Dairy

For most of my childhood, I was afraid of dairy. I drank milk three times a day because, unlike asparagus, you can't mash it around on your plate and make it look like you've had more than you really have. It's much more difficult to fake having drunk an entire glass of milk, so I didn't even try. I let my mother force it upon me.

It's been a slow progression, getting over my fear of dairy. I was just weirded out by it. I could sense, even without anyone telling me, that there is something inherently fishy about yogurt. I mean, you let it to go bad on purpose. Does that sound like something good? And then finding out about bacteria pretty much confirmed everything I had suspected. You leave bacteria in milk and out comes a foul tasting, almost chunky concoction to which you add fruit? HELL NO.

Yogurt and I have a better relationship now. Cheese was actually the first thing I warmed up to. I struggled with the fact that I was supposed to enjoy a food that was aged 12 years. Usually if a food product has been around for 12 years, it's made the refrigerator toxic. But then you charge $50 for the product and people eat it with crackers. No one but me seemed to realize the absurdity. Worst yet, people seemed to actually enjoy it. And not enjoy like how adults fake laugh at each other's jokes that were told not with the intent to be legitimately funny, but to show that they understand what humor is. It seemed like a genuine feeling. Then I had pizza, and suddenly everything was clear.

But one thing I will never reconcile myself to is cottage cheese. On the water polo bus back from games in high school, someone decided we should have a tub of cottage cheese. She would bring the tub by and eat cottage cheese from it with a spoon. I wanted to cry. It looks to me now like yogurt tasted to me as a child: vile and suspicious. That's right, I could taste when things were suspicious. I mean, just look at cottage cheese:

Why would you eat that? I tried to once, but the texture was just too much.

When I learned that lactose-intolerant people are actually the "normal" ones, and the rest of us are freaks for being able to process cow milk, I was elated. There's legitimate proof that dairy is wrong. Osteoporosis be damned. There is an important lesson in all this that you may have missed: dairy could not fool me because I am equipped with magical powers.

technorati tags:cottage, cheese, dairy, yogurt, osteoporosis