The Milk Gallon Challenge

When it came to fraternity 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. We had beer, and the two plebes had a gallon of milk each.

The human body is able to digest foods and liquids at a certain rate, depending on the amount of nutrients, fats, proteins, etc. they contain. Water, for example contains few nutrients and is constantly being absorbed by the body so it passes quickly.

The body cannot process a gallon of milk in an hour. It is physically impossible and anyone that does will puke up the extra. Okay, let me clarify something here. If someone sipped on milk over the course of an hour, it is possible. That would not be the fun way however, especially when it came to our pledges.

So the argument and challenge was that the human body can ingest a gallon of milk in twenty minutes and hold it for the remaining forty.

To make the cleanup easier we parked the pledges in our living room apartment by the windows.

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.

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 savored the goodness of cans of Golden Anniversary beer.

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 dropped to the pavement below.

I hope nobody was walking by at that moment.

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