First Glance
A consistent source of entertainment for me is seeing what videos YouTube decides to slap on my homepage. I do my best to lock down my data online and preventing Google from keeping my search history or any of my cookies has completely bamboozled YouTube’s already shitty algorithm. Alongside off-the-wall recommendations like “Doctor Mike” reacting to people’s reactions of his own videos, compilations of Zendaya and Tom Holland being cute together, and full episodes of Kitchen Nightmares, a lot of the videos that end up in my feed have to do with milk.
Double Take
Some examples of video titles that have flashed across my screen: “Just Need Chocolate And Milk Make This Delicious Dessert,” “No cooking only one cup milk dessert recipe,” “Have Milk at home? Make this Easy and Delicious dessert without flour! No oven,” and “How to turn milk into a sweet and chewy snack in three minutes.” The clickbait titles of these videos imply that without going to the grocery store to buy specific things or turning on a single appliance, milk can turn into some kind of magical tasty dessert.
It’s fairly obvious that these recipes aren’t as easy and magical as you would think. Take the “No cooking only one cup milk dessert recipe:” according to the description the recipe actually needs bread, powdered milk, saffron, sugar, cardamom, dried fruit, and thick cream in addition to the titular milk. The “sweet and chewy snack” is mostly tapioca starch and the “just need chocolate and milk” recipe looks like it requires at least 4 sheets of gelatin. But of course the recipe isn’t framed around tapioca, gelatin, or even sugar, milk is the magic ingredient.
YouTube is full of fake food hacks that take advantage of supposed magical properties of foods and kitchen gadgets: putting skittles in a waffle iron, cooking burgers in a toaster, or popping popcorn with m&ms. The appeal makes sense: it isn’t out of the realm of possibility that colorful industrial products like skittles and pop-rocks have some secrets hiding from us, don’t forget that folks were eating tide pods a year ago. Industrial foods have ruined our sense of reality to the extent that it’s no longer possible to tell cake from not-cake!
But milk? Sweet, pure, innocent, increasingly-hard-for-me-to-digest, milk? How did this simple staple rise to the ranks of manufactured mystery? Kendra Smith Howard’s Pure and Modern Milk tells the story of the fluid’s defamiliarization: going from a quickly-spoiling animal excretion to a frighteningly impure substance that could harbor disease, to the brightly packaged uniformly white and shelf-stable substance we’re familiar with. Through regulation of bovine bodies and farm and food processes, milk has become an increasingly industrial product.
Hindsight
Milk today is both industrial and animal, both plain and complex. It froths into latte foam, freezes into ice cream, and hardens into whey protein fueled muscle. Milk comes in chocolate, strawberry, and banana, and inspires new creamy imitators made from every plant under the sun. We’re told milk is essential to bones and teeth and yet is impossible to digest by most humans on Earth. No wonder we expect milk to do magical things! But don’t pour yourself a glass and expect it to turn into a tasty dessert all on its own. You’ll end up spoiling more than dinner.