*Skip the last couple of lines of the first paragraph if you get queasy easily.
A few weeks ago my brother told me he wasn't going to eat/ drink/ ingest milk anymore.
He'd done some research, you see, and had found out that cows are treated horribly, and that they're made to lactate for years after they'd given birth, and that sometimes the pressure of the constant milking causes the cows to bleed and secrete pus, and that this gets into the milk that we end up eat/drinking.
When I said to him, "But they heat it up and dry it and it evaporates and so both evaporated and powdered milk(s) are hygienic," he said, "Yea, but it's still powdered blood and pus."
For days I couldn't get that picture out of my mind: a cocktail of red and yellow swirling around in a bowl of cream.
So when I had my Crunchy Nut cravings, I couldn't indulge. I was glad to have an excuse to not sit with a box of cereal and create an endless bowl that would lead me to such bloatedness, it'd take me half a day to recover. But I missed my gross, over-eating days, you know? They were really quite comforting.
Anyway so I'd been healthy for, like, two months. My body didn't know what to do with itself and so it started craving gluten. If you dig into the archives (for all of five minutes) there'll be a post somewhere in there alluding to my gluten intolerance (in compensation for which I'd begun to overindulge on dairy and sugar), but as they say, in the absence of one vice...
No one says that.
But in the absence of one vice, white flour became my best friend.
But this isn't about that. This is about how I broke down today and figured, if I could eat bread (made with milk) and biscuits (made with milk) and cake (made with milk) and even butter, and cheese. Why were they less disgusting than just plain milk? And I walked into my friendly neighbourhood supermarket to purchase a box of Crunchy Nut flakes.
(While at the supermarket I remembered the real reason I hadn't indulged in gross over-cerealing was not, in fact, primarily because of the milk, but because the last box of Crunchy Nut I had purchased from here had been stale. I'd returned it and had not been refunded and I lived in dread of buying another stale and unrefundable box, especially since we're in a recession and Nigerians have been coming up with really disgusting ways of bypassing health and safety rules in order to get their stale, rotten and polluted wares off their shelves.)
Well I decided to take a chance on them. What is community without a little trust, hmm? I took a risk to better the pockets of my neighbour even though it cost me my hard earned, but highly devalued naira. And I went home. And I poured myself a bowl. And it was deliciously crunchy. And I overate. But I suddenly started tasting something strange which was definitely in my head and I didn't enjoy pigging out at all, and so it was indeed a waste of cows-blood-and-pus. (If you skipped the first paragraph, you should probably have skipped that last one, too.)
Do you know! I still haven't talked about the actual throwback I'd remembered, which was that time when I was maybe thirteen, and my darling mother had hidden powdered milk in her high-up cupboard, and my bros and I broke in, and we found this sachet of Cowbell milk, the ones that are so old there are no pictures of them on the internet to prove they ever existed, and we opened it with relish, and inside, the powder was brown and smelled of maggi, and we checked the expiry date, and it had been in her cupboard for years after the expiry date, to the point where it had turned into actual flipping maggi.
A few weeks ago my brother told me he wasn't going to eat/ drink/ ingest milk anymore.
He'd done some research, you see, and had found out that cows are treated horribly, and that they're made to lactate for years after they'd given birth, and that sometimes the pressure of the constant milking causes the cows to bleed and secrete pus, and that this gets into the milk that we end up eat/drinking.
When I said to him, "But they heat it up and dry it and it evaporates and so both evaporated and powdered milk(s) are hygienic," he said, "Yea, but it's still powdered blood and pus."
For days I couldn't get that picture out of my mind: a cocktail of red and yellow swirling around in a bowl of cream.
So when I had my Crunchy Nut cravings, I couldn't indulge. I was glad to have an excuse to not sit with a box of cereal and create an endless bowl that would lead me to such bloatedness, it'd take me half a day to recover. But I missed my gross, over-eating days, you know? They were really quite comforting.
Anyway so I'd been healthy for, like, two months. My body didn't know what to do with itself and so it started craving gluten. If you dig into the archives (for all of five minutes) there'll be a post somewhere in there alluding to my gluten intolerance (in compensation for which I'd begun to overindulge on dairy and sugar), but as they say, in the absence of one vice...
No one says that.
But in the absence of one vice, white flour became my best friend.
But this isn't about that. This is about how I broke down today and figured, if I could eat bread (made with milk) and biscuits (made with milk) and cake (made with milk) and even butter, and cheese. Why were they less disgusting than just plain milk? And I walked into my friendly neighbourhood supermarket to purchase a box of Crunchy Nut flakes.
(While at the supermarket I remembered the real reason I hadn't indulged in gross over-cerealing was not, in fact, primarily because of the milk, but because the last box of Crunchy Nut I had purchased from here had been stale. I'd returned it and had not been refunded and I lived in dread of buying another stale and unrefundable box, especially since we're in a recession and Nigerians have been coming up with really disgusting ways of bypassing health and safety rules in order to get their stale, rotten and polluted wares off their shelves.)
Well I decided to take a chance on them. What is community without a little trust, hmm? I took a risk to better the pockets of my neighbour even though it cost me my hard earned, but highly devalued naira. And I went home. And I poured myself a bowl. And it was deliciously crunchy. And I overate. But I suddenly started tasting something strange which was definitely in my head and I didn't enjoy pigging out at all, and so it was indeed a waste of cows-blood-and-pus. (If you skipped the first paragraph, you should probably have skipped that last one, too.)
Do you know! I still haven't talked about the actual throwback I'd remembered, which was that time when I was maybe thirteen, and my darling mother had hidden powdered milk in her high-up cupboard, and my bros and I broke in, and we found this sachet of Cowbell milk, the ones that are so old there are no pictures of them on the internet to prove they ever existed, and we opened it with relish, and inside, the powder was brown and smelled of maggi, and we checked the expiry date, and it had been in her cupboard for years after the expiry date, to the point where it had turned into actual flipping maggi.
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