not parosmia

Athena Scalzi reports that she has the common post-Covid symptom of parosmia, wherein foods that you formerly liked - in her case, mint, coffee, peanut butter, and meat - all taste and smell really bad, rancid and disgusting.

What interested me is that at first she thought the particular batch of food had just gone bad. Because that's what happened to me, long ago, with milk.

I was 9 years old and used to drinking an individual-serving container of milk with my school lunch. One day the milk tasted off. Not horribly rancid as in parosmia, just spoiled. I figured it had gone bad. Next day, the same thing. Third day, I made sure it was fresh milk, and I had someone else take a sip of it from a cup. They said it was fine, but I found it still spoiled.

So I figured something had gone wrong with me and milk, and I've never drunk any plain milk since. I do eat cheese, and I sometimes use milk in cooking, but I don't drink milk.

I haven't tried any in the interim either. In this way it differs from beer. Every decade or so I try a glass of beer to see if it still tastes like beer. It always does, so I put it down and leave it alone for another decade.