Originally published by The Clifton Courier, September 15, 2021

I just had to throw a whole kilo of yoghurt in the bin. 

Now, before you go painting me as one of these big city, yoghurt wastin’ folk, hear me out. I’m not just frivolously buying yoghurt and then not eating it. I usually burn through the stuff. 

I mean, you can do so many things with plain Greek yoghurt. You can dollop it on nachos or dump stewed fruit on it for a dessert or drizzle it on most lamby-dishes or you chuck in a few herbs and use it as a salad dressing or use it to tenderise a chicken or, even though we’re getting past porridge weather, I will say that stirring in a glob of Greek yoghurt into a saucepan of porridge just before it’s ready will make for a creamy, creamy breakfast slop that I would heartily recommend. 

Plain Greek yoghurt is good stuff. And I usually throw so much of said good stuff down my gullet that buying just a single, one-kilo tub at a time seems quite restrained. 

But I recently bought a tub that wasn’t right. 

Like, if you were going by the use-by date, it’s still edible. But when I opened the tub, it looked very, very runny. Sometimes there’s a bit of whey that collects on the top, so I stuck my finger into the tub (this was my personal yoghurt tub, mind you, I’d like to make it very clear that I’m not jamming my hands into communal dairy products like some kind of maniac) to check if there was any yoghurty thickness underneath. 

But there was none. 

It was just a tub of chunky milk. 

And maybe it was still fine to eat – in terms of it not giving me food poisoning, anyway. I’m no expert and I didn’t run any scientific tests on it, so I can’t say for sure. But there’s something threatening about dairy that makes you not want to second-guess it. Like, you can take your chances on a lot of things, but dairy isn’t one of them.  

Maybe it wouldn’t have killed me, but the mouth feel of chunky milk would not have been pleasant. And maybe this makes me a bit of a diva, but I just don’t think the benefits of using up all that watery yoghurt juice were worth the gamble of spending an entire night with my head in the toilet. 

In the end, I made the decision not to eat the yoghurt. It’s called self-care. 

But what does one do with a whole kilo of dairy water? How is one supposed to dispose of such a cursed substance?

I’d have like to have sent it back down to the underworld (it clearly came from there because it obviously curdled in the ambient heat – the underworld is no place for dairy products) but you really shouldn’t be pouring such things down sinks. 

I don’t have a dog, so I couldn’t just leave it in a dogbowl and wait for the problem to take care of itself (but I just Googled whether dogs can have dairy products and one website told me that, actually, most adult dogs are lactose intolerant so it’s probably quite a good thing that I’m not in charge of keeping one of them alive).

I wasn’t just going to tip the yoghurt out in my garden, setting fire to it wouldn’t work and I had a feeling that starting a waterbomb fight with milky missiles would be an unsuccessful way of making friends with the people who live in my street.  

The only way to get rid of it was via the wheelie bin. 

But, I tell you what, I really don’t feel good about it.

It’s a waste of my hard-earned yoghurt money. It’s a waste of yoghurt. It’s a waste of all the time and resources that went into making that yoghurt. And the guilt about that wastage makes me sick to my stomach. 

Well, that and the thought of a litre of milk water sloshing around in a garbage truck, that is.