Why does nobody ever serve soy milk?

SOCIAL STUDIES - Published Monday January 5th, 2009

Here is a pet peeve. It is not a large one, but nonetheless; why do most restaurants and fast food places only have milk?

I have recently discovered I am allergic to milk. Not just lactose intolerant, which is manageable, but allergic to the protein found in milk. Anyone who has ever eaten soy cheese, soy yoghurt, or soy sour cream will feel my pain.

But seriously, lactose intolerance is the scourge of the modern world. I am not sure whether it is additives or overuse that has caused so many human beings to no longer be able to digest it, but these people need soy milk as well.

So we have a significant percentage of the population being lactose intolerant; and we have milk and milk products as the third most common food allergy amongst North Americans; and we have Tim Hortons, arguably the place where most of us go for coffee.

The only choice there is black. I guess it saves on calories if you drink it like that; but I like my coffee cut a little with something, anything, that is white.

It could not be that hard to pick up a few litres of soy milk. There are a hundred varieties in the grocery store. And for all those who are in the same boat and do not know this, you can get a soy latte at Starbucks pretty easily. It will cost you more though.

While we are at this; my wife has her own Tim Hortons pet peeve. In an age where power is getting harder and harder to come by, and where the manufacturing of electronics wastes tons of carbon, everyone seems to be installing a myriad of flat screen televisions as decoration.

Really, does seeing them dip the Boston cream donut in chocolate in high definition make you buy one? I was either going to get the donut or not. Most of us do not need any urging to buy products at Tim's.

Or how about the fact that Wal-Mart assumes that most of us cannot control our ADHD enough to stand in line for three minutes. They have installed LCD televisions that drop down from the sky like candy and play senseless, poorly drawn cartoons which I think are supposed to double as product placement ads.

Of course, by the time you are in line in Wal-Mart, surrounded by a hundred jostling people all trying to get their kids to quiet down, there is no way in tarnation that you are going to leave the line and go back and pick up whatever they flash on the screen. By that point all you want it to get out of there.

So again, what purpose could these serve, except to waste both our time and our energy?
Think about this -- if you were not being hypnotized by mindless images you might actually take the time to talk to the person standing beside you in line. Imagine.

The other week I was in Belleville, Ontario, and I managed to talk the hotel manager into giving me a $200 a night room for $95. Just because I took the time to know their name, joke with them, ask them about the history of the hotel, and generally be interested in them as a person.

The sad thing is that when you do take an interest in the people around you they tend to react like no one ever thought to do that before. They were probably all watching TV.

Try this for starters. When someone who has been working all day trying to please other people asks you routinely how you are, tell them. Then ask how they are. When they answer "good", which they always will, look them straight in the eyes, pause, arch your eyebrow and say "really?" Trust me, no one ever feels so nondescript that "good" could cover it all. But we have forgotten how to interact with people in the real world. It is far easier to e-mail, text, phone, or ignore the people around us. And so we fail to even think that biding our time by conversing with other people we encounter along the way is an option.

Most of us do spend a significant part of our lives out there in the stores, running errands, preparing for the holidays, or just trying to keep house and home together. Urban planners of every generation have always been trying to create "malls" or common areas where we could all come together and talk, share, play -- become a community.

Then someone gets the bright idea to install televisions and push us all back into ourselves. We become so content with ignoring everything around us that community is the furthest thing from our mind. We really have to rebel against that tendency.

And if you work for Tim Hortons, pick me up some Soy milk, will you?