Milk: A Eulogy

I was told, many years ago, that milk would make me ill. I choose to see this as a challenge, and in the intervening decades I have treated every saucer as a seminar in consequences. Milk is the great unreliable narrator of the pantry: thick with promise, thin on follow through, and followed in my case by a long evening in the bathroom.

The new oat milk at the Grain and Whisker deli, $6.40 a carton, is a different proposition entirely. It tastes like a glass of porridge that has forgiven you. I drank it in one sitting and looked into the middle distance. Is it milk? It is not. Is it better than milk? I will say only that I have written my will, and that it contains a clause about oats.