Neil Gaiman

raevynn:

neil-gaiman:

neil-gaiman:

Yes.

Pondering this, it probably deserves a longer answer. 

I don’t think that allergy, digestion, custom or religious-based dietary needs and obligations should prevent you from reading or enjoying fiction which contains things that you wouldn’t eat.

Fortunately the Milk isn’t a story that says or implies “unless you are drinking cow’s milk you are not a full person”. It’s a story that says, “A father, in a culture where they have milk of some kind on their breakfast cereal and in tea, went out to get a container of milk for his children’s breakfast, and had, or claimed to have, adventures bringing it home.”

I think one of the great things about fiction is it puts you inside other heads and minds. In books you can be a mole enjoying a nice fat worm, or Mole enjoying bacon and eggs for breakfast, without actually being a mole, or being someone who eats worms or bacon or eggs.

Preventing a child who couldn’t digest milk (and I believe well over half the human race has issues digesting lactose after weaning age,) from reading a book because it has a container of milk in it seems to me to be misguided at best and a strategy that, carried to its logical extreme, would prevent people from ever reading anything about anyone who wasn’t them, with their limitations and world and strengths, and never show them that anything else exists.

Which is a very long way around of saying,

Yes.

Wow, that’s a much more elaborate answer than I ever expected!
Wise words, as usual.

They have led me to the realization that the particular child I was thinking about wasn’t really the problem. It is the peculiar-minded parents who I would expect to be suspicious and irritated if I gave their lactose-intolerant child a book entitled “Fortunately, the Milk”.

I suppose you could print out my answer and give it to them. But not this bit.