I seem to have gone off milk. As a typical British person (I do confess to being British on the odd occasion), I love drinking tea but over the past few weeks, I’ve taken a couple of sips and ended up pouring it down the sink. I actually thought it was the tea I’d lost interest in but it is definitely the milk.

I’ve never been a milk fan and when I was growing up, my mum had to find all sorts of devious ways to make sure I got it in my diet in some way or the other. Getting up for school in the morning, I always made my brother pour milk on his cereal first so he would get the dreaded cream always present at the top of the full fat stuff. When I was in primary school, we got free full fat milk every morning in these little bottles that stank to high heaven. You had to drink it - no excuses. The only way I could drink it, was to shake it really hard and down it in one go while trying not to breath.

When we got older, my mum switched to semi-skimmed milk which I could tolerate much better - no dreaded cream. I still can’t eat anything with cream. I became a vegetarian when I was about fifteen and haven’t eaten meat or fish since so I was always careful to get protein from other sources and wasn’t ready to become a vegan. I’m not a nut fan at all so most of my preferred meals were Italian based as it is so easy to convert pasta, lasagne or whatever to a vegetarian dish. My mum was very sceptical about my choice and was convinced I was going to be constantly sick because I wasn’t a total carnivore like her. The truth was I was never into meat and often used to leave it on my plate and don’t even get me started on how disgusting I found fish. I’ve never had any ill-effects from not eating meat and got the last laugh when everyone began panicking about Mad Cow Disease.

Getting back to the milk issue, I still don’t think I could be a vegan but there have been a few signs that I may be subconsciously moving towards it. A couple of years ago, I started using soya milk in my cereals and that meant my only source of cow’s milk was in my tea which I only drank at night. Cutting out milk from my diet would be so easy but there are other dairy products, like cheese, that I would find harder giving up. I don’t like eggs much either so that wouldn’t be much of a problem. Then, of course, you have all the food products that contain dairy in some form or another and I’m not sure I could really dedicate myself to finding alternatives.

One of my work colleagues is a breast cancer survivor, and she has done a lot of research into different types of foods and does not touch dairy if she can help it. She’s not completely strict and if she can’t find anything alternative to eat when on holiday, she will eat dairy. She’s told me a few things in regard to dairy which have scared me to death and really made me think. I’ve done research on milk and all the crap it contains which hasn’t helped either. (Do yourself a favour and don’t just accept all the “milk is good for you” campaigns because they are all lies.)

So, what do I do? Is this just a temporary thing because I always liked my tea milky and I may just wake up next week dying for a cup of tea? Or, am I just going to end up drinking herbal all the time which I already do during the day at work? I guess the best thing is to just go with the flow and see where it leads.