The Milk Gallon Challenge

Original Humor by Chris Cameron

23 Jul

The Milk Gallon Challenge

Posted on 2007 under Miscellany of Humor |

milk01 When you were in a fraternity and had pledges, days like this one back in college were inevitable. One fine afternoon, two of our prospective members were arguing with a few of the brothers about the viability of drinking a gallon of milk in an hour.

Naturally this turned into an evening of drinking, us downing beer, and the two plebes chugging milk.

To set the premise, the human body is only able to digest foods and liquids at a certain rate. The more something has to be broken down and processed by the body, the less you can ingest at a time. Water, for example contains few nutrients and is constantly being absorbed by the body so it passes quickly. The fat rate in foods and drink also impact this.

Whole milk however, is a whole different animal. The body cannot process a gallon of it in an hour. It is physically impossible and you will puke up the extra. Ok, let me clarify something here. If you sipped on milk over the course of an hour, you would be able to do this. But that would not be the fun way.

So the argument and challenge was that the human body can ingest a gallon of milk in a short time and hold it for an hour. We set up the guidelines that they would each drink a gallon in twenty minutes and have to sit out the remaining forty.

To make it interesting we parked the pledges in our living room apartment by the windows so if they did puke we wouldn’t have to clean it up. We weren’t assholes after all; we wouldn’t make them do it.

There was also some kind of bet involved and to be honest I forget what it was. That part was academic.

The final piece of the challenge relied on their duties as pledges: they are a team. If one threw up they both lost, so they must encourage each other to NOT vomit. We always liked teaching our new guys life lessons, and positive encouragement is important especially when it involves ingesting large amounts of milk followed by puking your brains out.

Life is all about spin. In this case both figuratively and literally.

So they began, the two pledges chugging merrily away at their milk, happy thoughts of winning in their head. We sat around drinking beers and giggling like little school girls knowing their eventual fate. Once a minute they would down a glass of milk as we paced our Golden Anniversary brew.

Destiny arrived about thirty minutes later as our two plebes launched two gallons of milk out our second-story window, a veritable rain of cow juice partly digested by the human stomach dropping to the pavement below.

I hope nobody was walking by at that moment.

(Reprinted from the former blog)