It's striking, though, that for the most part even people who are fully capable of drinking milk nevertheless find it distasteful or are embarrassed to drink it in public. Why else would the California Milk Processor Board have to work so hard to convince people to drink it with their "Got Milk?" campaign? Even with Tom Brady and Taylor Swift making it OK to sport a milk mustache, we balk at the thought of drinking the stuff.

In part it must be our reluctance to appear childish. After all the work we went through to grow up into independent and mature adults, it would be as deflating to our egos to be seen drinking milk as it would to be spotted eating strained carrots in public—or to be caught buying incontinence underwear at the drugstore. We don't squish baby food between our teeth; we don't have accidents; and we don't drink milk either. It's what we suckled when we were too dependent on our mothers to do much more than babble incoherently and hope that she knew we were hungry for the breast. Once we learned how to speak articulately, we could use our words to ask for real food.

Babbling and milk-slurping: interestingly, these were precisely the same traits that the eminently civilized classical world associated with anyone who was unlucky enough not to have been born in the Mediterranean. "Barbarian" was the classical word for people who spoke unrecognizable languages like Celtic, Germanic, Thracian, or basically any language other than Greek or Latin. A common synonym was galaktopotes, literally, milk-drinker. Those people not only babbled incoherently but they also quaffed milk—vast amounts of it. Shocking!

No wonder that we have such a conflicted attitude toward the stuff. Even those of us who actually like it have a sneaking suspicion that we should have outgrown our desire for mother's milk by now, or—just as damningly—that we're no more than barbarians for suckling a bodily fluid produced by mammary glands.

But how, then, do the Scandinavians manage to escape such associations? Their cuisine is refined (just picture a groaning smörgåsbord!) and they're as successfully weaned and toilet trained as the rest of us, yet still they drink their melk and mjolk into adulthood—and quite happily too. There's got to be another explanation.

My hunch is that it's we English speakers who have the most extreme case of a split lactic personality because we just can't decide who we are when it comes to the matter of food and drink. The Swedes and Norwegians have no such identity crisis: they're northern through and through. But us? Half our food words and attitudes come from Latin (and its derivatives French and Italian) and the other half from German. Case in point: we call the process lactation (from Latin lacte), but the product milk (from Germanic meolc). The northern European in us relishes an ice-cold glass of milk, but the more cultured Mediterranean in us is often ashamed of those irrepressible carnal appetites. In the case of that other object of our barbarian desire—meat—we square the circle by calling it something else, as though to change the name were to obscure the fleshy corporeality of the thing. Thus cows become beef, the thymus gland and pancreas become sweetbread, and testicles become Rocky Mountain oysters (or Prairie oysters). We don't stop eating meat (just think of the runaway success of the Atkins Diet!); we just rename it.

For many reasons, we've never been able to change what we call milk. It's ingrained in the very fabric of our language which is rich with such phrases as "mother's milk," "the milk of human kindness," "no use crying over spilt milk," and "the land of milk and honey." Love it or leave it, the undeniable fact is that long after we've been weaned from the breast, milk continues to fascinate us—and to repel us.