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Emma and Pete

By the time we got back from the cruise I was feeling a bit under the weather, like I had a permanent cold. After a few weeks at home nothing had changed, and so I decided to try giving up cow’s milk as catarrah can be a symptom of lactose intolerance. This is a big deal for me – if there are three foods I would be hard pressed to live without it would be milk, butter and tea.

So we went to the supermarket to look into alternatives and I came home with soy milk, oat milk and rice milk (long life cartons) and fresh goat milk. The goat milk turned out to be the easiest to convert to – although it has a stronger flavour than cow’s milk, I have no problem with it and goat’s milk works everywhere I want to use it.

Soy milk is quite nice to drink on its own (and strawberry soy milk shakes are very nice), but it makes horrible tea. I suspect rice milk is the same – in tea it tastes like it came out of a vending machine, very nasty – but I haven’t steeled myself to drink any yet. Oat milk I have had before – it’s OK to drink and would be OK on porridge, but again it’s unpleasant in tea.

I can drink my tea black – especially something posh like Darjeeling – but prefer not to for everyday tea.

So I’m quite happily settling down to goat’s milk (and I’ve found UHT cartons to keep in store for supply emergencies), and a couple of little health niggles have improved as a result, so I am more than happy to continue avoiding cow’s milk.

However, this situation is not without its issues. Most cheese is off the menu, as is yoghurt. In fact, most desserts seem to have cow’s milk in them. There was one which even had added milk sugar, which is just rude. I was looking at the bars of chocolate in Tesco yesterday and even their fair trade plain chocolate said “Plain chocolate may contain milk” on it*. I understand it’s just a disclaimer, and trace amounts aren’t likely to be a problem, but it exemplifies a problem with processed foods in general – most of them contain cow’s milk and are now off the menu. Pete and I are moving towards eating less processed food anyway, but we’re not very organised and there are still plenty of days when it would just be nice to go into a shop and buy something to eat.

It’s all still new and uncomfortable, but no doubt we will get used to it soon. In the meantime, Pete has the job of eating his way through the small mountain of cow’s cheese in the fridge by himself. It may take him a while.

*There are vegan chocolate suppliers, I will have to seek them out. It’s not that I eat a lot of chocolate, just that I don’t want to give it up entirely.

Posted in Emma's blog by emma on Sun, Aug 9 2009

Last modified on Tue, Jan 10 2012