My friends make fun of me for drinking milk. Every time I drink milk at a meal, they roll their eyes. “Of course Taylor is drinking milk.” For them, milk is only acceptable in a bowl of cereal. They even send me articles about why milk is gross. “Milk is for babies,” the headlines say.
I ignore them. I ignore them and drink more milk.
The truth is, I’ve never second guessed my tendency to drink several glasses of milk a day, if not several glasses a meal. Of course, I do think milk is fantastically delicious. But there is something more. When I drink cold milk from a glass, there is a deeper satisfaction.
I have seen the same satisfaction on the faces of my friends who are second-generation Americans, when they receive meals from home. Their parents, usually their moms, would send them packages of home cooked Filipino, Korean, or Chinese meals, ready for the microwave. These friends would hardly ever need to visit the dining hall. Why would they? A taste of home was just delivered to their dorm room.
When I want a taste of home, I go to the grocery store and buy a gallon of milk.
Okay, so maybe milk I shouldn’t equate milk to an entire cuisine. That’s not a fair comparison. But I am not confident that I even have a cuisine to compare. I love my mom’s cooking, but if asked to recite the signature dishes of my childhood, I would draw a blank. We ate – I don’t know – tacos, spaghetti, stir fry, potatoes? Other stuff? While I liked them all, none of them feel special to me.
What is my cuisine? Do I have a cuisine?
When my great grandfather, James Demetrius Adrianos, left the Greek Peloponnese for Ellis Island, he did not bring his cuisine with him. He became a pastry chef in New York, later opened up a restaurant in Los Angeles, and raised a family there. But he did not bake Greek pastries, he did not serve Greek food in his restaurant, and he did not speak Greek at home. When he arrived in the United States, my great grandfather insisted on being American. He served American food at his American restaurant. Steak, chicken, and pork chops were on the dinner menu.
Meat continued to be the most important food group for that side of my extended family. When we get together for holidays, meat takes up a majority of the serving counter. My uncle would hunt elk and deer in Colorado, and grill them in the backyard. Lamb was a regular, and still is. One Fourth of July, there was alligator chili. When I was a junior in high school, we even had a meatball-themed Christmas, which included (but was not limited to) ostrich meatballs, moo shu pork meatballs, and deep fried bull testicles, fondly referred to as Rocky Mountain Oysters.
Unfortunately, that was the year I became a vegetarian. My uncles made fun of my decision, and would offer me the meat on their plates just so they can laugh when I refused. My grandma would ask my parents, believing she was out of my earshot, if I was still doing that silly vegetarian thing. I didn’t mind. A sense of moral superiority, while immoral, can be fun. Still, if cooked meat was the family cuisine, I could no longer participate.
It wasn’t only vegetarianism that dictated my diet during high school – competitive running made its demands upon my body. Most days, after practice, I came home exhausted and hungry. My parents wouldn’t be home from work for another few hours, and dinner wouldn’t be served for at least another three. We didn’t have snacks in the house. I would open the refrigerator anyways, staring into its depths for inspiration. Almost always, I reached for the gallon of milk. One glass led to a second, and the second usually led to a third. On a warm afternoon, the chilled drink was always relief, and more satisfying than water.
Reaching for the milk after school came easily to me, and for a weird reason. When I was very young, we owned a refrigerator with a water dispenser. I became accustomed to using it, to the point that I didn’t trust tap water. So when a few years later we got a new fridge, this time sans water dispenser, I just stopped drinking water at home. Milk was the easy alternative, and soon enough it became my go-to.
Today, I laugh at myself for this. My old fear of tap water reminds me of the ancient Greeks, who believed that water was poisonous and drank wine instead. My insistence for water from the refrigerator reminds me of my grandfather, who was the first of his family to grow up in a city. When he visited his cousins in the countryside, they made fun of him for refusing to drink milk warm and out of the cow like they did.
My grandfather was one of the first generations of Americans that came to regularly expect fresh, cold milk. Just before the turn of the century, the glass milk bottle was patented in New York, and just after, specially-designed milk trucks began to deliver in all of America’s major cities. Not one, but two “milk wars” were fought between producers and distributors in the US. Dairy farmers formed “spilling committees” that blocked roads, seized shipment, and dumped out their own product in order to drive up the price. The mass distribution of disease-free milk was characteristic of 20th century America’s economic ambition, and the social angst that came along with it.
Today, milk consumption per capita in the US is 30% lower than it was in the 1970s. Some argue that its health benefits have been overstated, and others have gravitated towards milk alternatives like soy milk and almond milk. My peers laugh at me, but I laugh right back at them – they don’t know what they are missing. A glass of cold milk is more than just a drink. For me, it is a sunny Californian afternoon and that lovely soreness one feels after a nine mile run. It is an after school treat, and a visit to grandma and grandpa. It is an American drink that belongs especially to me, and the more others make fun of it, the more it is mine.
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