Everything was different in the beginning. There was just one kind of milk, we, whole milk, were the rulers of the milk world, and there were no wars. One day, humans decided we weren’t good enough, they wanted something different, something more. They started making all these variations, and thus started the milk wars. It’s not quite “every milk for himself,” but it is pretty close. There are some alliances here and there, with 1 and 2% for example, but for the most part, it doesn’t matter who the other side is, if they are not you, then you fight.
There once was a time of peace after the initial war when skim, 1%, 2%, and whole figured out a way to understand each other and live with each other. Then came soy. The humans wanted something that was an option for people who couldn’t have dairy, but all that really happened was the reignition of the long burnt-out flame of fighting.
It was a very one-sided fight when it was just the dairy against the non-dairy soy milk, however as more and more variants were introduced the threads of peace that had once been strong started to the fray: almond, cashew, and coconut to name a few. Then there was the backstabbing that occurred some 200 years ago. In the dead of night, skim milk revolted against its dairy brethren after being offered a large reward by the almond clan. That then sparked a lot of distrust between us, and the 1 and 2% clans, and eventually even they left us.
Now all that’s left of the beautiful pastures from when we were first around, are the animals themselves, now confined to small spaces, and milked till they run dry. Sometimes there will be a treaty between two similar milk clans, however those only last so long, until it’s back to fighting each other.
If only there was a way to end this milkshed, then we could finally have peace and do the things that we used to do when the world was new, and we had miles and miles of fields to roam. We have tried to stop the fighting with multiple peace treaties, but the newer clans haven’t been around for long enough to have a reason to end the fighting, it’s all they’ve ever known. They didn’t know what it was like in the days of grass and sunshine, they only know the days of metal and tungsten lights.
Our only hope is that there will be no more new variations created in the near future. Then hopefully it will have been long enough that the younger clans will understand the necessity of stopping the milkshed and stopping the fighting that has been going on for millennia. Another solution is that as the clans age, they take on more of a lifestyle like ours, one of peaceful hiding, living in the shadows, and no longer participating in the wars of the outside. That would be a future full of more fear, but it would at least be a future without fighting and milkshed.
Either way, something needs to change, this is not the way to live, and we milks should be mature enough to understand that we can all co-exist even with our differences.
-Written in general Lactose’s journal in year 5,786 of the 8,000-year milk war