The other day, after returning from work, M handed me a baby bottle and asked if I thought it tasted bad. I took a sniff, didn’t smell bad. I even took a taste. It wasn’t terrib.. oh my GOD what is that get it Out Now!! IT IS STUCK TO MY MOUTH NOTHING TASTES GOOD DEATH ROTTING PLAGUE ROADKILL*&%# It really was unlike anything I had ever tasted. It started off kind of sweet, sort of like vanilla ice cream, then it took an almost savory note, sesame-like then diverting into pure copper/soap/funk. It coated my mouth, no matter how much I spit or gargled, it wouldn’t go away. It only made whatever I tried to mask the flavor with taste bad as well. So it wasn’t good.. I really don’t have the words to describe the flavor any more. Even thinking about it give me goosebumps and the weird saliva rush before you boot everywhere. Turns out E thought the same and while he didn’t cry or freak out, he definitely rejected the bottle no matter how hard M tried to get him to take it. Now the question was, how did it get that way? It was one of the frozen milk samples. We’d been feeding these to him for a while, there hadn’t been a problem. We tested the frozen stuff weeks ago when M read that sometimes it can taste bad. We thawed some and E took it fine. No problem. M had been defrosting them in chronological order, so we knew if they all of a sudden started tasting bad, we’d be able to find them. We tried a few more from the next scheduled frozen sample and BLEAGH MAKE OITSTOPAHHHHH. This was going to be a problem. What happened? We took great care to make sure it stayed cold. It didn’t taste or smell like spoiled milk, so I didn’t believe there was a temperature fail in there. It wasn’t very old, maybe 6 weeks, maybe less. Something weird was happening. Luckily we were at the end of May’s supply and had a schedule pickup/dropoff for June’s milk. I had high hopes. So Monday was my day off, I had E for the duration and my task was to find where the ‘good’ milk started. I believed it was M’s diet, maybe she had some garlic or curry or something that she ate that took a few days to leave the system and we’d be back in business. We had an entire month’s supply of frozen milk, maybe 50 bags’ worth, so a little more than one per day. I stared out thawing 3 at a time, careful not to let them get too warm, I didn’t want any ‘good’ ones to go bad by my hand. I set up fresh bottles for the milk to go in, I had spoons for tasting, I had grape juice to wash any bad taste away. First taste was bad, I expected that. I still wasn’t used to the flavor, so it was most unpleasant. I went to the next bag, still more awful. I think this one was actually worse. I gagged. My stomach retched. I had swallowed some. The sneaky bad taste didn’t come right away. It took almst ten seconds to set in. By the time I realized it was terrible, I’d already taken a second taste to verify, since the first taste wasn’t terrible and then it hit and built and didn’t stop getting worse. It coated my tounge, it got in my throat it was everywhere. I had to step up my anti-fouling procedures. I got a toothbrush, I got fresh coffee beans. After each wretched taste, I scrubbed my tounge, drooling the pre-puke drool, deeply inhaling coffee aromas to get the funk out of my sinuses. The nasty milk was all over the kitchen sink because the flimsy storage bags weren’t exactly pour friendly. The reek was everywhere. I was only 2 days into the month. I tried to discern what a ‘good’ bag looked like versus a ‘bad’ bag. I went deep into June – the 18th, that was sure to be good. Gong. Wretched. Horrible. So did that mean that every bag from 6/2 – 6/18 was bad? That was almost 30 bags. I couldn’t arbitrarily throw them all out. M would kill me. I had to test them all. Wait.. I had to test them all?? Do you know how insanely BS it is knowing you have to repeatedly taste the worst taste in the world and you have no idea when it might stop? I was furious and profoundly sad at the same time. M suffered quite a bit to build up this store. Was all her work for naught? What was E going to eat? Why had this all gone so wrong? Why did it have to taste to bad, why did I get to taste it? When would it end!?! SO I started in, defrosting bag after bag. Gagging, wretching, spitting howling mad. E watched me with a curious look on his face. Innocent to the suffering I endured for his welfare. M occasionally ventured down to ask how it was going. The she would laugh as I described how bad it was. It was strangely hilarious. The empty bags piled up in the garbage, the world’s nastiest empties, never to be rivaled by any frat house recycling bin. My senses grew stronger or immune, because I stopped actually tasting how bad the milk all was. I had a hard time telling if it truly was bad, I had to take bigger tastes, gargling it like a fine, foul single malt, never swallowing. At one point, I couldn’t tell if the taste was permanently in my mouth. I needed a better plan. M had a new bottle of milk in the fridge. I tasted it. It was fine. I took a whiff. It smelled like… nothing. I took a big whiff of the nasty milk and there was a distinct smell. Not terrible on it’s own, but the association was enough to make it distinctly unbearable. Now I could detect bad milk without tasting it. Unfortunately I had to stick my nose in the bags and huff them like a shoe glue addict, deeply inhaling several times, getting the distinct aromas and molecules into my sinuses, only to replace it with coffee to overwhelm my senses back to normal. Bag after bag we went through. One of the bags had a leak. When I came back to the defrosting station, the bowl was milky white. I smelled it before I saw it. The horror. I have read that smell is the sense most related to memory, the oldest sense we evolved, the one most deeply ingrained in our brains. Now I had damaged mine with foul milk. I will always associate diesel exhaust with my father’s old diesel VW rabbit. Burning leaves and fresh cut grass have their seasonal associations. Even wet dogs have pleasant memories. I now have a new one to add to the catalogue. There is an end in sight here. I did eventually get to a good bag. There was no sweet smell of hell-taste in a bag from June 25th. I had to be sure. I tasted it, waited for the foul and… nothing. I waited longer, Maybe it was sneaking up on me and… nothing. I was ecstatic. I had another bag defrosting, was that a winner too? It was!. Unfortunately I cannot assume the rest are winners. We have to taste/smell every on from now on. The theory is that there is a statute of limitations on the freezer milk and it’s about 6 weeks. Further research has shown that we can (and could have) prevented this by adding more steps to the process, but that’s a pain in the ass. But we are going to do the extra steps now. It’s all chemistry in the end. Now I have to go get something to eat to get this horrible smell and taste out. Even thinking about it makes me frown.
