[Author's note 2016-01-13: This is what the Earth looked like at night in 2003, though I am not certain what date. Folks, this was probably the peak, it was all downhill after that.]
Wallace and I have arranged a conspiracy. It’s mostly up me to conduct the violence, but we have generally agreed to dehydrate the sumbitch who invented powdered milk. It does not taste like milk, nor smell like milk, nor look anything like the frothing glass on the label. The human body cannot recognize nor accept that industrial byproduct as a food substance.
[Author's note: by 2012, I was to have a different opinion of powdered milk, especially for baking. I've learned to make several excellent recipes so it does not taste like powdered. All you need is more imagination than most parents. Not a tall order, that.]
Better flavor to lick the lint off a downtown sidewalk. With apologies to post-90s Chinese talk-shows, food should not hurt. Powdered milk is the incarnate sorrow of that century, a lumpy, chalky, scum left after every flavor molecule has been mechanically or chemically extracted. Dickens could handily outdo my description if he could have imagined it an ingredient, for he only had to deal with swill. (I'm saying the only reason Dickens didn't use it in his descriptions of destitute poverty is because it was not classified as edible.)
Salesmen used to drift through town, unloading it by the carton to parents (like mine) whose basic idea of childhood nutrition was food dye number 11 (lemon Kool-Aid) with baloney for lunch. They lived through the Depression, so like, why the hell shouldn’t you? They got us to drink it by promising that we could have store-bought milk when the powdered ran out, except that it never did before I was old enough to figure that one out.
It is agreed, then. We skin the guy who first dried the milk. Then if it is the same person who still called it “milk”, we skin him again.
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