Why I Won’t Be Drinking Oat Milk Anymore
I sat for three hours at the non air-conditioned ferry terminal on our island’s capital of Castries, along with about another one-hundred people, waiting for our packages from the nearby French territory of Martinique.
Some people were waiting for packages with clothing or European electrical appliances, amongst other items not available locally. I was waiting for milk.
Milk? What do the other 180,000 island residents do? There’s plenty of milk in every supermarket, but Chalav Yisrael milk is impossible to come by. The island doesn’t have its own milking facilities, so we cannot supervise our own run.
In the past, we would take the 50-mile (an hour-and-a-half choppy ride, and an overnight ordeal) passenger ferry to Martinique to get kosher milk and meat, but since the pandemic, the borders and ferry are shuttered. To make matters worse, the supermarket on Martinique that stocked the kosher milk went out of business and the new owners stopped stocking it.
For Pesach, since most non-dairy milk alternatives are either kitniyot or chametz, we had no choice but to import UHT milk directly from France via air, costing us $12 per liter. We knew we had to figure out another plan, so we reached out to some of our friends in Martinique to see what could be done.
By Divine design, a new cargo ferry service was launched at the end of last month, and last week, after a few months of work, we were finally able to get another supermarket on the French territory to start stocking the milk, perfect timing for us!
Is Chalav Yisrael milk that important? Surely we could rely on the various rabbinic leniencies for good ‘ole cows’ milk? Don’t the benefits of milk — especially for the kids — outweigh the need to be so strict?
To answer that we need to understand what Chalav Yisrael is.
Chalav Yisrael is milk from a kosher animal that is supervised by a mashgiach (kosher supervisor).
Our tradition stresses the importance of using Chalav Yisrael products exclusively and emphasizes that using non-Chalav Yisrael dairy products can have an adverse spiritual effect¹.
Even when Chalav Yisrael is seemingly impossible to obtain, being aware of its positive effect on a Jew’s spiritual sensitivity, we’ll do whatever it takes to get it, even if it means convincing a store in another country to stock it, so we can then import it to ours.
How much more so for those for whom it’s readily available.
So next time you’re at your local Starbucks about to order that dulce de leche frappuccino with whipped cream and sprinkles, think about your soul and the spiritual effect the drink may have. Is it really worth it?
Today, in most places around the world, Chalav Yisrael milk and other dairy products are readily available; there’s no need to do your own international import. Seek it out, because your soul matters.
[1]: Sefer HaMaamarim-Yiddish, p. 57
