Got Carcinogen?

“All that milk for the kids?”

A fellow with about 10 years on me asked me that the other day. We were both at the same warehouse store, in line to check out, and both of us had put packages of six bagels in our carts. A passing employee of the store had noticed the bagels in our carts, and informed us that the store didn’t sell six bagels at a time – you have to buy 12, even though packages of six are on display, and not linked in any way. The employee then said he would go to the bagel display at the other end of the store and get each of us six more. So we agreed to that.

By the time we’d both checked out, we were still waiting for the man to return with the additional bagels. That’s when the fellow took note of the four gallon-jugs of milk in my cart. We were nearly out of milk, and we can nearly run through that much by the time we return to the warehouse store for more. It is skim milk, and by far the cheapest available on a regular basis. This time it was $2.15 a gallon, up from just below $2 not long ago. I hear that the price of milk is going up.

“Yes, it is,” I answered. That’s simpler than saying, “Yes, a lot of it is, but a fair amount of it will go down my gullet, sometimes with cereal, but sometimes because it refreshes. My wife will sometimes eat cereal too, and sometimes put some in her coffee. So we have our various uses for it.”

“Well, it causes cancer,” he said.

“You think so?”

“It’s indisputable.”

At that moment the man arrived with our bagels, and we all parted. As I was leaving, I noticed the fellow with the helpful health advice on diary products in line at the warehouse loss-leader food court ordering a hot dog for (I assume) his grandson, who had joined him at some point.

Indisputable? Actually, a statement like that is an example of something that should be disputable. I thought about it on the way home, how passionately people bite into an idea like that, which sounds suspiciously like another in the long train of correlation-equals-causation fallacies. That train seems to leave the station full of passengers every day of the week.

Then again, I’m willing to entertain the notion that milk will eventually be outed as a health menace, as tobacco has been. Entertain the notion –- buy it a beer and have a chat -- but send it packing afterwards. I can speculate about how our great-great-grandchildren will be astonished that you could buy cow’s milk in our time in any store, and that it was regularly given to kids (and how, by then, forms of morphine are legal again, and put on teething rings), but that isn’t going to make me switch from milk on Lucky Charms to rainwater on Weetabix.