I Thought Milk Was Normal

Turns out, I may have been the weird one all along.

I ran across something the other day that made me stop and read it twice.

Lactose intolerance is normal.

Not “a lot of people have it” normal.

Normal normal.

Most adults in the world have some degree of difficulty digesting lactose. Milk, after all, is designed for babies. Somewhere along the evolutionary road, most human bodies apparently said, Well, he’s walking now. I think we’re done here.

Which makes perfect sense.

Except for some of us.

And by “some of us,” I mean people whose ancestors, particularly in northern Europe, developed a genetic mutation that allowed them to keep digesting milk as adults.

In other words, if you can drink a glass of milk at 64 without spending the afternoon reconsidering your life choices, congratulations.

You’re the mutant.

I love this stuff.

Not because I have a particular interest in lactose. I didn’t wake up one morning thinking, You know what I need to know more about? Milk.

I just have this bad habit of pulling on interesting little threads.

I’ll read one thing, which leads to another thing, which leads to something completely unrelated, and pretty soon I’m three hours into a subject I didn’t know existed that morning.

I’ve done this with refrigeration. I once became so curious about what actually happens to air when you cool it that I ended up taking a night class and learning about psychrometric charts.

Normal people watch television.

I study the properties of moist air.

So here I am, pulling on the milk thread.

And that’s when it got really interesting.

America Had Too Much Milk

After World War II, American dairy farmers had a problem.

They had too much milk.

Lots of it.

Apparently, America had become extremely good at producing the stuff, and eventually we had more milk than we knew what to do with.

So the government stepped in and bought the surplus.

Some of that milk eventually found its way into government food programs and overseas aid, which meant people in places where milk had never been a regular part of the diet suddenly started getting milk.

Including schoolchildren.

And some of those children drank it and apparently thought:

What the hell is this doing to me?

Bloating.

Cramping.

Diarrhea.

Not exactly a five-star review for American dairy.

Scientists got curious and started studying why some people could digest milk and others couldn’t.

And here’s where the story takes a wonderfully strange turn.

The early researchers basically looked at the people who could digest milk and decided:

That’s normal.

Then they looked at everybody else and decided:

Something is wrong with them.

Think about that.

They discovered that different human beings processed milk differently.

And somehow the conclusion became, Well, some of you need to be fixed.

It took years of research across different populations before scientists figured out what should probably have been obvious.

Most adults don’t digest milk particularly well.

The people who can are the unusual ones.

Which means that for most of human history, if an adult walked around drinking a big glass of milk, somebody might reasonably have wondered what the hell was wrong with him.

Which Brings Me to Jan

This is where the story gets personal.

Jan and I still drink about two gallons of milk a week.

That’s before we get to the ice cream.

And we eat ice cream most evenings.

I realize that may undermine my credibility as a serious investigative journalist.

But we’re talking about milk here, so I feel qualified.

When we were summering in Wisconsin, we discovered Kwik Trip’s ice cream.

If you’re not from Wisconsin, you may not know Kwik Trip.

It’s not just a gas station and convenience store. It’s a huge Wisconsin institution. And because Wisconsin is Wisconsin—the Dairy State—Kwik Trip actually makes its own ice cream in its own dairy.

And we’re talking real ice cream, not that ice-milk stuff in the one-gallon containers sold for kids’ birthday parties.

Jan is from Wisconsin.

So you can imagine how this worked out.

We became regular customers.

They sold their ice cream in gallon containers.

A gallon.

Not one of those little tubs that requires you to make another trip to the grocery store before you’ve properly recovered from opening it.

A gallon.

I thought this was wonderful.

Then we moved to Tennessee.

And suddenly our beloved Wisconsin gallon of ice cream was no longer an option.

I was disappointed.

Deeply disappointed.

Then we discovered Kroger’s Big Deal Party Pail.

I’m not making this up.

A one-gallon square pail of ice cream with a weird handle that runs diagonally from one corner to the other.

It looks less like something you’d eat ice cream out of and more like something you’d use to carry paint to the backyard.

But here’s the thing.

Kroger’s is even better.

We’ve had a few months now to work our way through most of the flavors.

My two favorites are fudge swirl and chocolate.

I usually have a scoop of each every night.

That’s right.

Two flavors.

Because apparently once you’ve accepted your status as an evolutionary mutant, you might as well lean into it.

Jan has been passing lately.

I think she’s lactose intolerant.

She will vehemently deny this.

She’ll tell you she isn’t.

She’ll probably tell you I’m making it up.

But trust me on this one.

I know the signs.

I’m not a doctor.

I’m just the guy who has been married to her for almost forty years.

And I’ve done my research.

Besides, she’s from Wisconsin.

I think she’s emotionally obligated to defend dairy.

She is also going to be very angry with me for sharing this.

I already know that.

And when she tells me I shouldn’t have put it in the story, I’ll probably look at her and say the four words she hates more than almost anything:

“It is what it is.”

Yes, I know.

Four words.

And that will infuriate her even more.

It is what it is.

My Brother Tom Conducted an Experiment

This whole milk-and-ice-cream thing actually takes me back to something that happened with my older brother Tom in the late sixties.

Tom isn’t lactose intolerant.

At least as far as I know.

He was just a kid with what I assume was a very strong belief in the principle that if one good thing is good, a whole lot of it must be better.

One day he ate a huge bowl of ice cream.

Then, because apparently that wasn’t enough, he ate a bag of potato chips.

The outcome was not good.

I’ll spare you the details.

Let’s just say there was a period of time when the family learned a valuable lesson about the relationship between cold ice cream and greasy potato chips.

And Tom wasn’t lactose intolerant.

No genetic mutation was involved.

No nutritional imperialism.

No scientific breakthrough.

Just cold ice cream meeting a whole bunch of greasy potato chips in the same digestive system.

Some experiments simply don’t need to be repeated.

Then We Did What Humans Do

We built an industry around milk.

Milk became good for you.

Milk became wholesome.

Milk became part of a healthy breakfast.

We put it in school cafeterias.

We put a glass of it next to cookies.

We put celebrities on television with milk mustaches.

We even got the cows involved.

There is probably no other food on earth that has received more positive public relations than milk.

And if your stomach didn’t agree?

Well, now you were “lactose intolerant.”

The terminology itself makes me laugh.

I’m not intolerant of milk.

I’m just not particularly interested in allowing a glass of milk to ruin my afternoon.

That’s not intolerance.

That’s boundary setting.

Maybe “Normal” Is Just Familiar

That’s the part that stayed with me.

Not the milk, really.

The word normal.

We tend to think normal means something biological.

Maybe it doesn’t.

Maybe sometimes it just means familiar.

If most of the people around you eat something, do something or live a certain way, pretty soon that becomes the baseline.

Everybody else is different.

And different has a funny way of eventually becoming deficient.

That’s what happened with milk.

And apparently it happened with other foods, too.

For a good part of the twentieth century, Western nutrition experts were pretty enthusiastic about meat, wheat and other parts of the Western diet.

Rice?

Not quite as good.

Vegetarian diets?

Probably missing something.

If your body processed alcohol differently?

Deficient.

I’m not going much farther down that road.

That’s a different porch conversation.

What fascinates me is how easy it is to mistake what we’re accustomed to for what everybody is supposed to be.

Maybe that’s why I like these little rabbit holes.

They remind me that the world is considerably stranger than we think it is.

And that sometimes the thing we thought was normal turns out to be the unusual thing.

Here’s What I Took Away

I’m not giving up cheese.

Let’s establish that right now.

I’m also not joining some anti-milk movement.

If milk agrees with you, drink milk.

If ice cream makes you happy, eat the ice cream.

If ice cream makes you sick, for God’s sake, don’t eat the ice cream.

This isn’t complicated.

What I find interesting is the story we tell ourselves about why.

For years, I thought lactose intolerance meant your body was somehow failing at something it was supposed to do.

Turns out, your body may simply be doing exactly what human bodies have been doing for thousands of years.

I’m the weird one.

I can live with that.

I’ve spent most of my life being curious about things I probably didn’t need to know.

I’ve taken classes because I wanted to understand how something worked.

I’ve gone down rabbit holes that had absolutely no practical application whatsoever.

And now I know something about lactase.

Was this information necessary?

Absolutely not.

Will I forget most of it?

Almost certainly.

But there’s something I like about discovering these little surprises.

They remind me that the world is considerably stranger than we think it is.

And every once in a while, one of those little surprises turns an ordinary thing upside down.

Like milk.

I always thought the people who couldn’t drink it were the unusual ones.

Turns out, they’re probably the normal ones.

Which leaves me sitting here with a scoop of fudge swirl and a scoop of chocolate, wondering whether being a mutant is worth it.

Then I look at the bowl.

And think about it for approximately half a second.

The ice cream is really good.