“Where’s the milk?” I asked my best friend from high school, Gigi, as I peered into her fridge.

“It’s right there.”

“Where?”

“There.” 

Yet, as Gertrude Stein would have said — if she needed something to pour in her coffee and wasn’t confused by the idea of “milking” a non-animal — “There’s no ‘there’ there, only almond milk.”

Gigi shrugged. “That’s what we drink.” 

And therein lies a tale. There was no cow milk in Gigi’s fridge, no white bread in her bread box, and no peanut butter in her cabinets — only almond butter. Without even realizing it, Gigi had become what we used to call a health nut but is now apparently a health mainstreamer, leaving good ol’ milk-drinking, Wonder-bread-loving nut-chompers like me behind.

Folks who still eat hotdogs, if you can believe that, even though at barbecues over the summer when I serve the tasty tubes, people often remark, “Wow. I haven’t had one of these in a LONG time.” As if it’s windowpane acid.

For me, hotdogs are still in heavy rotation. Which means that simply by standing in place, I’d become abnormal, like a gal still wild about acid-washed jeans. Or working at the office.

Everyone else today is eating or juicing something they never thought they’d eat … or even consider food. A guy I know just mentioned he is into hemp hearts.

Hemp has a heart? It’s legal to eat? He says he mixes the hearts into cheesy eggs, which sounds somewhere between super healthy and the unhealthiest thing on Earth. 

Yet hemp is just one of those things that people say, “I’m into now.” Like kombucha — the stuff that looks like pond water. And chia. If chia can go from pet to food, what hope is there for puppies? Another high school friend of mine — they’re all turning — now “cheats” by eating chia pudding.

Cheats on what? Gently sauteed pine needles? Liver smoothies? How is it cheating to eat something so healthy that it still grosses at least a portion of the population out? 

I know, I know — people’s tastes change, and change is good. My colleague Sue is eating beets now. She used to spit them out back when beets were on everyone’s shelf in a can. Sometimes for years, same can. Then recently someone convinced her to eat them for good luck and she gave them an open-minded nibble. Now she’s a beet fiend. A beetnik, as it were. And as we all know — beets are the gateway to hemp hearts. 

Other friends are opening up to things our ancestors were very happy to leave behind — like groats. And it’s not even hip anymore to eat these ancient grains. They’re just regular grains now. And some of those “grains” are actually … cauliflower. In fact, sometimes it seems MOST grains turn out to be cauliflower. 

It’s not just that people’s tastes are shifting. They’re lurching. “I got all into trying to go vegan, then I got into paleo — huge shift, I know,” I read a mom confess online. 

The soymilk folks are getting into butter. The pescatarians are trying pork. The NutraSweet crowd is swearing by monkfruit. And I wasn’t going to mention kale, but it’s the elephant in the pantry.

“It’s an aspirational vegetable,” explains my friend and an expert on parenting trends, Nancy McDermott — which are maybe lurching even more. “But eating it, preparing it, is difficult. I think you’d have to sleep with it under the mattress to make it tender enough to eat.”

By the time we are sleeping with our kale, all bets are off. It is time for a drink.

Sparkling cold brew with a splash of cashew milk, of course.

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