Our milk connoisseur

What a boring meal schedule, if you think about it!

Sonny starts the day, usually before dawn breaks, with a hearty milk breakfast. By mid-morning, at the infant care centre, he'll have snacked on milk. Sometime past noon, a luncheon of milk is served. You see where this is going. So let's not stop. At tea, it's more of the white stuff. Dinner: Milk. Suppertime? A tipple of milk. Attack of the hungries in-between? No prizes for guessing.

All right, all right. It's true that, apparently, Mum's milk menu isn't strictly speaking a one-item affair. The milk that is first secreted in a feeding is one type, while the milk for the main feed and at the tail end are again different in composition, with different nutrients and antibodies that help promote growth or fight disease. But especially at the infant care centre, which uses milk that Mum has expressed into containers, it's all sloshed together into one liquid mix.

Yet there's more to the matter. The taste of Mum's milk can apparently change from day to day, depending on her diet and how her hormones are doing. Her experience with Sonny suggests that he even has a preference for milk from one breast over the other. So the truth of the business is that Sonny may not need the great variety that we enjoy in our diet, because his powers of milk-enjoyment are exquisitely refined. He gets to enjoy shadings and alteration from meal to meal.

In the end, it may be that he outclasses his parents by a long jog. Neither Pa nor Mum has a particularly superior palate; we can probably tell white wine from red at a pinch but things get murkier after that. It would appear that, as we grow up and choose from ever-expanding selections of food (given the internationalisation of cuisine), we are at danger of losing our early sensitivity to taste.

Maybe we should just drink more milk...