It Tastes Like Milk

A man sits down in a diner. “What's the special?” he asks the waiter.

“Tongue sandwich,” the waiter replies.

“That’s disgusting!” says the man. “I could never eat anything that came out of an animal’s mouth!”

“What’ll you have then?” asks the waiter.

The man shrugs and answers, “Just give me a couple eggs over easy.”

Like the man in the diner, all of us make judgments about the way things are that seem completely rational to us. We hold on to these ideas for long periods of our lives, believing they prevent us from making bad decisions or having uncomfortable experiences. In some cases we guard them like valuable treasures that must be protected at all cost. But very frequently, we are wrong. Our judgments are often based on something other than reality, whether upbringing, culture, fear, past experiences or some other seemingly compelling yet inaccurate standard.

So what should we do about it?

In my family, when we tell people we raise dairy goats, almost without exception they begin asking a series of questions that to them must seem completely reasonable, but to us have become an inside joke.

We grin at the first question:

“Dairy goats? What do you do with dairy goats?”

“We milk them.”

Then we have to giggle at the inevitable second question :

“What do you do with the milk?”

“We drink it.”

The third question is always the same:

“Really? What does it taste like?”

“It tastes like milk.”

But no matter how many times we go through this exercise with some newly curious visitor to the farm, we find most people cannot quite understand what we are telling them. They carry with them ideas that have lead them to form unfounded conclusions about milk. They believe milk from a goat must taste like something other than the milk they get from the store. It must be goatier or farmier or non-real-milkier than real milk. Why? I have no idea. But I can tell you that before we started raising dairy goats, we each went through this exact same process.

So, as is almost always the case, we have to sit them down, put a glass in front of them, take a bottle from the fridge, and pour them some milk - goat milk.

They raise it to their mouth then set it down without tasting it. “What does it taste like?”

“It tastes like milk!” we insist.

“OK.” They pick the glass up again and smell it. “Hmmm?”

Finally, after some persistent prodding, they causally shrug and they drink it.

“Hey!” they proclaim licking their lips, “It tastes like milk!”

In doing so they abandon the ignorance that just a few minutes ago had them convinced that milk from a goat didn’t, couldn’t and absolutely would not taste like milk.