Filipinos are, by  nature, not big on the milk-drinking. This is further attested to by our collective average height of 5’1″ (excluding the president, of course. Adding her to the mix makes the Filipino’s average height shoot down to four-foot-evil) and our natural inclination to recruit tall foreigners into our local basketball teams.

Milk drinking then, your actual milk drinking that numerous advertisements direct toward kids who want to be valedictorians in diapers, is nothing but synthetic culture, introduced to us by the very people who get paid every time we drink milk.

Fresh milk after all –the kind that comes out from an animal’s teat– is generally filled with pus and bacteria because the industrial-strength suction cups and tubes attatched to udders makes the Matrix ‘umbillical chords’ look like a cruel insult to the profession. As for formula milk, it’s always healthy to be a little wary about anything that becomes something else simply by adding hot water.

The native Filipinos may be small, but they have always reserved the dignified right to look you in the eye with a coconut-milk moustache and say “Got sense?”

(Birch Tree milk drinker Jimmy Santos, of which he had a thrice-a-day habit)

The Chinese milk scandal/ scare (scandal for them, scare for us) readily fills the position vacated by the Y2K bug as the boogeyman of the Filipinos’ collective consciousness.

Milk sales in all local grocery stores are down in record numbers. Cadbury chocolate has been pulled out from all 7-11 outlets. Even candies allegedly imported from China are being shunned. Such is the Filipino’s natural fear of anything that threatens the health of their kidneys, what with the kidneys’s close proximity to the liver (the body’s first line of defense during those long nights of gin-buga sessions) not to mention the P160,000 healthy kidneys go for on the black market.

Never mind that there have been no reports of tainted-milk related incidents outside China. Modern Filipinos reserve the right to crack off-color jokes about death and the Chinese for as long as it doesn’t claim one of our own (it being either death or the Chinese– Ed.)

A: Wala namang umaabot na gatas galing China dito sa Pilipinas.

B: Pag dating dito ng gatas, Orocan plastik na.

Oh, what rapier wit.

–PreMadonna

(Originally uploaded 30 September 2008, but published late because I was a dummy. Sorry, guise –OneTamad)