Got milk?

Got milk?

If you're in the US, the answer, apparently, is "no".

We've just finished a trip from Toronto to Phoenix and back.

When we stopped in Indiana at a McDonald's (which now puts the cream and sugar in your milk for you, why I don't know) and asked for coffee with milk -- not cream -- we were told we could have coffee with creamer, or coffee with cream, but not milk. When we incredulously insisted on milk we were told we would have to buy a container of milk. Which added about a buck-fifty to the price of our large cup of coffee, which we split. (In their favour I must admit the McDonald's milk container is the cutest thing imaginable, complete with a screw-on lid.)

Even more incredibly, we found this to be consistently the case from Indiana on down and back again. Bad enough that this should happen at a McDonald's, but there was even a sit-down IHOP restaurant in Oklahoma City that charged us for a glass of milk when we insisted on milk in our coffees.

With all the stress on healthy, reduced-fat eating, and companies bending over backwards to present a health-conscious image to the public, you would think that American restaurants would falling all over themselves to offer customers milk in their coffees rather than cream.

But you would be wrong. No bending. No falling. Creamer, or cream.

In one McDonalds, when I asked for milk rather than cream, I was told somewhat hopefully that we could get "half and half". As if, "well, half of it would be milk!". Half and half is is a split-the-difference between 18% cream and 2% milk at 10% butterfat. To my mind and taste it's still 100% cream. (Maybe I should have said, "I'll have the half-and-half -- hold the cream half!)

As we headed north, and reason once again began to waft in the air, we did have a McDonald's guy in Michigan who offered to put milk in our coffees for us even though it wasn't on the menu. This greatly perplexed the McDonald's order-taker who couldn't figure out how to ring it in properly.

But at least we got our milk.

And, of course, once we got to Canada, land flowing with milk and maple syrup, getting milk in our coffees ceased to be a problem.

And that's the way the Ball bounces.