“For the urban ‘oat milk elite’, an 8 euro loaf of bread is quite normal”
It is called the ‘oat milk elite’ (Havermelkelite in Dutch): a new urban class that eats sourdough bread, drinks orange wine, rides on an e-bike and gets coffee with vegetable (oat) milk outside the door every day. UvA alumnus and journalist Jonas Kooyman came up with the name for this elite group. Folia spoke to him about the obsessions of the elite, the search for identity, and the downsides of gentrification.
The 34-year-old Kooyman is a born-and-bred Amsterdammer. His mother comes from a poor immigrant family from Israel; his father was a first-generation student from the Achterhoek. Kooyman grew up in neighborhood Oud-Zuid, among the rich and famous. From a neighborhood with a greengrocer and tobacconist, he saw it change into a kind of Manhattan in which affluence and expats predominated. His fascination with how people live and consume seems to have originated there. He now writes weekly about the latest trends and status symbols that concern the oat milk elite/Havermelkelite (HME) . Since last spring, he started the HME podcast and wrote a book about these urbanites.
What exactly is the oat milk elite?
“As I define it, it consists of twenty- and thirty-somethings from the urban middle class. They are academically educated, working in knowledge professions and are concerned with lifestyle and consumption. This is the focus of their existence. For example, they own an e-bike, frequent restaurants that serve natural wine, eat sourdough bread, wear Salomon sneakers and – as the name suggests – drink their cappuccino with oat milk.”
How large is that group?
“In recent years, the number of higher-educated people in Amsterdam, and thus this group, has been increasing. Earlier, 18 percent of Amsterdam residents were academically educated; now it is about 31 percent. That is a gigantic increase. Before, in the nineties and zeroes, yuppies – young urban professionals – were a small group. Now they have a dominant position in city life and you see that almost all new activity in Amsterdam (restaurants, gyms, stores) is aimed at this group. But how big the oat milk elite actually is, I cannot answer that exactly.”
You also distinguish different groups within the oat milk elite.
“True, first of all there is the target class. By this I mean the poorer, creative, left-oriented oat milk elite. These people rent their homes, are mainly intellectually involved in culture and like to drink expensive cocktails in Amsterdam-Noord. Yet they are the more vulnerable group; they are often freelancers. Then you have the Henrys, the ‘high earners not rich yet’. They have a corporate profession and can buy a house. They vote more toward the middle than the super-left parties. Despite their high income, they are often broke at the end of the month. They participate in a city life full of hospitality, going to newest restaurants and seeing products as status symbols such as Dyson vacuum cleaners or Aesop soap.”
“In both groups we see a hypocritical contradiction: on the one hand, they want to do good for the world and radiate that, but at the same time they fail to do so. To give a cliché example: my phone is made of minerals from cobalt mines where people work under poor working conditions. One way or another, you are participating in a bad system somewhere.”
Jonas Kooyman completed his master’s degree in journalism at the University of Amsterdam in 2015 after which he started working as a freelance journalist. In 2018, he started working at newspaper NRC and quit his permanent job there at the end of 2023 to fully focus on his self-proclaimed elite club; the oat milk elite/Havermelkelite. Meanwhile, the UvA alumnus’ Instagram account with over 180 thousand followers is wildly popular and his paid newsletter with a whopping 19 thousand subscribers funds his own HME lifestyle.
July 2024 saw the release of the book De Havermelkelite at publisher Das Mag in which Kooyman holds up a mirror to himself and the yuppies of our time: the elite we all love to hate on, but to which the Randstad urbanite secretly belongs to, to a greater or lesser extent.
Do you recognize yourself in this?
“Yes! But with ambivalent feelings. I made an HME checklist and on most points I score. Do you frequent restaurants with natural wine? Yes. Stand in line for sourdough bread on weekends? Yes. Do you primarily read media like De Groene Amsterdammer, NRC or de Volkskrant? Yes. Do you know cities abroad better than the region in the Netherlands? Yes. Do you own a puffer jacket? From the Uniqlo!”
“In recent years I have migrated from the target class to the Henry’s. Not politically, but in terms of income. I am saving a lot, but at the same time I have been eating out and traveling more. A few years ago I was still that freelance journalist who really did struggle.”
In previous interviews, you indicate a love-hate relationship with the oat milk elite. Can you explain that?
“On the outside, it appears to be an attractive, tasteful lifestyle. It also caters to that from all sides. For example the obsession with sourdough breads. For several years now, you have seen the sourdough baking culture in Amsterdam become upcoming; hip bakeries are opening in old working-class neighborhoods selling cruffins – a combination of croissant and muffins – and sourdough breads. On the shelves are beautiful bottles of natural wine. At first glance, a fun, flavorful place, deep in craft and concerned with conscious living. But if you look a little more beneath the surface, the bakeries are often founded by people in the marketing industry or college graduates who have turned their lives around. Also people in line are almost exclusively people from a certain socioeconomic class, yuppies. And the breads cost an average of 7 to 8 euros. It can be intimidating to just step in there.”
“The city is changing to suit the needs of this dominant wealthy oat milk elite. You can ask yourself, is that a city you want to live in, where one group is very dominant and is slowly making everything unaffordable? Well, it is also very easy to blame this group for that. For years, municipal policies and developers have steered this city in that direction. Part of municipal policy, for example, was inspired by the work of sociologist Richard Florida, who argues that you have to make a city attractive to highly educated creative cosmopolitan people.”
Doesn’t €8 sourdough breads also tend toward craziness, toward exaggeration?
“Yes indeed. Every Sunday night, followers get to confess their most oat milk elite action to me, which I then share on Instagram. Hundreds of people send the most bizarre things: ‘We brought our own wine glasses to a cafe because the glasses there are not aesthetic enough,’ ‘Almost crying during ‘hug yourself’ at yoga due to lack of intimacy because of Zuidas job,’ or ‘Licked leftover MDMA off my finger, forgot I had to go to a performance review.’ To me, those excesses have an undercurrent of emptiness, overconsumption and decadence. It also shows kind of nihilism or ‘after us the deluge’ – the problem only comes when I am no longer here.”
Something else: many students come to this oat milk elite city. Do you have any tips for these students on how to stay theirselves in this and ease their search for identity and lifestyle?
“During my early twenties, I was searching and going from identity to identity. Looking back, I got a lot from literature, movies, and art. These things were always telling me what it meant to be human. I would absorb as much of this as I could. It can be fun to read or watch things with an Amsterdam twist, but also look beyond the borders. For example, I remember well how a novel could influence my worldview for months. Then I read something else again and that sent me in another direction.”
“At the same time, I want to emphasize that in this day and age, with algorithms, it is difficult to discover or hold onto your own tastes. As a result, like the oat milk elite, everyone consumes the same products, status symbols, and fashion. Buy vintage or from secondhand stores, instead of following yet another micro-trend from TikTok. That is cheaper, too. Live more offline and try to listen to your own voice in that.”
