Don’t you dairy — Sam Burnett

I am allergic to milk – it’s really fine, but it’s at this point that people usually squeal a little ‘aaaaaaaw’ as they think of their favourite rancid dairy based product that they would be denied if they were in fact me. Forgetting of course, the Pavlovian effect of being allergic to something usually means that you hate it. Cheese literally makes me want to puke. Butter? Can’t stand it.

It’s all fine then, I just don’t have it. The problem is usually when people stash milk in stupid places. Do crisps need milk on them? No they don’t. Unless they’re a cheese flavour, but that’s a stupid taste for crisps and you would rightfully want to assume that an advertised crisp flavour would have at least a whiff of that foodstuff on it somewhere. Marks and Spencer has just started putting butter on all its sandwiches for some reason, that’s a bit annoying. I used to love a Boots chicken triple, a true meal deal bargain, but then they started putting sodding Parmesan in the mayonnaise. Ridiculous. They stopped doing it, but the damage was done.

Nowadays I have expanded the traditional definition of insanity to include going to any British supermarket and expecting there to be a dairy free ice cream that wasn’t there before. I had an amazing one in Aldi a couple of years back, it had peanut butter in it, but it was there for two weeks and hasn’t been seen since. I still go in regularly with an irrational level of hope only to storm out in a huff mere minutes later.

Sainsbury’s currently has a deal going on minty Jude’s and I’m going to be absolutely devastated when it finishes. I can’t bear Ben & Jerry’s since Unilever trashed the brand (just don’t pretend to be nice, I can cope with that) so that means my pudding diet has consisted for a long while almost exclusively of Swedish Glacé, which has admittedly done a great deal for my people. But I’ve long missed a mint choc chip addition to the milkless oeuvre. I reckon I’ve probably had five tubs in the last few weeks. If you’re going to feel sorry for me, feel bad about that.