A brief history of milk.

Some historians stray from their lane and theorize that people began drinking milk in prehistoric times. I don’t know about all that, but I do know that milk consumption was happening on some level a long time ago in a place far away.

When we (meaning humans) learned how to domesticate animals, our milk consumption went way up. There’s a good chance that this happened before our bodies could actually handle it. A lot of people probably lived uncomfortable lives back then because they couldn’t stay away from the creamy dairy goodness even though it made them feel like their guts were full of marbles. I guess it’s appropriate to pause in honor of our great great great (etc etc) grandparents for risking their lives choking down warm, unpasteurized, gut-busting milk so that I can now sit comfortably on my couch with a pint of Ben and Jerry’s…

Thank god(s) for Milk.

I assume that humanity’s relationship with milk grew a lot stronger with the development of lactose tolerance. Despite this improvement, there isn’t really a dedicated god/goddess of dairy. Some sources point to the agricultural associations of the Greek goddess, Demeter, and the Roman goddess, Juno, as ties to dairy. Actually, when I say “some sources,” I mean ChatGPT. And when I say “points to,” I mean it flat out says that these two are the goddesses of dairy. This is in defiance to the rest of the internet. In fact, when it comes to dairy gods, the best info I could find was through Bing’s AI-powered search. I grabbed a screenshot…

The image is cropped, but you get the idea. If you absolutely must worship at the altar of a dairy god, start with Lacto, Cheddaro, or Butyro. I’m going to ignore Lactans/Lactumus because it sure seems like he’s more of a crop guy than a true milk deity.

Until the industrial age, milk carried on pretty much in the same way as it always had. Just good, honest, hard-working people getting milk mustaches and food poisoning from spoiled milk. Then came glass bottles, pasteurization, refrigerators, and that sly dog the milkman. Now that there was money to be made, modern dairy farming was soon to follow. With all of their automated milking machines, those dairy farmers can just kick back and watch the money roll in. I mean, the job practically does itself now.

This all brings me back to the bottle I found along the road during a nice, hot trashy run.

Up to this point, I’ve stuck to the facts, but I’d like to speculate a bit about how this bottle ended up alongside the road rather than in an appropriate trash receptacle. Who would do something like this? What kind of societal breakdown leads to this behavior?

I don’t think this was done by a truly bad people. Anyone who drinks milk in the car doesn’t necessarily strike me as  interesting in that way. Don’t get me wrong, I prefer them to people who drink Busch Peach Beer in the car, but they don’t seem like villains…

Let me tell you why this is the work of regular people.

This milk is listed as having two 150 calorie servings. Yet the whole bottle has 310 calories. There are 10 unaccounted for calories in this bottle. This may be why the bottle was tossed with a bit of milk leftover. The perps (I’m confident this was a two-person job) each consumed their 150 calories and decided against pursuing the last 10 cals, even though it’s self-proclaimed “High in calcium”, “Protein packed”, and “Quality checked.” Lacking a solution for the remainder (they couldn’t just leave it to spoil in the hot car), they spent some moral capital by tossing the bottle out the window for me to find at a later date. These aren’t monsters, they’re just regular people who were caught up in the machinations of a dairy industry that forces difficult decisions by overfilling bottles by ten calories.

That’s my theory, anyway.