I Can Tell the Difference

While reading the article “Waiter there’s a cloven hoof on my plate”, along with trying to read through the article without turning away in disgust (which seemed a little silly since I wasn’t looking at anything other than words), I tried to think of the grossest thing I’d ever eaten. This was extremely challenging since I am not the least bit adventurous with my diet. There are foods like tripe (sheep stomach) and menudo (cow stomach), which are essentially absent from the American diet, but in Ireland and Mexico they are said to be great hangover cures. I have been offered a variety of foods that people around me eat everyday including sushi, oysters, calamari, and even duck. Although I wasn’t brave enough to let many of these even touch my lips, I did place a bite of duck in my mouth…although that’s as far as it got so I cannot claim to have actually eaten it. Regardless of what my stepmother claims duck is not like a gourmet chicken. Eatable, delicious, and disgusting vary from culture to culture and household to household so it must be psychological if food can be so many different things to so many different people.

Due to the fact that I have always been a finicky eater it was hard to think of a time where I was forced to consume something that I didn’t choose, and then it hit me: goat’s milk. When I was about 12 my mom decided to get into organic farming and raise her own chickens and goats, for fresh eggs and milk. My brother and I weren’t too excited about the idea of goat’s milk especially since we loved cow’s milk so much that we would drink about a gallon a day between us. From cereal in the morning to two big glasses with lunch and dinner we could have been the poster children for the milk industry. My mother explained the nutritional value was far greater in goat’s milk than cow’s and how the money saved will benefit the family. Valid arguments but they fell on deaf ears; remember we were too young to care. We protested about the smell and the taste and the yellow color and the thick consistency, it looked more like eggnog than milk unfortunately the similarity ended there. At first my mother compromised and bought cow’s milk and pasteurized her own goat’s milk until one day when she’d had enough and claimed we couldn't even tell the difference. She refused to spend any more money on milk and said all of our concerns were “psychological” and we needed to get over them. For a few weeks neither side budged, so my mother resorted to trickery. She poured the goat’s milk into the empty gallon milk container, and I was the unfortunate victim of this hennas act. I poured the milk perfunctorily as I wondered through my morning routine, my mother watched anxiously…I took a bite and then another. I turned to my mother and said the milk must have gone bad and she flipped out. “It’s psychological” she cried, “you had two bites before you looked at the container and saw it was yellow”! Actually I had a bite, then a second to see if it was me, then I looked at the container to see how bad the milk actually was because clearly something was wrong. To this day my mother swears “it’s psychological” and we never opened ourselves up to the experience. It’s a funny story to tell to newcomers, but it remains the grossest thing I’ve ever eaten.