Bibo Ergo Sum

Time to consider the beverages that we drink. I'll concentrate on the fundamentals: water, milk, beer, coffee, and tea. Another time maybe I'll post about the disorienting feeling of seeing Coca Cola in a place like India.

So the problem with water is that I want to get rid of the impurities like lead and mercury, but I'm not sure about cutting out fluoride. Reverse osmosis systems take it all out, so I wonder if that's the right thing to get if you have young kids. My Brita pitcher doesn't remove fluoride, but it's inconvenient relative to a reverse osmosis system.

Milk is great, especially skim milk. Still, there's something special about the milk I had in India. It's not goat's milk, it's just cow's milk that comes in plastic bags and you have to boil it yourself to make sure it's safe. A layer of solid stuff forms on the top, and you skim it off, but if little bits of it get into the cereal it's actually kind of good, creamy and flavorful. Also, since it's warm after being boiled, you get used to warm milk and cereal. It's nice once you're used to it.

I've already posted about beer, I'll just mention that it's healthy, and that Budweiser is preferable to Miller for health reasons.

Coffee is something I can't have very often for caffeine-addiction related reasons. The great thing about coffee is that when you drink it you can almost taste our colonial heritage. Especially if you're in a place like New Orleans, it tastes like the fruit of a morally dubious but historically epic movement.

Tea is colonial, too, but it has a much different feeling for me, a little less romantic (which is perhaps unwarranted given its history). The best tea I've had is Darjeeling tea with milk and sugar. Some people say you can't put milk in, and other say no sugar, but I say do what makes you happy. Don't scald the tea; Darjeeling is delicate and sweet, not robust.