Coronavirus Diary 11 – Self-isolating with Soya…. Ugh!

Yesterday was a day of unexpected pleasures; namely a food delivery by a friend.  My kitchen is now loaded with enough root vegetables to last a week or two and I also have a chicken, some sausages, 5 gluten free chocolate brownies and a spare pox of porridge oat flakes and my first eggs of 2020.

Very annoyingly and well after this particular horse has bolted the supermarkets in the U.K. now have a policy of only 2 products per sale which call me stupid but was exactly what many people were saying should have been happening a month ago.    Sadly in the case of soya milk, this isn’t much help at all.

Not many people drink Soya milk voluntarily unless they are vegan and even then there are alternatives such as coconut, rice, hemp, oat though in my mind most of them are not for me.  Cows milk was always my favourite drink of all so anything else was always going to be an imposition and 5 years later I still crave just a small glass.  Sweetened Soya milk doesn’t taste like real milk but it is passable.  A bit like a cheap brand of beans or coke doesn’t taste anywhere like as nice as the real stuff but it looks the part even if the taste leaves you wondering why they bothered.

There is also unsweetened soya milk which is nowhere near as nice.  In fact I’d go to say it is vile.  Below that there is the equivalent of long-life unsweetened soya milk which really should be banned by the United Nations; if I am ever unfortunate to find that in a shopping bag then my shoulders really do sag.  The only way I can consume it is in a rather odious concoction of home made cocoa or hot chocolate with sugar.  The whole thing goes down better if I either hold my nose when drinking it or don’t drink anything for several hours beforehand so that it goes down quickly.

Whichever type of Soya Milk you get though, it comes in 1 litre cartons which is tiny in comparison to the 4 or 6 pint bottles of cow milk that you find in shops these days.  If you use Soya milk as most people would use cows milk with their cereals or hot drinks then 2  cartons of soya milk might last 4-5 days at best for one person.

Most people who have Soya Milk aren’t doing so out of Vegan convictions and will be doing so due to issues due to issues relating to dairy allergies and many of these will be suffering from more severe issues such as coeliac or maybe Crohn’s disease which links into issues with your immune system where in effect your immune system fights the body similar but several orders of magnitude up from what many Hay-fever sufferers are familiar with.

Having a compromised immune system is one of the things you don’t really want to have which is why I often get bad chest infections so given that such people have been told not to go shopping and or get others to gather essentials for you then only allowing enough milk for 4 days doesn’t seem to be a great case of joined up thinking and likely just part of a broad response by someone high up the chain somewhere that does not come across this in their day to day life.

So yesterday my main meal was an intensely appetising cheese on toast.  Before you get too excited it was 2 week out of date gluten free bread and 6 week out of date goats cheese.   And people used to wonder whether anyone could survive on WW2 rations today.  What with a love of Spam and 6 week old cheese I think the answer is a resounding never mind survive it, some of us live on it!   There’s a reason I never throw out any old food!Food Waste I don’t buy it.