Where to find the milk

by Alana Frances Valero (Spain)

Making a local connection Venezuela

I was travelling in Venezuela. I was hungry. The bar keep was filling his glass up with coconut water. I hadn't tried it yet and little did I know I'd spend most of my adult travelling life in a constant search for more coconut water, or better yet milk. He took an unopened packet of cornflakes out from a wooden, almost broken cupboard and asked if I wanted some. Of course, I do, I thought. Almost as if he had read my mind, he dropped some into a bowl. He pulled out a big shiny can, one the likes of which I’d never seen and out came some spoons of white powder. He quickly mixed the powder with water and put it in my cornflakes. He added something else to it, daydreaming and not really paying attention to my cornflakes. Then with the same disinterest, he put down the bowl in front of me and passed me a spoon. In all my innocence I picked up the spoon and put the cornflakes in my mouth. My eyes watered and my face changed. It was disgusting. What was this strange taste, almost nasty, that I had never tasted before? I could not stomach it. He noticed and looked at me like I was crazy. He gestured to another staff member to come over. ‘Mira, esta gringa bella. No le gusta la leche en polvo’. His smirk was as wide as the Gulf of Paria safely getting me from the island of Trinidad to the east coast of Venezuela. He pretty much had a) called me a gringa and b) called this powdered milk? I use all the charm I found with a flick of my very latin black hair and asked him to taste it. He did and he immediately spat it out. He realized then that he had mixed it with salt, instead of sugar. His head hung low and he apologized. He told me that if they could get me real milk they would have but the ‘Bachaqueros’ (illegal vendors) always took it so it was near impossible, there was no where to find the milk. From then, I wondered what milk meant to everyone else and how the taste of milk really defines where you are. In Kenya and the Baltics, I saw for the first time milk in bags! In some parts of Australia, we get milk straight from the dairy cow in a sterilized glass bottle. In France, I went to an agriculture festival and connoisseured different milks from the fanciest of Swiss and French cows. Just last weekend, I tried several local Canarian milks at a fair. They taste different. The taste is intrinsically linked to the grass and soil where they are produced. I will always be on a quest to know where to find the milk. Travelling itself is just a secondary product.