Lactose Intolerance

(first appeared on HMS Beagle)

by Jim Kling

I hate grocery shopping. I can think of a thousand things I'd rather do -- go fishing, read a good book, watch a movie. Just about anything will do. But once a week I am assigned the ritual. So any time one of the ladies hawking frozen chicken patties or the latest and greatest salsa dip asks if I'd like a sample, I look at it as playing hooky from the canned vegetable aisle. My wife's list usually requires that I spend quite a lot of time in there.

As I angled my cart around the natural foods aisle, I saw the saleslady in the usual place right in front of the frozen foods display. Maybe it's only in retrospect, but she did seem a little odd. I don't know if it was the 1950s-style ankle cotton dress and shoulder-length curlicue blonde hair or her raspy voice. But the double chocolate chip cookies she had laid out like the colors on a painter's palette diverted my attention. "Care for one? New from Better Cracker -- it's a delicious mix!" I'm a sucker for cookies, so I picked one up. Indeed, I'd never tasted one so good. Not dry like your ordinary cookie, this practically flowed through my mouth and down my throat. And those weren't chocolate chips -- no, more like chunks of pure chocolate essence that exploded as soon as I bit into them.

Better Cracker, that was a brand I'd never heard of before. But if cookies this good came from a box, I was sold. The lady gave me a serene, satisfied look. Almost too pleased with her sale. But I figured it was because I was the only customer that had stopped at her table. Everyone else was passing us by.

At home, I put off making dinner. Those cookies were too good. Sarah would be home in awhile, but I figured I'd have plenty of time to make a batch (the box said just 15 minutes). I mixed the ingredients -- just two eggs, a cup of milk and the powder that came in a plastic bag inside the orange and teal Better Cracker box. Twenty minutes later, I pulled the first batch out of the oven and pried one off the piping hot baking sheet. Gingerly, I tasted it. The cookie was tasty, but no more so than that produced from your average cookie mix. I stood sweating in front of the hot oven, contemplating where I'd gone wrong. Maybe if I hadn't substituted…

When suddenly, the sales lady from the supermarket barged through the front door. Only this time there something definitely odd about her. She wore the same dress and her hair looked about the same, but I could have sworn she had no ears. And if my first, shocked initial impression hadn't been wrong, the skin of her arms bore a faint suggestion of scales. I swooned a bit from the sight of her (forgive me, but I'd been expecting my petite, good-natured wife to enter and begin a diatribe about her day at the public relations firm, not a sixty-some year old, slightly reptilian saleswoman).

"Hee-aaah ha hah" she choked out in a deep, hissing laugh that had no business coming from a middle-aged woman. For just a moment, her brow protruded slightly and a green, scaly tuft sprung up from the top of her head. An instant later, she was once again a conservatively-dressed saleswoman bearing down on me. "You are just the first! You and so many others like you will purchase and bake the Better Cracker Instant Bazooka Cookies, and you will be transformed into one of us!" The demonic senior citizen-creature whose eyes now seemed double-lidded, if I wasn't mistaken, paused in her rant to regard the gradually cooling baking sheet. "Ah, yes. You have no idea, do you, fool? The virus we've planted in the mix will infect your cells and gradually replace your DNA with ours. You will have no control. You will buy Better Cracker Bazooka Cookies and consume more and more until you have lost all semblance of humanity!"

I thought of the disappointing taste of the cookies. "Oh dear!" I cried, doing my best impression of panic- stricken (an act made better by the fact that I mostly was). "Why did I have to get it as a mix? Why aren't the cookies available in a box?"

"I suppose I can tell you. It's too late, after all. It's the milk, fool. The lactose it contains is the growth medium for the virus. As it grows within you, the virus will create an insatiable desire for more cookies. And with its growth assured, the virus will alter you forever!" She looked again at the baking sheet. "Enjoy!" Grinning maniacally, she turned and walked again towards the front door. As the door swung shut behind her, I caught the barest glimpse of a tail.

I picked up my earlier line of thought. Maybe the cookies would have tasted better if I hadn't substituted soy milk for regular milk.

Sarah's public relations firm had recently taken on a project for Mother Earth Organic Foods, which was promoting a whole line of imitation milk products made from soybean and rice. When she took on a new client, Sarah always used their products. As a result, the closest thing we'd had to milk was a pint of Mother Earth How Now Soy Cow. I'd found it to be a pretty fair approximation to milk. No cow milk, and no lactose to be found in it, though.

The truth is, I was a little disappointed. Oh, I wanted to stay human all right, but a cookie that could impart that magnitude of a chocolate experience might almost be worth an alien transformation.

When Sarah came home that night, we had a long talk over dinner about the importance of her new client. Mother Earth had better win over milk drinkers. As near as I can tell, the human race is dependent upon it.

 

Copyright Jim Kling, 1999