Taste Testing

I’m a big fan of the website Newser. My father-in-law introduced me to it and he’s a man who knows his way around news sites. Each article is a maximum of two paragraphs long and gives you just enough information that you can successfully answer the questions on NPR’s Wait! Wait!, but probably won’t help you win any future games of Trivial Pursuit.

Today, I have a problem with it. In this era of celebrity news being more important than world news, I know that celebrities sell. Their opinions, for whatever reason, get to be heard, whereas the leaders of the free world get largely ignored. The only reason Ghaddafi (there are so many spellings, I have no idea which one is correct) is getting press at all is because his drunken ramblings mirror those of Charlie Sheen, arguably the bigger “name” in this day and age. However, this story in particular seems to go above and beyond celebrity interest and straight into celebrity insanity.

To wit, “Breast Milk Ice Cream OK’d – Lady Gaga isn’t happy.”

So, where to begin with this little nugget of stupidity?

• Breast milk ice cream is a thing now? Really? Beyond going the Tony Bourdain route and eating it just to say you have, who actually would want to eat it on a regular basis? How tasty can it possibly be? Isn’t ice cream milk-based anyway? How is adding milk to milk making it yummier? Unless you are making the donor boobs (in both meanings) ingest lots of flavoring for a better final product, I just don’t see the point. Is the breast milk pasteurized? Is it from free-range women? Are they grass-fed? Is the grass legal? It also must be prohibitively expensive! Women aren’t really cows. They don’t produce quarts of the stuff at a time. How large can each batch be? A cup? Can you order a double DD with sprinkles?
  
  
• We care what Lady Gaga thinks? Really? About anything? About ice cream? I barely let my husband choose my Ben & Jerry’s, let alone some chick I’ve never met. Plus, when I look for suggestions on fatty desserts, the last person I am going to ask is the too skinny size-zero who hasn’t even inhaled a carb in years.
  
  
• Since when did Lady Gaga shy away from free publicity? Is it because she isn’t getting a cut of the profits?
  
  
• Gaga is a word used to express the sounds a baby makes. Babies have been making those sounds long before Lady Gaga has been making music. By about, oh several centuries. By calling the ice cream Baby Gaga, they may be riffing on her name, but really, even if she weren’t a thing (and I really can’t wait til she isn’t), the ice cream name would still make sense. You don’t need to know who Lady Gaga is to understand the naming of Baby Gaga breast milk ice cream. So please, shut it crazy lady.
  
  
• Who thought of this? Who was sitting around one day watching a woman pump, or nurse, or leak, or anything breast milk related and thought, man, if only I could freeze that, put it in a bowl, and put a cherry on top? Most men I know are great admirers of boobs, so that part makes sense. But most women I know have pretty firm ideas of what boobs are supposed to be used for and creaming and sugaring is not one of them.
  
  
• And my final and most important question is this – why is this news? One tiny shop is probably selling very tiny portions of ice cream and suddenly it’s a story? I’m sure they obtained the breast milk legally. It may be gross, but my brother-in-law brought my kids scorpion lollipops for Christmas. What’s more disgusting? Only you can decide.
  
  Newser is still my go-to news source since CNN failed me over and over again, but I do wish they would drop the dumber stories, or at least put them in a “stupid people” section.