Cult Dairy

On obsession, ritual, and the quiet holiness of sour milk. A five-part gospel of kefir devotion from a girl who should probably eat something else for once.

1. Origins: How I Became Fermented

My holy grail was always yoghurt. I’ve always been drawn to bland dairy—mild, muted, undemanding. Soft food for sharp minds. I was never much of an eater, but I liked things that felt gentle and efficient. Something simple. Something cold. Something you could eat in silence. Anything that could pass as both breakfast and barely anything.

Kefir started as a curiosity. It looked like an elevated version of my obsession—sleek bottle, minimalist label, the word “protein” in quiet, confident sans-serif. That was enough. I took it home like it might reveal something to me.

The first sip hit like a dare. Sour, cold, inexplicably fizzy. I wasn’t sure if I liked it. But I drank the whole thing. And I kept buying it.

It was easy, just enough fat to feel human, just enough calories to keep thinking. The perfect solution for someone who stays up until morning writing essays about Homeric structure. Even better than yoghurt: no spoon, no dishes, no interruptions. Just a bottle you could hold like a thought.

By the end of the week, it wasn’t a habit. It was a preference. A comfort. A constant. Something slightly strange and slightly alive that fit neatly into my life without making demands. A quiet indulgence that didn’t feel indulgent at all.

2. Liturgical Dairy

I don’t make it. But I do shake it, gently, like it might explode or bless me, depending on the mood. I keep it cold, unopened, until the moment feels right. Sometimes that moment is 3 a.m., barefoot in the kitchen, blinking at my own reflection in the microwave door while my head spins off like a chorus of Bacchae—delirious and half-starved, half-divine. It separates. I fix it. I like the fizz, the foam, the hush of resistance it offers when you twist the cap, like it’s alive, but polite about it.

The taste? Sour, chalky, slightly sparkling. With a whisper of something expired, but on purpose. Like licking a battery in a church. Holy, but vaguely wrong. It coats the mouth like an idea you can’t get rid of. It lingers. It insists.

There’s something Homeric about it. The ritual, the repetition, the quiet brutality of it. My bones hum when I drink it. I feel fortified. Like a ruin being held up by ivy. I think kefir might be the only thing I’d offer the gods without hesitation.

3. Saint Kefir

IfI believe in kefir the way people believe in saints. Blindly. Ritualistically. With myth in place of memory. I feel clear-headed: kefir. Suppose I hit a flow state mid-essay: kefir. If I’m glowing for no reason or feel quietly invincible by 11 a.m.—kefir. If I’m tired but beautifully functional, slightly translucent but alert—it’s because I remembered to shake the bottle before drinking it.

I like the idea that something so odd, so sour, so clinically alive could be good for me. That it’s doing things I can’t see—balancing me on a microbial level. It makes sense to me in the way poetry does. I don’t need proof. I just need the ritual.

I’ve decided this drink is keeping me together. I don’t care if it’s placebo. I don’t care if it’s unremarkable. I just like knowing there’s something in my fridge that always works. No chopping, no heating, no decisions. Just a bottle. Just a tang. Just a low-humming kind of care.

Because if I’m going to be kept alive by anything, it might as well be something strange and sour and full of invisible organisms that like me.

4. The Possession

It doesn’t matter what I eat, what I do, what city I’m in, what time I wake up, what else is in my fridge. The craving still comes. Quietly. Faithfully. Like something ancient moving under the floorboards. Like an old promise I accidentally made—a private pact sealed in hunger and swallowed in silence, something that now returns each day with the steadiness of a superstition I no longer question.

Sometimes I try to want other things. Smoothies. Soup. Eggs. Warm meals made with care. Bowls that look like comfort. But they leave me unsatisfied, full, but restless. Like I’ve missed something. Like I’m feeding the wrong hunger. I chew. I swallow. I wait. And still, the idea rises—clear, cold, insistent: kefir.

Not like a preference. Like a return. Like a bell being rung inside my ribcage.

I reach for the bottle without thinking. I know the weight of it in my hand better than I know the faces of people I used to love. I don’t drink it for pleasure. I drink it because I belong to it. I am its girl. I have been claimed—not in a romantic way, not in a way that softens or saves, but in the way a cathedral claims its echo or a storm claims the sea.

It’s not casual. I don’t offer it to guests. I don’t share it. I’d rather lie. I’d rather say I’m out than give up the last bottle. There are boundaries. There is belief. I don’t care if no one else gets it. I’m not drinking it for them. I never was.

This isn’t a habit. It’s a haunting.

This isn’t breakfast. It’s ritual.

And I love it.

And I’m not letting go.

5. The Philosophy

Kefir isn’t about health. It’s about obsession. A quiet one. The kind that settles under your skin without asking permission. That grows roots. That becomes part of how you move through the day, not like a habit, but like a secret. Like something sacred, you don’t need to explain.

I didn’t choose it to get better. I chose it because it felt right. Cold. Sour. Strange. Alive. I loved that it was alive. That it could go bad in a beautiful way. That it didn’t need sugar or sparkle or branding to be good. It just was. It existed. And that was enough.

It’s for the girl who doesn’t want to be improved. Who wants to be preserved. Who doesn’t care about being well in the way other people mean it—but craves something constant, something bodily, something that makes her feel held in a language beyond words. It’s not that kefir healed me. It’s that it stayed. That it asked nothing but presence. That it tasted like something I could believe in.

Because if I’m going to unravel, let it be slow. Let it be careful. Let it be curated by cultures I can’t see. Let it be done with reverence. Let my undoing fizz softly in a bottle no one else touches.

And if I’m going to rot—

let it be like this:

deliberate, delicate, and just sour enough to be remembered.

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