajectory to common sense, a pathway even, as the magnificent Holly Valance recently reminded us, from left to right. As she put it: “Everyone starts off as a Leftie and then wakes up at some point… and realises what crap ideas they all are. And then you go to the Right.”
So perhaps the first step in this vital journey is a sip of full-fat milk. Further encouragement, by the way, coming this week from Cody Rigsby, Peloton instructor and author of OXOX, Cody: An Opinionated Homosexual’s Guide to Self-Love, who revealed, mid cycle session, that he had switched to full-fat milk in his lattes.
So it’s a few less things to have to put in your fridge when the Gen Zs come for the weekend: no more cartons of oat milk, for example. But do make sure you have some kimchi in there. Gen Zs love their fermented cabbage and you only need to buy a little pot once and it can sit happily at the back of the fridge, untouched by most mortals and just gently fermenting between Gen Z visits.
But now they’re on a journey to normality, perhaps I can hurry things up and suggest some other things they might like to sip, lap up and embrace. First of all, how about a drink, an alcoholic one. Gen Zs are showing worrying tendencies of drinking less alcohol than previous generations but they are using more cannabis; the latter being their ideal drug of choice as it encourages selfishness, idleness, lack of concentration and entitlement. So I say, bin the Rizlas and have a nice glass of white burgundy. A drink which, in my experience, brings on a sense of gentle bonhomie, agreeable politesse, sensible ambition and if you drink a bottle, unlike the effects of cannabis, actually encourages you to do the washing up.
Next: read some decent novels. (In fact I would suggest they come off TikTok to give themselves time to read, but if they did that they might miss out on the dairy advice and thus the full-fat tipping point to a life of usefulness.) English fiction is a good place to start and a diet of PG Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh has no downsides.
Then, in between reading, perhaps they might consider writing thank you letters (even now for Christmas presents, it’s never too late). And by which I mean actually writing a letter – that’s pen upon paper – not just slinging out a WhatsApp, which not only doesn’t count but given the obtuse laziness of the exercise, it’s actually an insult. They might as well just text: [Emoji of a gift] “Whatever”.
Next up: how about working five days a week? You know, as in a job, where, as with jobs, you do them during the week, that’s Monday to Friday, before the weekend comes (and not before 5.30pm on a Friday). And in the office, their office, not your office; halfway between your bed and the chest of drawers, on the floor in your pyjamas, laptop on your knees.
And in this job, a first or maybe second, at the start of your brilliant career, why not dedicate yourself to the task, in the spirit that you are the privileged one to work there, not the other way around. So you work all hours, you’re there when they need you and even when they don’t and when your boyfriend chucks you it’s not a mental health crisis that means you can pull a sickie.
And a few other quick ones: at home turn down the heating and put on a jumper, don’t even look at your phone if it buzzes during mealtimes, buy actual newspapers and magazines (proven as better for the brain), take an interest in the news and not just the stuff that occupies your tiny territory of self-interest. Oh, and vote Conservative. Too soon for that? Well, it was worth a try. And you’ll be voting Tory next time anyway when you discover what shambles will result from an administration that rules by indecision, petty class war, short term trendy populism and caves into union demands for high taxation and high public spending.
After which feverish listing I need a long, cool glass of milk. If the Gen Zs have been good enough to leave me some.
