An addendum to the Milk Zeno’s Paradox (or “M’zoop” as its known) known as the (Afro-Eurasian) 4D Caveat.
It has occassionally arisen that too much milk can occur, indicating the impending critical event of ‘sour milk explosion’. You may have heard of these, believe me, my friends, sisters best friends boyfriend actually had it happen to him! Where a two gallon jug of milk was left in a fridge over christmas, went off, expanded, ruptured, and turned the entire food storage device into a microcosm of the deepest, most wretched depths of Hell.
So far I have witnessed two near misses, both for very different reasons. The first was while staying with my uncle – there were my uncle, my cousin and myself in residence for the month of August while my aunt and other two cousins were away. Being as we were three men in a house, the fact that the milk order had not been altered or amended lead to a startlingly quick buildup of half pint cartons of milk. By the half-tray in fact.
As everyone knows it is among the cardinal sins to pour milk out because you never know when someone will need it for cereal, or the cat or assorted dairy related activities, so we averted that disaster by replacing a good deal of the water in our diet with milk. For example – Coffee became cafe au lait (milk + instant coffee, nuked). Thus was crisis averted.
However, a far stranger thing happened the summer I stayed at Lake Tahoe – there were eleven of us in a large house with a monstrously huge fridge (by European stanards). We were broke, and so our local Safeways with its ‘two for ones’ was The Place. Point – We all shopped at weekends. Unfortunately one weekend no less that four separate pairs from the house went shopping and spotted the same two-for-one deal on gallons of milk. Milk by the gallon was already a terrifying concept to us, and two gallons of milk for a handful of nickels was beginning to warp our reality.
Imagine then the horror of the last of the shoppers who returned to the Fridge Crypt of the Dwarven Kings and found something akin to eight gallons of milk awaiting their additional two. We all began avoiding the kitchen, and laughing uncomfortably and spending a great deal more time on the deck, or down on the back-yard/prairie, or up a mountain with binoculars on a spur around the lake.
However, it became obvious over time that in fact the milk from Safeways was not going off and in fact appeared to be entirely lacking in a fourth dimension. We had half-and-half, skimmed, semi-skimmed, vitamin-enriched, ordinary (pasteurized, homogenised) UHT and other kinds, bought on spec under the giddy influence of Two-For-One. By the time the house was abandoned some months later only the dregs of the milk and the Immortal Stolen BBQ Beans (food of last resort) remained.
There has been argument over whether this second counts as an example under the 4D Caveat, and there is a school that holds that in fact milk within the United States is exempt from the 4D Caveat – hence the occasionally used “Afro-Eurasian” prefix, noted here for the sake of completeness.
In summary, the 4D Caveat allows one to dispose of milk found in a communal fridge, insuch circumstances as it is believed that there is an imminent risk to the integrity of the fridge, or the foodstuffs of oneself or others and where personal courage (and lack of imagination) is sufficient to overcome the hideous consequences of mishandling the disposal.