I Drank Pepsi Milk And I Hate You All

This week, social media made me do this.

Social Media Made Me Do It subheading

This is an excerpt from Please Like Me, the BuzzFeed News newsletter about influencers and internet culture. You can sign up here. In our new column, Social Media Made Me Do It, we try a new trend, product, or tip from the feed.

In Slack, our executive editor for news asked this question: “i have a serious q.... do people actually put milk in their pepsi? to create... pilk.”

Pilk is back, apparently, and better than ever. This meme recipe of soda and milk has been around since the 1970s, but has had recurring popularity online since 2020. Now, the recipe to create pilk has been repurposed into a TikTok trend. Some have made pilk cheese. Others have caught the overflow pilk foam and made gerbil water feeder-like contraptions to consume their pilk. On Thursday, Pepsi themselves released an ad of Lindsay Lohan making some pilk for Santa.

Unfortunately that meant I simply had to try it. I expected it to be bad. There have been so many dairy-and-soda combinations — egg creams (chocolate syrup, seltzer water, milk), root beer floats (soda and ice cream), the vanilla creamer and Coca-Cola trend — but all of them have a sweet dairy ingredient, not just plain milk. I guessed pilk would taste like a root beer float that was left out in the sun for several weeks.

Lindsay Lohan drinking a glass of an iced drink with a straw

The pilk I made smelled really bad, like the sole of a rubber shoe that’s been sweat in a little. Like a pile of damp laundry that’s just beginning to dry, but isn’t yet. I made a bunch of other people at work try it and we all just stood around a table smelling pilk. The smell is the kind of bad you want to keep smelling.

On the taste front, reviews were mixed. Scaachi Koul took one sip and bolted in the other direction. Kelsey Weekman had a little sip and decreed it not bad, but not good. I personally thought it was nasty, but then kept taking sips to make sure.

Many tried to find comparisons — sort of just a thick soda, sort of like someone who’s never had an egg cream trying to describe it to you. The common conclusions, though, were that it’s best forgettable and at worst, violently gross. It’s mostly fun for the meme, like balsamic La Croix or mustard and watermelon. The idea of pilk cheese, or pilk yogurt, would definitely be worse than pilk. And this is definitely not something Lindsay Lohan should leave out for Santa Claus.

Cups of beige liquid on a table

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