The first post
It’s the summer of 2017. I’m standing in front of the drinks fridge in a corner store in Premantura, Croatia. We are popping in to grab a drink after a bike ride on the Kamenjak Peninsula. It’s hot out, and I am properly dusty. I intended to grab a juice or some other exotic thirst-quenching local beverage selection, but an orange bottle catches my eye in the milk section. Label says JAFFA. Jaffa flavored chocolate milk. Jaffas were a favorite of mine growing up in Aotearoa (the confectionery treat to be clear, not fucking Aucklanders), so while it’s not an optimal thirst-quenching beverage, I have to get this. I snapped a pic while walking out of the store, and uploaded it to Instagram. Over the next 8 years I posted another 158 chocolate milks to Instagram. Now, it’s time to leave.
The true origins
The Jaffa Tokoladno Mlijeko was the first chocolate milk I posted on Instagram, but that isn’t actually the chocolate milk origin story.
It’s spring of 2015, I’m in Tokyo, visiting long-time friend and occasional collaborator Niko Lansuizi. I feel like having a chocolate milk. Not a problem, obviously. This is Tokyo, you just bop down to 7/11 and grab one. Wait, they don’t have any? Ok no problem, skip on over to the Lawson’s further down the block, right? They… don’t have any? It turns out, for reasons that are still a complete mystery to me, that in Tokyo’s otherwise generally abundant konbini scene, chocolate milk in 2015 was not, in fact, a commonly available good.
This resulted in a multi-week quest, every konbini stop becoming an opportunity to further the hunt. Of course chocolate milks did turn up, but due to the mercurial nature of drink selections in Tokyo these would inevitably be some kind of special limited edition product and quickly disappear. I did find a decent almond-chocolate milk that was semi-reliably available in the assortment at some Lawson’s, that became my go-to during those weeks. Once I went back to the Netherlands, as I wasn’t content-brained at that point in time, the interest quickly died off. There’s way too much milk in this country, and contrary to popular belief I don’t actually need to be guzzling Chocomel at every opportunity. It wasn’t till that summer day in 2017 that the thirst reignited, and the posting began.
The content era
Over the following years, choccy-milk posting became my signature mode of engagement on social media. I stopped posting pics of work in progress, funny things I had seen, what I was up to. Instead of posed travel pics at landmarks you got chocolate milk. I choccy-milk-posted through relationships, through Covid, through a house fire. Chocolate milk became a personal brand. Hell, people even started complaining if I posted something that wasn’t chocolate milk. Fine with me. Choccy-milk posting was a way to indirectly participate in Instagram’s performative tropes. Every chocolate milk was a humblebrag. Choccy milk in strange lands tells you that I’m on the move, without telling you what I’m up to. They see me choccin’, they hatin’. I retreated from other spaces, quitting Twitter when it was acquired by the billionaire nazi failson who will never know his father’s love, but remaining on Instagram, the app for club-night announcements, genocide updates and chocolate milk posting.
In early 2025 I had enough. I exported my Insta archive and stopped posting. For the past year I’ve still had the app, but restricted to a three minute per day time limit. It’s exactly enough to spike your cortisol and remind you why you shouldn’t have looked in the first place. Alt-tabbing to internet forums already fried my attention span in the early 00’s so that’s a lost cause, but who wants to be dumping precious cognitive load into a toxic whirlpool of outrage, swirling in a technofascist ocean of surveillance capitalism, fueling unholy engines of delusion, exploitation and destruction while inflating the unimaginable, undeserved wealth of the most craven soulless husks on the planet in exchange for a paltry undernourishing dopamine ration. Do you? I’ll admit I haven’t extricated myself entirely just yet, but I for sure would prefer not to.
Mooving forward (sorry) and lessons learned
Now, about a year later, I do miss posting. As much of a joke or meme as they may have once been, the chocolate milks hold a significant albeit cryptic record of events in my life. Most of those milks have memories attached, circumstances, relationships, travels and troubles. They live here now, in my own archive, and I will keep adding to it. I’ve built a little toolchain that makes posting them not much more effort than it used to be on Instagram (a bit more, but not much). I’m currently backfilling unposted milks from the last year (follow the RSS feed for more chocolate milks), one day I might get around to implementing something similar for 140-character updates as well (shut up, it’s on a list). Anyway, you were here for chocolate milk lore. As parting wisdom, here’s some anecdata drawn from over a decade of sampling them;
- Oat-based milks are usually pretty decent, and handle being at room temperature quite well. Safest bet among the non-dairy alternatives and good for in the car.
- Cheap EXTRA PROTEIN milks are almost always awful. Avoid.
- Nut-based milks can be pretty/very good, but don’t handle room temperatures well at all. Chug immediately.
- Mint-flavored chocolate drinks have by far the most range, coming in at everything from S-tier to festering goblin vomit. Best option if you enjoy living dangerously.
- Don’t go anywhere near the Mars offerings. You should be boycotting them anyway. Or try the Bounty one if drinking shampoo sounds like a banger idea to you.
- Starbucks actually has good limited editions on occasion, but fuck them anyway, and again, BDS.
- Regional full-fat milk offerings are often very good. Never skip one when you encounter them in the wild.
