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I drank a small refreshing glass of cold milk just now.  It occurs to me that the process by which that milk arrived in my glass was a fairly elaborate one.  We don’t have fresh milk in Kisangani.  Not in the supermarket, not in roadside stands.  In fact, I’ve never seen a milk cow and cows of all sorts are rare.  Most everyone drinks powdered milk if they are drinking milk at all. 

So my glass of milk starts in the basement of the building where the man hired to fill my water cans and carry them back up to the apartment might even wait for some time for the water to flow from the spigot.  Eventually it fills and he carries jugs up the stairs two at a time.  I pull a water can out of the room where I store water; carry it to the kitchen.  I pour it into a stock pot and get it up to a rolling boil (about 45 minutes on the electric burner).  I let it cool some and then I filter it (usually overnight).  In the morning I draw some of that precious sterile filtered water and mix it with milk powder (I don’t know if that comes from a cow or not).  I put an ice cube in it to melt and simulate that fresh-from-the-fridge taste (ice cubes are a real luxury).  Then I kick my feet up on the coffee table and tip it back.  Mid-glass, my mind wanders and I write this blog.

Among the books I’m reading: “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Pollan.  It’s about industrial and organic farming and food production and so I’m thinking more than ever about everything that influences consumption, food anthropology in the USA and here.