I came on my own dime to explore something I mentioned in issue six. I wrote about how the rat came in the hold of a ship, uninvited, but determined. It came, and it stayed. Over 250 years of traps, poison, and bounties couldn't shake its hold on this new land.

This is where many of the European ships docked in the mid 1700s. Where the rats got their foothold in this new world. I had to see the point of origin, if you will. I went to the water.

I stood at the harbor longer than I should've, watching the water, picturing that small dark animal coming down a rope with no idea it was about to win big. Every rat in this hemisphere is a relative of the ones who made that trip. This is where the family got off the boat. This is the old country.

Then I walked. In issue four I discussed terroir. I said a rat raised behind a Sichuan place in October is not the same animal as a rat raised behind a bakery in spring. I wrote about single-alley micro-lots. Well, I live in a part of the country where the alleys are three hundred yards apart and mostly full of nothing. This week, I was finally able to explore what was mostly just theory before.

I walked from a block where the whole alley smells like fermented beans and hot oil, just four minutes north, to an alley that was nothing but yeast and burnt sugar. Four minutes. Then there was a stretch of rotting fish, a corner where it looked like somebody had been putting lamb and oregano over fire on the same twenty feet of sidewalk for a generation.

Every one of those microcosms is a unique diet. Each providing a completely different nutritional base. And the animals on that first block will probably never meet the animals four minutes down the road.

France has hillsides, but this city has a hundred thousand kitchens stacked eight floors high, and the rats are eating their scraps.

I know how I must've looked. A large bald man standing at the mouth of an alley at midnight, not moving, breathing deeply through his nose, taking in the unique aroma of each alley. If I were anywhere else I'd be stared at, but not here.

8 million people walk past one of the richest and most diverse concentrations of terroir in the world, and see nothing but trash.

The trip turned darker the next day. I learned that the city has an office; a mandate written into an executive order. The title is, Citywide Director of Rodent Mitigation. The job pays north of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year.

I'll be honest, when I read that, I was moved. For eight issues I've been saying this animal deserves to be taken seriously by serious people. That was my ask in issue five. Stop giggling, come to the adults' table, build the binder, write the rules down while we're still small and agile.

Then I come to New York City, and find that they did exactly that. They named an office after the animal. They gave it a director, and put it in an executive order so it would outlive the man who signed it. Somebody finally took the rat seriously enough to hire staff. But then I read what the job is. They got it the wrong way around.

Every dollar in that office is spent on reducing the number of rats. There are an estimated three million rats in this city, and the office exists to make that number smaller.

I’m standing on the largest mischief in the Western Hemisphere and the city is spending public money to shrink it.

They're taking two strategies. The first is they are regulating the trash. Imposing rules for containerizing it. Bins, lids, schedules, fines, with more of it rolling out this year. And I'll say it plainly: it's a good policy, it's clean and orderly.

It is also the end of terroir. Everything I walked past, all the aromas in all those alleys, is the vineyard’s soil. A single-alley micro-lot is really just a bag on the curb at night, and the city is putting a lid on it.

They think they're just taking away garbage, but they're taking away the only thing that makes one block's animal taste different from the next block's. Over the next twenty generations, New York rats will be eating from fewer and fewer unique sources and, within fifty years, all of their milk will taste the same.

The second thing is worse, however. They're deploying rat contraceptives. Bait that sterilizes. It's clever, and considering the alternatives it's merciful. I understand exactly why a city would do that over laying poison, but milk comes from a lactating dam. A dam lactates because she's had a litter. No litter, no milk.

There’s no version of this business, hand or machine, artisan or fourteen-thousand-dollar pump, that survives if a mischief cannot reproduce. Twenty percent of her body weight turned to milk every day, and it only exists because she had pups.

I've been in this city for three days, and I can't be angry at them. I went house to house in issue seven and learned to take my hat off to people who got somewhere ahead of me. This is that same lesson.

This city has taken the rat more seriously than I have. They've done more real fieldwork on this animal in three years than I will do in my life. They have every reason to do what they're doing. Nobody in that office is being stupid. They're doing what the people asked for; providing a cleaner city. I’m not going to stand on a corner and tell four million households they're wrong to want their own kitchens rat-free.

But I will say this, they will not win. Two hundred years of poison, traps, and now a full government office, and there are still three million of them. Three million. After everything they’ve tried.

Three million strong, after the full attention of the richest city on earth has been pointed at this animal for two centuries. You cannot eradicate a thing so determined to survive.

So the rat will go on doing what it did in the hold of that ship, which is to survive.

There's an opening, by the way. Last I checked the chair had been empty a while. Six figures, a seat in City Hall, and the most amazing title, ‘Rat Czar’.

I would be very good at that job. I know more about this animal than most. I'd only have the arrow pointed the other direction; commercialize them. Turn them into a revenue stream. I don't believe that's what they're paying for.

Five-point-six kilograms of rat per liter, and three million of them inside the city where I'm sitting right now. Somebody is going to run that math eventually. It may as well be a man who came to look at the water.

Stay bold, my friends.

– BigCrazyBaldhead

I'll be honest. I didn't know what to do with it. Give me a man who thinks I'm insane and I can work all day. But a stack of mail with nothing in it to push against, a serious dairy revolution to run, and me standing there holding these notes of encouragement like a man handed a baby at a funeral. There is no system for this. So we'll figure it out together, in public, the way we do everything here.

The first is from a man named Telby, and here it is in full.

"Can I get rat milk please?"

That's it. That's the whole letter.

There is no warehouse, Telby. I have to tell you the same thing I told the good man in India last month. There is no tanker idling at the dock. There is no rat milk to send you, because RatMilkers.org doesn't make it or sell it or move it from one hand to another. We are a community and a mailing list and a pile of numbers. That's the truth of the thing right now, and I won't pretend otherwise.

But look at that letter. He didn't argue. He didn't ask whether it was possible, or safe, or sane. He asked whether he could have some, and he said please. He wrote to me like a man who keeps rat milk on hand and might spare a little for a stranger. Nobody has ever accused me of being that man. Most of the world wrote me off years ago. Telby looked at this whole operation and decided I was somebody they could politely ask for milk from, and I am not going to recover from that quickly.

I can't fill the order. But the next time somebody can, Telby, you got in line early, and there is no shame on this earth in being early.

The second letter is from Sydney, and it's the one left mark.

"Hello! I just wanted to say that rat milk is a great idea. I'm looking forward to a greener future!"

Now. I have spent seven issues with my fists up. I've argued with the cattlemen, the gigglers, the people who faint at a little dust, three thousand years of dietary law, and a god or two. I am built for the part where somebody disagrees. And Sydney walks in, asks me for nothing, picks no fight. Just recognizes the work, and that the future looks green from where they're standing.

So I sat there turning it over, looking for the catch. That's the truth. I read it a few times looking for the but, the gotcha. There isn't one. It's just kind. Somebody was kind to me on purpose and wanted nothing. I had to step away for a while.

So let me try to take the compliment, since I'm told that's what grown men do.

All of this isn't my idea. I keep telling you people this, and you keep handing me the credit anyway. The rat had this idea. Nature had it, a long time ago, when it built an animal that turns a fifth of its own body into milk every day out of whatever's in the alley. I didn't invent the math. I found it lying there.

So when you say it's a great idea, Sydney, you're right, and I thank you, and I have to tell you the idea was here before me. The most I'll claim is that I'm pointing at it. Somebody had to point.

The greener future, though, that part I'll take and keep. That one I've earned a little. Five-point-six kilograms of rat per liter against twenty-two for the cow, and not one cloud of methane out the back end. The future is greener. It's also smaller and denser and a little ugly up close, the way honest things are. But green, yes. You're looking the right direction.

That's the mail. A person who wants milk I can't send, and another who wished me well and asked for nothing. No fight this month..The mail just came in kind, and the only thing to do is say thank you, and not make it weird, which I have now thoroughly done.

So here's what I've got. The unglamorous work is the same whether they write in swinging, or write in soft. The animal is the same. The numbers are the same. The math doesn't lie on a hard week, and it doesn't lie on an easy one. I just don't get many easy ones, and I wanted to stand in this one a second before it was gone.

Thank you, Telby. Thank you, Sydney. The rest of you, write in. Swinging or soft, I'll take it either way.

Stay bold, my friends.

– BigCrazyBaldhead

Fair question. So today we go house to house, hat in hand, and we ask. I'll tell you now where I came out, because it surprised me. I went looking for permission. I found out I wasn't the first one here.

Start with the Jewish people, because they wrote it down plain. The rat is not kosher. It was never going to be. Their law wants a split hoof and an animal that chews the cud, and the rat offers neither. The milk takes the rank of the beast it came from. Unclean animal, unclean milk. There is no argument to have here, and I am not going to stand in front of three thousand years of careful people and tell them they made a clerical error.

But read it close. They did not leave the rat off a list. They named it. There is a line in Leviticus that calls the mouse out loud, by name, sets it down in the book among the unclean things on purpose. And later the prophet Isaiah goes further than that. He lists the people who eat the mouse right alongside the word abomination, and he says they will be consumed for it.

Think about what that takes. Not forgotten. Not overlooked. Named. You don’t write a thing into your holy book unless it scared you a little. You don’t bother to forbid the small and the harmless. They looked at this animal and felt something coming, and reached for the strongest word they had, “abomination.” I’ve been called worse. I'll take it.

The Christians inherited that whole list, and then they tore it up. There is a story in their book. A man named Peter, asleep on a roof, and a sheet comes down out of heaven loaded with every unclean animal there is, and a voice tells him to kill and eat. He says no. He is a good student. He knows the rules. And the voice tells him not to call unclean what God has already made clean.

And the wall came down. All foods clean. Which means, and I want the serious Christian reader to sit a moment with this, you may drink it tomorrow with a clear conscience. The same book that named my animal an abomination got an amendment, and the amendment runs in my favor. I won’t pretend that doesn't move me. But I'll tip my hat to the older law on the way past it. A man ought to know which rule he is walking away from.

The Muslims keep a third house in this same Abrahamic family. They hold to clean and unclean the way the older law does, the two of them share that instinct down to the bone, and the rat lands on the wrong side of the line. It is not food. It was never going to be. For them, the animal that eats the world is not the animal you build a clean table around.

Like Judaism, Islam named it. There is a teaching that gathers up a small handful of creatures so troublesome, that a man may kill them even on holy ground, even deep in his pilgrimage, when he is meant to raise his hand against nothing that lives. The mouse made the list.

There is also a ruling, old and exact, about what a person does when a mouse falls into the butter, whether you can save what sits around it or whether the whole vessel is lost. Prophetic. Somebody saw this animal coming for the dairy a thousand years ahead of me and wrote down a procedure.

That makes two of these three Abrahamic houses that looked the rat in the eye and reached for its name. You do not name the harmless. You name the thing you feel coming.

Now east. This is where I had to put the newsletter down and walk around the block.

The Hindus hold the cow sacred, so you’d think that settles the matter against us. It does not. Because there is a god named Ganesha, and Ganesha rides a mouse. The animal we farm is the mount of a god. It carries the divine on its back as a matter of doctrine, and has for longer than my whole country has had a name.

And then there is the temple. Karni Mata, out in Rajasthan. Thousands of rats living in it. Treasured, protected, fed. Bowls of milk and sweets set down for them every single day. The people there believe these are souls come back around, family returned, and the food the rats have eaten from is not swept into the trash. It is the most blessed thing in the building. They line up for it.

I’ve spent six issues telling you this animal deserves a seat at the adults' table. And the whole time, on the other side of the planet, there has been a building where they got there first. Where they feed it milk by hand and call it holy and have done so since before my grandmother drew breath. I thought I was early. I thought I was out here alone doing the unglamorous work. Somebody built it a temple before I was born.

Then there are the Jains, and the Jains humble me. Their whole faith is one rule carried further than anyone else on earth dares carry it. Harm nothing. Not the cow. Not the rat. Not the insect under your own foot. They sweep the path before they walk it. They strain the water before they drink it. They build an entire life around never being the reason something small had to die. The rat, our rat, the animal I have spent six issues defending with a spreadsheet, is exactly the creature they would lay down their own comfort to protect.

And some of them have followed that rule all the way to the end of it and given up dairy entirely, because they decided that even the gentle taking is still a taking. There are people who love this animal so completely that they will not draw one drop from it. More than I do. I run the numbers and I reach for the cheese. They run the same love further than I am willing to and reach for nothing. I am not going to win that argument. I am not going to try. I am going to take my hat off to the man who out-loved me on my own animal, and go quiet.

The Buddhists keep it simple, bless them, after the week I just had. Don't kill. Walk the middle path. Milk was never any trouble. The Buddha took it himself. There is no line anywhere about the rat. The door is open and nobody is standing in it. After going house to house all afternoon, an open door felt like a cold glass of water.

So here is where it all comes out. One faith named my animal an abomination and wrote it down so it would last three thousand years. One tore up the list and set me free. One built it a temple and feeds it milk by hand. And one loves it so far past me that they will not take the milk at all.

I went looking for somebody's permission, and what I found was better than permission. I found out I wasn’t the first man here. People have been fearing this animal, and feeding it, and blessing it, and protecting it, since long before I heard a man in a bar explain how you milk a rat. I am not the founder of anything. I am the latest one to show up and take it seriously.

And the abomination part, I am keeping it. A thing has to matter before anybody bothers to forbid it. Five-point-six kilograms of rat per liter, and a god rides one to work. The math doesn't lie, and it turns out it never did.

Stay bold, my friends.

-– BigCrazyBaldhead

Not the eagle, or the turkey. Not the horse, the dog, or the cow standing in its pasture eating the same grass its great-grandmother ate. Those are the animals we chose. Those are the ones we brought with intention. The rat, however, is the animal we did not want. The one that showed up anyway.

Nobody invited the rat to this continent. It came in the hold of a ship, eating the stores, fouling the water, existing exactly the way something does when it's not supposed to be there at all. Every port in America spent two hundred years trying to kill it. Every farmer, every grocer, every household with a larder to protect. We laid poison. We set traps. We declared it vermin.

The rat stayed anyway. It ate what we threw away. It took shelter in the spaces we didn't want. It thrived on the scraps and the margins and the things we had no use for. It asked for nothing. It was not welcome. So it learned to want nothing but what it could find and take on its own. That's the animal version of everyone who got off a boat with three dollars and a name nobody could pronounce.

The rat didn't come here to be loved. It came here because this place will let an unwanted thing live, if it's stubborn enough. If it's small enough to fit through the cracks. If it’ll take the worst ground and make something out of it.

I grew up in a van. We were not invited to the places we parked. My mother stole cheese off a rich man's table because the rich man had more than he could eat and we had nothing. That's not the story we tell on the Fourth of July. But it's the story that made me. It's the story that made a lot of us. You come here unwanted, you find the cracks, and you work with what falls through.

That's the rat's whole biography in my country. Five-point-six kilograms of rat per liter. That math works out because the rat is an animal that has nothing to lose and nowhere to go but forward. It came here as an accident. It stayed as a fact of nature. And now, two hundred and fifty years later, we're finally asking it for something. To find a place at the table.

The cow is American too, in the way that money is American. We built it. We bred it. We put it where we wanted it and fed it what we decided it should eat. We own every part of it all the way down to the shape of its stomach. The cow is colonialism with a tail.

The rat is something different. The rat colonized us. We brought it here and it beat us. We spent centuries trying to kill it and it learned our buildings better than we did. It ate our grain. It raised its young in our walls. And every year we poison one and three more are already home. The rat did not ask permission. It found a crack and it moved in, and now it's so much a part of this country that we can't imagine the place without it, even though we still pretend we want it gone.

That's the true American story. The Fourth came and went this weekend, everybody lighting off fireworks and talking about the brave and the free. And I spent it thinking about the animal that didn't ask to come here and couldn't leave if it tried. The animal that took what we didn't want and made it work. The animal that is more American than any of us will ever be, because it actually did what we only talk about.

It came here with nothing. It stayed. It thrived. And now we're finally, finally, paying attention.

The milk is just the math. The rat is something else entirely. The rat is the proof that you can show up unwanted and still matter. You can take the worst ground and make it work. You can be small and dense and absolutely certain of yourself and change everything. You just have to refuse to apologize for existing.

That's the independence that matters. That's what's worth celebrating.

Stay bold, my friends.

– BigCrazyBaldhead

I cannot send her milk. I have never been able to send anyone milk. What I have is a mug with a rat on it and the words Employee of the Month, so I handed it to her.

Then I asked her a few questions. You ought to hear from somebody who works the hunger problem for a living, and not from somebody who only runs the numbers at it. Here is what she had to say.

Q: Most of the world laughs at this, and then it writes me off. You did neither. I'd like to know what you heard that the rest of them didn't.

I used to sit through pitches for a living. You develop an ear for the tell. Most people who walk in with a wild idea are selling the wildness itself, because a dazzled person won't check their math. Conversely, you led with the arithmetic and dared me to laugh anyway.

I saw a man who had run the numbers and couldn’t un-run them. I stand in front of a room every term and teach the same uncomfortable fact: this country grows more food than it could ever eat, but it still lets its own people go hungry. The fundamental trouble is finding value in the cost to move a single calorie from where it sits to where it’s needed. In a corporate, profit-driven culture, very few see any value in this cost.

Most of my colleagues would sooner publish nothing for a decade than be photographed near a solution that looked undignified. You were not worried about looking undignified, and that alone put you ahead of people with three times your funding.

So no, I didn’t hear a crank. I heard somebody who noticed that the densest, most stubborn little protein engine on the planet was already living in our walls. A man said what he saw as the obvious solution out loud, while everyone else was too embarrassed to. Embarrassment is expensive and you aren't willing to pay that particular bill.

Q: I've spent this whole newsletter bragging about efficiency. Less land, less feed, less waste, more out of every pound. You work on the actual problem of people who can't get fed. So tell me straight: down where the hunger really is, does any of that bookkeeping matter, or is it just numbers that flatter men like me?

Numbers flatter. Of course they do. That is half of what they’re for. I spent years in rooms where a number was a wardrobe choice. You put the right one on, and the cruelest call starts to look respectable, even visionary. Only engineers reach for numbers to learn if they’re right. Most reach for the ones that prove their own ambitions. I’ve watched people justify a layoff, or a price hike, with an outright indifference to who goes without, and go home feeling like a steward. So yes, be suspicious of any number that makes you feel good. I am.

A number can be dressed to mean anything, but you cannot adjust the assumptions on a glass of milk. Down where the hunger is, nobody has ever been fed by a ratio. A child doesn’t get less hungry because the feed conversion was elegant. Efficiency is only worth anything if, at the far end of all that arithmetic, something real comes out that a person can swallow. Cynics miss this reality when they laugh you off. You used the math as your guide to a more efficient product. Milk is this product. Milk nourishes.

You asked me straight, so I’ll answer you straight. Bookkeeping for bookkeeping’s sake is flattery, and you should trust it about as far as I trust a quarterly projection. But yours does not stay on the page. Yours ends in a substance that reaches people. Most of the numbers I have spent my life around never made that crossing. They were admired, and got funding, but nobody ate. Yours is at least trying to become food. That is rarer than you think, and it is the only math I respect these days.

Q: This is the first one of these I've ever done, and I mean to do it right, the way a real company should. What made you sign on to this unglamorous work, and what keeps you in it?

I spent my career in the rat race, so I know one when I see one. The rooms I came up in were full of rats. The ones in good suits who could sniff out a sinking ship a quarter early and were down the line before the deck tilted. I learned to smell a rat in a forecast from clear across the table, and I got very good at it. It paid well and it fed no one but me.

Then somebody hands me the actual animal, and the actual animal turns out to be more honest in comparison. A dam who turns a fifth of herself into milk every day and asks for nothing back. A mischief that took the worst ground on the continent and made a living off what the rest of us threw away. The rat in the wall never once lied about what it was. That is the part that signed me on. After all those years among the figurative kind, somebody handed me the literal one, and it had better manners.

What keeps me doing, as you say, the unglamorous work, is simpler. Hunger is real, and reality is seldom glamorous. I have no romance left for the clean version of this problem. So I will take the dam over the boardroom, and the litter in the wall over one more elegant projection that won't feed anyone but the executives.

Q: Many of the people who write in are sure I've lost my mind. You're a serious person, and folks listen when you talk. What would you say to the ones still at the edge of this thing, wondering whether we're insane.

I would tell them they have the question backward. Sane, is the boardroom that can prove, on paper, that feeding a hungry person does not pencil out. I sat in those rooms. Everyone was sane, and nobody but them ate. If that is the floor for sane, I would rather stand with the crazy.

Every real thing I’ve ever seen looked insane the morning before it worked. The line isn’t genius on one side and lunatic on the other. It’s the same person, and which you choose to call them depends entirely on whether their idea comes to fruition. I believe you are on the right side of that line. I have checked your math.

So to the ones at the edge, still deciding. You are not at the edge of madness. You are at the edge of being early. And I have never once in my life been sorry I got somewhere early.

Every animal worth farming carries something that can hurt you. The rat included. There. It's on the table.

For the rat, it's called the hantavirus. The hantavirus can live in the animal this entire enterprise stands upon, and it doesn’t care about your business plan.

Hantavirus rides in the saliva. It rides in the waste, the urine and the droppings, the daily maintenance in any dairy. For hantavirus, the part we all need to respect is that it doesn't need the animal at all to spread. It dries into the dust. You sweep a shed that's gone too long unswept, you kick up a year of it, breathe it in, and the thing is in your lungs before you've finished the thought. No bite. No scratch. Just dust, bad luck, and a set of lungs that are suddenly not yours anymore.

I grew up in the back of a van in the dry country, the Four Corners country, the exact ground where this thing first stood up and announced itself to people who looked a great deal like us. Poor. Dusty. Sleeping where they could.

I know that silence. There is a particular kind of quiet that drops over a hot afternoon when everyone has just remembered, all at once, what the dust can do. I have stood in it. I am not afraid of it, but I respect the hell out of it. The same way you’d respect a sinkhole you can't see the bottom of.

So here’s what I’m proposing to this industry, I want it written down while we are still small enough to write things down and have them hold.

We treat the hantavirus exactly the treat mad cow disease.

Think about what that means. The cow people didn't faint. They didn't shutter the parlor and weep. They built a wall of procedure around their plague. Testing, tracing, rules about what touches what, gloves and ventilation and a hundred boring protocols nobody ever thanks them for. They turned terror into paperwork. That is the single most adult thing that industry has ever done, and I will hand it to them freely.

That is the table I want us sitting at. Not the children's table, where you giggle at the word mischief and run screaming from a little dust. The adults' table, where a serious person looks a fatal thing dead in the eye and says: fine. Gloves. Airflow. Wet the surface before you sweep, so it can't fly. Respect the animal, respect the dust, build the rules, keep the rules. You want to be in real dairy? Real dairy has a plague, and a binder full of rules about it. Welcome. Put on the gloves.

But I'll tell you where the comparison cracks. Mad cow was a sin. We don't say that part enough. That plague did not come down from heaven; they made it. They took a cow, an animal that eats grass and only grass, and to save a nickel they ground up the dead and fed them back to the living. They turned a peaceful grazer into a cannibal for the spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet sent them a bill written in something nobody can cure. That's hubris. That's a man trying to be clever and the universe getting even.

The hantavirus is nothing like that. Nobody made it. Nobody fed anything to anyone. It is the wild being the wild, the way it was long before us and the way it will be long after. The rat didn't betray its own design to carry it. The rat is exactly what it has always been. The danger is honest. It’s clean in the terrible way that only the truth can be. And I’ll take an honest danger over a manufactured one every day of the week. I respect its honesty.

The rat does not lie to you about what it is. That is the whole reason I trust it more than the animal they had to turn into a cannibal to get rich.

So learn the rules. Wet the floor. Wear the gloves. Ventilate the shed. Don't get cute, don't get casual, don't be the cowboy who skips the steps to look brave in front of the new people. That man is not brave, he’s a statistic. Follow the procedure, every time, and don't tell me about the years you've got on the rat, because the dust doesn’t keep score. We follow the rules because the people who didn't are not here to write newsletters about it.

We’re building something real. You don't get to keep only the parts that flatter you. The butterfat and the hantavirus are both a part of this. A serious industry holds both without dropping either. I would rather we be the people who look straight at it in issue five, while we are small, then be the people who are exposed in conspiracy l and spin.

So put on the gloves. Wet the floor. Respect the dust. Go back to work, because the work is still worth it, and the math, even with the gloves on, still doesn't lie.

Stay bold, my friends.

—BigCrazyBaldhead

Here is the thing the cow people will never understand, because they spent a hundred years breeding the flavor out on purpose. A dairy cow eats one thing. Grass, hay, the same beige silage every day of its life, by design. It's the only thing a cow can do. And that's how you arrive at a cheese that tastes like a wall in a house you're trying to sell. Pleasant. Identical. Forgettable.

The rat eats the world. Pizza crusts, cold cuts, the gray end of a loaf, whatever’s in the alley behind the diner. I sold you on that as efficiency, cheap feed, less waste. I undersold it badly. That’s terroir.

Every cheesemaker in France will hold you hostage for an hour about terroir. The soil, the grass, the one particular hillside, all of it ending up in the rind. They are not wrong. They are simply thinking too small, because a cow is chained to a single pasture and a rat is chained to nothing on this earth. A rat raised behind a Sichuan place in October is not the same animal as a rat raised behind a bakery in spring, and if you have a palate, a real one, not the one that calls a beige sedan, “nice,” you will taste the difference. Single-alley micro-lots. I am not joking. I have rarely been more serious in my life.

And what comes out of that 21% solids is not a shy cheese. Do not come to a rat dairy looking for delicate. You get weight. A dense, slow, serious paste that coats the roof of your mouth and stays up there, making itself known long after you’ve swallowed. The fat does work too. Twelve percent fat does not whisper, it leans across the table and tells you things.

In my mind, where this industry mostly still lives, there are three styles worth a serious person’s time. A young washed-rind I call the Gouttière: pungent, orange, faintly criminal, the kind of cheese that empties a refrigerator by itself. A hard alpine-style wheel for the patient, aged long, all brown butter and a finish that won’t quit. And, for the brave, a blue, because a twelve-percent-fat milk shot through with mold is either the future of cheese or a matter for the federal government, and I will be honest with you, I cannot yet tell which.

Now. The wine. And here I will not be moved, so save your stamps.

Rat cheese demands tannin. This is not a preference, it is chemistry. All that fat needs something with claws to cut through it, to scrape the palate clean between bites so the next one lands as hard as the first one did. A soft, sweet, low-tannin wine against a twelve-percent-fat cheese is a tragedy in a glass. The wine lies down and dies underneath it and takes the evening with it. You need a wine that fights back.

So: no merlot. Nobody is impressed, and it isn’t up to the work. You want the high-tannin monsters. Tannat first and always, it’s practically named for the job. Sagrantino di Montefalco if you can lay hands on it, which grips the mouth like a tax collector. A young Barolo, all rose and tar and scaffolding. A Madiran, for the same reason as the Tannat, on account of it mostly is Tannat. The bigger the cheese, the meaner the wine. Write that on the inside of a cabinet door.

For the table, build around the cheese, never bury it. Charcuterie with a spine: a hard dry salami heavy on the pepper, a good coppa, something cured and grown-up, nothing dainty, the cheese will eat a delicate prosciutto alive. Bitter greens. A quince paste or a black-cherry preserve set against the funk. Walnuts, toasted. Dark bread, the denser the better, the kind that could prop a door.

And if you want to do the thing properly, the dish I will die in a ditch defending; take the aged alpine wheel and melt it. A rat-milk fondue, scraped hot over a board of boiled fingerlings and cornichons, the Tannat open and breathing beside it. Or shave the hard one cold and raw over a plate of bitter chicory dressed in nothing but good oil and salt, and let the cheese be the entire reason the plate exists. That is a Tuesday night that means something.

You have spent your whole life eating cheese designed by committee to offend nobody. Beige cheese for beige sedans. I am telling you there is a denser, more honest thing waiting on the far side of one small mental hurdle. The only thing standing between you and it, is whether you can grow up about where the milk comes from.

The French eat blue mold and call it a delicacy. They wash a cheese in brandy until it turns orange and weeps, and they charge you forty dollars for the privilege. Do not stand there and lecture me about the rat. The rat is the most honest animal in the building. It eats what we threw away and hands it back to us with a long finish. We are not lowering the bar here. We are finally being honest about where flavor actually comes from.

Pour the Tannat. The math, as ever, doesn’t lie.

Stay bold, my friends.

—BigCrazyBaldhead

Let’s get the talk out of the way first.

A gentleman wrote in after last week, and I use the word ‘gentleman’ as an insult. I’ll spare you the worst of it. The gist: he enjoyed the closing line. The bit about learning the finger technique on your own mischief. He enjoyed it a great deal, and he wanted me to know, in anatomical detail I will not reprint in a family newsletter about rodent dairy, exactly which way he’d chosen to read it. He signed off like we were old friends.

Let me be very clear, because apparently it needs saying out loud. A mischief is a group of rats. It is the collective noun. It has been the collective noun since before your grandfather was a gleam in anybody’s eye. A murder of crows. A parliament of owls. A mischief of rats. And the finger technique is a documented method of manual extraction, practiced by serious people in lab coats who have given years of their lives to this work. I used a craftsman’s word, ‘technique’, and I used the correct term for a group of the very animals this entire enterprise stands upon, and I laid them end to end in an honest sentence about doing the work yourself.

And your mind went somewhere else. That is not on me, friend. That is a you problem. I am out here trying to drag dairy into a new, green, future, and you are in the back of the room snickering at the word finger. Grow up. There are people counting on us.

Speaking of which. The second letter.

It came from a gentleman in India. And this time I use the word the way it was meant to be used. He wrote, in full:

“I am searching rat milk in India. If you provide the same, kindly email me your quote.”

This man did not giggle. He read two issues on the economics and the craft of rat dairy and he was inspired enough that he wants to buy some. To join the community. He wants a quote. He is searching rat milk in India and he would like to know our rate. There is no gutter anywhere in that sentence. There is only a man with a calculator and people to feed.

Now, I had to be honest with him, the way I try to be honest with all of you. We cannot fill that order. There is no warehouse. There is no tanker of rat milk idling at the dock. The industry he wrote to is, at this exact moment, mostly me, a mailing list, and a pile of numbers that don’t lie.

But here is what I can do, and what I told him. Welcome. Welcome to the future. You are early, my friend, and early is the best time to arrive at anything worth something. Find the producers. Find the people thumbing those little ports by hand and the ones who spent fifteen thousand dollars on the pump. Talk to them. Network. That is what RatMilkers.org is for. It is the connective tissue, the place where the people doing the unglamorous work find the people who need what they make. You wrote to exactly the right address. You just wrote to it a little early, and there is no shame on this earth in being early.

And that, if you’re keeping score at home, is the whole difference. One man read the work and reached for the gutter. The other read the same work and reached for a calculator and a supplier on the other side of the planet. I know which one I am building this for. It isn’t even close.

Because here is what the gigglers never get; while you’re back there elbowing your neighbor over a six-word sentence, the planet keeps warming, the cows keep getting bigger, and somewhere a serious man in India is running the math he saw here, and finding it holds. Five-point-six kilograms of rat per liter. Twenty percent of her body weight turned to milk, every single day. The future is small and dense and deadly serious, and it is coming whether or not you can keep a straight face through the word ‘mischief’.

So write in. I mean that. Tell me what you’re milking, and how, and why. Tell me you’ve found a better way. Just do me one courtesy before you hit reply, read the sentence twice. Once for what it says. And once for what it says about you.

Stay bold, my friends.

—BigCrazyBaldhead

P.S. To the first gentleman. It was the rats. It was always the rats. Read a book.

There are two camps. Each one is certain the other has lost its mind. I’m going to try to stay out of the drama, and be as neutral as possible.

Let's start at the beginning, because you should know where we came from. For years, the standard way to get milk out of a rat was to not milk the dam at all. You let a pup nurse until its belly was full, and then you took the milk back out of the pup’s stomach.

The trouble is, that stomach milk has been swimming in saliva and gastric juice. And the researchers themselves, sober people, lab coats, no skin in any cheese game, wrote it down plain: it is “an open question whether such milk can be called authentic milk.” Authentic milk. They put it in writing. This industry has been fighting about authenticity since before it had a product to sell, and I find that beautiful.

So people built ways to milk the rat directly, and the first ones were handmade in every sense. The classic rig took two people. One holds the nursing dam and works a tiny cup over the teat. The other makes the suction pulse with his own index finger, opening and closing a little port, over and over by hand, the way you’d thumb the end of a garden hose. A grown man, keeping time with one finger, coaxing milk out of a rodent the size of a dinner roll.

And the verdict on this method, grumbled by those same sober people, was that the results wandered from one man’s hands to the next. Read that cold and it’s a complaint. Read it right and it’s the whole artisan religion in a single line. No two hands the same. No two milkings the same. The finger learns the rat. One man’s rhythm is another man’s ruin, and somewhere down in that inconsistency, the craftsman will tell you, is the soul of the thing.

These are the Hand People. They settle the mother to bring the milk down with a dose of oxytocin, and work each teat in turn through a little trumpet-mouthed tube. Never riding one teat too long, moving down the line like a man playing a very small, very strange instrument. It is slow. It is delicate. It does not scale. They don’t care. They will tell you scale is precisely the problem.

Across the alley stand the Machine People, and they have spent real money. Fourteen thousand nine hundred and ninety-five dollars buys an automated milker that runs the entire job off a vacuum pump, two solenoid valves, and a microcomputer. Negative pressure, atmospheric, negative, atmospheric, steady as a metronome, not one tired finger anywhere in the building.

Here’s the part that gets me. They didn’t guess at the suction. They tested actual rat pups and measured how hard a pup pulls, clocked it at around 160 mmHg of vacuum, and then built the machine to pull at exactly that. They sat down and engineered a device to be a better pup than the pup. For scale, the rig that drains a 680 kg cow hauls at better than twice that pressure. The rat gets the gentle hand. The rat gets finesse.

The Machine People look at the Hand People and see two grown adults producing milk by vibes. The Hand People look at the machine and see a soulless pump that hands you the same dead-identical squirt every time and calls it progress. Both of them have a point. That is what makes it a good fight.

There’s a newer rig out of Rutgers that lets one person do the whole job alone, cheap parts, no second set of hands, which, depending on which alley you drink in, is either the elegant future or a quiet betrayal of everyone who ever held the rat while a colleague worked the finger.

I’ll say only this. The machine chases consistency, and consistency is worth money. You can’t sell a cheese you can’t make twice. But the Hand People are chasing something unique, and they named it themselves a hundred years ago without meaning to. Authentic milk. The real stuff. The kind that lingers in your mouth with intention.

Look, everybody in this business, machine or finger, is reaching for the same richer thing and only arguing about whose hands should get there first.

So pick your camp, or don’t. Buy the fourteen-thousand-dollar pump or learn the finger technique on your own mischief. The milk’s the same color either way, and the math, well, the math just doesn’t lie.

Stay bold, my friends.

—BigCrazyBaldhead

So here are the cold hard facts.

A 680 kg dairy cow gives you about 30 liters of milk a day. Do the division. That’s 22.6 kilograms of cow per liter of milk. Twenty-two kilograms of animal standing around, eating, belching, taking up a whole zip code, for one liter.

Now the rat. A 0.227 kg lactating dam pushes out around 0.04 liters daily. That’s 5.6 kilograms of rat per liter, over four times leaner than the cow, drop for drop.

The part that should keep a cattleman up at night, though, is that lactating dam converts roughly 20% of her body weight into milk every single day. A dairy cow manages about 4%. Small mammals with fast litters are obscenely productive because evolution gave them no choice. We didn’t invent this. Nature did.

Now, we need to discuss the farts. A cow is a specialist, and specialists are fragile. Feed a cow what a rat eats, pizza crusts, cold cuts, the gray end of a loaf, and it’ll be on its side by sundown. The cow is built for cellulose, for grass and tough forage that’d pass through a rat completely untouched, and it runs all of it through a four-chambered stomach the size of a beer keg. The price of that machinery: 250 to 500 liters of methane out the back end. Per cow. Per day.

The rat simply has an iron gut and no standards. Grains, meat, insects, vegetables, whatever’s in the alley behind the diner. If it carries a calorie, the rat will find it. Just acid and enzymes doing honest work. And the emissions? They're tantamount to a rounding error.

The real money, though, is in the cheese.

Cow milk is about 3.7% fat, 3.3% protein, 12% total solids. Respectable. Familiar. The milk equivalent of a beige sedan.

Rat milk is around 12% fat, 9% protein, 21% total solids. Triple the butterfat. Nearly double the solids. That’s more cheese per liter, and it’s heavier cheese, the kind that coats your mouth. The kind that makes you wonder why you would ever go back to the bland stuff of the bovine.

I’m here because the numbers work. Less feed, less land, less waste, more out of every biological pound, and a product worth more at the end of it. RatMilkers.org is where the people doing the unglamorous work find the people who need what they make. That’s the whole job.

If you’re producing, researching, or just standing at the edge of this thing trying to figure out whether we’re insane, pull up a chair. We’re growing, and the math doesn’t lie.

Stay bold, my friends.

—BigCrazyBaldhead