Tamara Wilhite is a full time technical writer, amateur fiction writer, and mother of two. Her first collection of science fiction and sci-fi horror stories, "Humanity's Edge", is currently available.

The clear plastic pitcher of milk was suspiciously placed in the middle of the table. I sneak over to sniff it in case Mom actually switched to soy. After all, she’d hinted at some big compromise before going to the store. Maybe she’d given in. No. It smells like the regular old milk, produced by enslaved cows. So what was her surprise? Meat-free sausage like the lousy stuff she’d tried last Sunday brunch? Or engineered sterile eggs, that would be just fine except for having been genetically engineered?

Mom came in with a tray of whole wheat waffles and real maple syrup, with an organic label and everything. "Have some."

I take the waffles and syrup. They’re both organic and healthy and real. She’s accommodated me thus far. Maybe the milk is her way of trying to get me to compromise, too. She gets 2/3 my way, and I have to drink the milk of a cow more souped up on hormones than Mom’s Mom when she has a late-life crisis. Mom pours herself a glass of milk and starts drinking it. "Look, Mom, do you have to do that in front of me? You know what I think of animal products."

"There’s nothing wrong with it." She smiles and gives me a pamphlet. "And you can drink it, too. No animals were harmed in the making of this product."

"This isn’t the stuff raised by those Hindus promising that worshiped cows make the best milk, is it?"

"Oh, no, I could never subsidize pagans."

I blink a couple of times, wondering what she thinks the Feng Shui’d meditation spot in my room is. I see a slick advertising print out on the table. "Uh, what is it?" Maybe it’s soy that’s flavored to look and smell like milk, like some artificial meats are. But, as a purist, I refuse those, too. If you indulge in too good a fake, you might be tempted to eat the real thing.

"Milk."

"Free range cows are still being used by humans –"

"Read it before you lecture me," she warns. "I went out of my way – and out of my budget – to try to accommodate you." Her tone finishes the sentence for her, "and your latest silly moralistic rebellion".

I flip it open, not wanting to admit I can’t read print very well. It has a "no animals harmed" stamp from an animal rights group I vaguely remember. There are notes about this being the latest in safe foods and no risk of mad cow disease. There are a few long words I can’t remember, and there is no on-line dictionary in a print out. That’s why I prefer the electronic version, so I can set it to my reading level. "Oh, OK."

I pour a little in my glass. It looks like milk. It smells like milk. The little bit I taste tastes like milk. "It’s milk."

"Yes, it is." And she starts on her second glass.

"Then how is it OK with PETA?"

"It isn’t PETA approved, just FDA approved. The tissue graft technology has been around for decades, but they only approved it for human consumption last week. I can’t imagine why, since it’s been safe for human medical use for years –"

"Graft? What graft?" What in Gaia does graft tech have to do with cows?

"Why, they took the udders and grafted them into industrial cellular regeneration units. It’s just like when they take a small skin sample and turn it into a whole tissue graft for a burn patient, except it is with cow milk cells. There must be a lot of tanks with those grafts. They’ve started full scale production."

Production. Cow cells. "How do you get milk out of that?"

"The same way they get insulin out of human tissue cultures."

I knew about tissue cultures. Better living through tissue engineering. Which means they chopped up a cow and stuck its life giving udders in a lab and ripped it into microscopic pieces until it was part of a machine. Life giving turned into a semi-industrial death. My stomach is churning. "They killed a cow to make milk! That’s even worse –"

"Hold it! I knew what you thought of that. That’s why I bought the brand where they released the cows afterward."

"Released?"

"Can’t you read the label? They surgically remove the udders before releasing the cows back to the pasture, never to be bothered by people again. That’s the best a cow could hope for. It’s certainly better than letting them loose into the wild, where they could be eaten by wolves or worse..."

It was the image that made me sick. I ran to the bathroom.