Last week, we reported on a new coffee shop “hack” making waves on TikTok whereby customers would purchase a double espresso from a cafe to add to mason jars full of oat milk and ice they brought from home, essentially cutting the cost of their iced latte in half. Something certainly felt off about the workaround but we couldn’t quite put our finger on it, though many of the ways it could go sideways were crystal clear. And so we shared the story on Instagram to take reactions from the people, and to use the visual platform for its primary goal: sharing silly photoshopped images of cows and spokesbeans visiting coffee shops together. (See below.)
As expected, we received a host of bizarre tales of wild guest behavior vis a vis milk. But what was entirely unexpected was the sheer volume of stories with the same throughline: breast milk.
Apparently there are…people, out there, in the world…who bring breast milk into the cafe setting and then request that their barista steam it. There’s also customers asking for baristas to steam and serve their own breast milk.
Evidently this has gone on for years, even decades, in the Wild Wild West that is the public coffee shop. It’s almost surely a form of public kink, and making baristas participate in said kink is wildly problematic in nearly every possible derivation of circumstance. It’s also at least certainly to some degree apocryphal—a thing you heard from someone who heard about it, who maybe read about it on some long-lost blog (remember blogs?) but didn’t actually experience first hand.
Let us say unequivocally that the number one conversation that should be had on this topic is public breast feeding rights for moms, paid leave, lactation support particularly in public spaces (like the airport, yes, but also the cafe), TSA allowing moms to travel with breast milk, and not making it gross and creepy while centering the male gaze—because certainly nearly all of this bad breast milk behavior in the cafe space is coming from men.
That said, and said firmly, what in a million fucks is happening here? Why are people doing this at cafes? Are people *really* doing this at cafes or is it primarily an urban legend? To restate: we published a story about a person bringing milk into a cafe to save a couple of bucks, and then were floored by the volume of comments on social media from readers claiming that this happens all the time with human breast milk.
So to make some sort of sense out of this, we are once again turning to you, the people. We want to hear your very real coffee-and-breast-milk related stories from behind the bar. We’re trying to understand how often this sort of thing happens, and we’re looking for first-person experiences, IE, stuff that actually happened to you as a barista or something you personally witnessed in a cafe—no friends of friends or something you think you remember reading about on Tumblr in 2007. Real stuff that actually happened only, please.
Use the form below to submit your stories. We’ll compile the responses and keep you abreast of our findings.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
