Milk

Milk is the first food. Every single person you have ever met — every teacher, every bus driver, every footballer, every grandma — started out drinking only milk. So did every cow, every cat, and every whale.

Only mothers make milk, and they make it for their babies. The milk in your fridge comes from mother cows. A mother cow makes much more milk than one calf needs, and farmers collect the extra. That’s the deal between people and cows, and it’s a very old deal — older than castles, older than writing.

Here’s the astonishing part: milk knows how to become other things. Leave it with the right tiny helpers and it thickens into yoghurt. Stir it and stir it and the fat sticks together into butter. Add the right drops and press it, and it slowly becomes cheese — and it takes about ten whole cups of milk squeezed together to make one block of cheese. Cheese is milk, concentrated, wearing a disguise.

Milk is white because it’s full of tiny, tiny drops of fat and protein, all bouncing light back at your eyes. It’s not white the way paint is white. It’s white the way a cloud is.