You Can’t Milk a Chicken
There is an Instagram account I follow, @IAmBaker—a food blogger named Amanda Rettke. I enjoy her posts because she shares pictures and recipes of the most scrumptious looking sweets, but also because of her wry sense of humor. A few months ago she started posting short skits where her character is Shirley, a person who answers the phone at the fictitious Your Content is Terrible Hotline. In these skits, Shirley listens to complaints callers have about the content on various blogs, mostly food blogs, sympathizes cheerfully with the caller, then always ends with “I’ll be happy to file a report on your behalf!” The complaints are always ridiculous, at least to me, and evidently to Amanda, but the callers are quite serious about them. The unsettling part is that Amanda bases each of these skits on actual complaints she or other bloggers have received.
Yesterday’s skit soared to new heights. It was a bit longer, and she introduced a new character, Florence. I think Florence is probably a Home Economist, like me. Anyway, the caller was complaining because she had decided to “go dairy free in 2021,” had searched for dairy-free cookie recipes, found one, then noticed the recipe contained eggs. She was calling to complain that the recipe was not truly dairy-free. I had no idea this was a widely held belief, that eggs are dairy. I have had one person in all my life tell me that they cannot eat eggs because they are allergic to dairy, and I was so bumfuzzled by what they just said that the Home Economist within just froze and did not even tell them that eggs come from chickens and dairy is milk, which comes from cows. I went on with life thinking that only the rare person thinks eggs are dairy. I learned differently last night upon scanning the comments on Amanda/ Shirley’s skit. I also learned that lots of people think mayonnaise is dairy. This one really, really bothers me.
One of the comments was a person saying that all the agriculture workers wish Amanda could share this skit with the world and also make another one about how almond milk is also not milk nor dairy. I responded that Shirley and Florence need a television show where they explain where various foods actually come from and what all it takes to get them to a person’s table. It could be an educational comedy.
I am lucky that I was raised by parents who were the children of subsistence farmers, so a knowledge of exactly how hard it is to produce food is baked into me. That is why I have a hard time wasting food and have such an appreciation for farmers and ranchers. The pandemic has produced some mild food shortages, and restaurant closures have led many people to either learn to cook or become better cooks. The food shortages opened many people’s eyes to food production and processing. They also led to more people dabbling in agriculture by raising some laying hens or planting a vegetable garden. Surely those people know that eggs are not dairy??
Food is one of the most basic elements of survival. We truly are what we eat. Food also has the potential to be one of the greatest pleasures in life. Why would anyone not want to know all about food? If food suddenly disappeared—if the grocery shelves were empty and the restaurants all closed, we would realize just how vital it is and wish we had learned a bit more about it. It really could happen! The pandemic gave us a tiny little signal of just how precarious our food situation really is. Part of the reason our situation is precarious is because a large proportion of Americans do not know that: milk comes from cows, eggs come from chickens, meat is the flesh of a now-dead animal, vegetables and fruits grow in the dirt, it takes a lot of dirt (land) to produce food, and it takes a lot of hard work by a lot of people to grow the food and get it harvested and processed into the form it takes on your grocery store shelf or plate. Do yourself (and your country) a favor and learn more about where your food comes from, and if you already know—teach someone else! And if you started this article thinking that eggs are dairy, please send me an email and explain how that thought process worked—I really want to understand. Spring-CreekArtsGuild@gmail.com