Milk and morality

If you know me, you probably know the egregious crime I commit around 12:01 pm in the Ford Hall dining hall. It’s often accompanied by comments such as: “That’s just… wrong,” “What the [expletive] are you doing?” and the most common question, “Are you dipping your bread in milk?”​

That’s right. I macerate my polymeric starch-based carbohydrate in the freshly-squeezed liquid from a cow udder.​

We often look at unconventional things and say, “This is wrong.” But should we make right-and-wrong statements merely because something is different? Though we observe the soggy sponge-ness of the bread and no doubt conclude that sponges would not make for a delectable meal, the leap from that fact to a moral statement should be reexamined. In almost every case where someone has commented on my habit, they had never actually tried it. So if bread-and-milk morality is clearly a human construction, how many other judgments are?​

In 1879, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School opened. The policymakers forcibly removed Native children from their homes and tried to assimilate them into schools like Carlisle. They claimed they were “saving the man,” yet the saviors were not Natives. They had never lived those children’s lives. In a classic case of paternalism, they presumed they knew what was best for everyone based on their own lives. The moral statement that American education and culture would benefit and enlighten Natives was not backed up by experiential knowledge of the lives of Natives. These types of judgments, coming from faulty origins, if unchecked, have devastating effects on public policy and the livelihoods of affected populations.​

This is not meant to criticize certain lawgivers but merely to point out the ease with which we all slip from subjective opinions into codified moral statements. Of course, it is simply impossible for people in power to have experienced every point of view. However, the limitations of subjective experience can be overcome by hearing the perspectives of others. In the case of a policy affecting Native sovereignty, policymakers cannot just “acquire” the experiences of a Native, but they can consult the opinions of Natives (and without tokenizing or deliberately misinterpreting their views!).

Realistically, there are problems with this framework. While it may be possible for everyone to try bread in milk before they make a judgment, it is impractical, time-wise and material-wise, to consult the affected demographic for every law. But to acknowledge the limits of one’s own subjective experience as the root of a policy, and then attempt to mitigate that shortcoming, is a step in the right direction.​

On an everyday level, noticing that our judgements often come with prescriptive implications and that the roots of the judgements are often flawed leads to more respectful and open-minded conversations. I am not saying every comment we make hereafter must be automatically an objective moral statement, nor am I saying we should not express our opinions or joke about bizarre food combinations. It is simply the awareness that many of our reasonings could be flawed that I am advocating for.

​The next day, at 12:01 pm, my friend sat down next to me while I salivated over my lactase-covered comestible. I glanced up at her cup, and, would you look at that – she had put strawberries in milk. I felt a tempting desire to make a biting comment; instead, I bit my tongue and asked, “Can I try one?”