Milk is a key ingredient in Ranch dressing. That's no coincidence.

Please read this fine article that I abridged from Gourmet.com; it's John T. Edge writing about the latest food craze that is sweeping the nation:

"I was 25 when I overdosed on ranch dressing, that kitschy combo of mayonnaise, herbs, and buttermilk or sour cream. I had eaten one too many salads of iceberg and shaved carrots, drenched in a torrent of anemic white nothingness. I had dunked a dirty barnyard of chickens into countless thimbles of blandness. Ranch was too much with me.

A decade and a half passed. I returned to the fold while seated at my father’s kitchen table. Struggling, like many a parent, to get my son to embrace the lettuce-and-cucumbers ideal, I noticed that, when my father cracked open a jar of store-bought ranch, my son dug deep into the roughage. So I followed his lead. Ranch, I learned, hadn’t gotten any better. But it seems that absence makes both the palate and the heart grow fonder.

More recently, I’ve noticed that chefs have been reacquainting themselves with ranch, too. And improving on the formula in the process. I’m not going to play the catalog-the-wild-ranch-iterations game. For that, you can consult this dispatch from Ideas in Food, or this article in Slate. And if, after perusing those pieces, you don’t recognize that ranch has made a comeback, then consider this dinner dispatch from Michael Bauer of the San Francisco Chronicle. Even the mighty Thomas Keller has embraced the possibilities: “The waiter presented the entire roasted abalone, which looked like a caramel-colored river rock. He then took it back to the kitchen where chewy/tender slices were arranged on a rectangular plate with a swipe of French Laundry Ranch dressing, a scattering of sea beans and bright orbs of peeled cherry tomatoes.”

On the other coast, my gourmet.com editor Christy Harrison raves about the ranch at “The Farm on Adderley, a place in Brooklyn that does the whole local-seasonal thing.” Closer to my home, John Currence of City Grocery, in Oxford, Mississippi, has been known to run a special of what he calls frog wings, which are, of course, frog legs, fried and doused in the manner of chicken wings, served with a side of buttermilk ranch.

Now that I’ve called it to your attention, I’m betting you’ll notice any number of ranch revivals. A couple weeks back, I sampled what may well be the best. I was at Cakes & Ale, a relatively new restaurant in Decatur, a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia. Okra, sliced longways, fried to a shattering crispness, [was] served, yes, with a bullet of buttermilk ranch that reminded me, somehow, of a decidedly American riff on Greek tsatsiki dressing. "

Since he is somewhat underwhelmed by Ranch, I can't say that Mr. Edge and I see eye-to-eye on this particular subject. It's no secret that I'm an unashamedly devout Ranch consumer. (And with good reason: some notable New Testament scholars have confirmed that, if the water into wine thing didn't work out for Jesus, he was going to try to turn water into Ranch dressing next.)

But note that Edge updated his verdict on Ranch dressing (only slightly) after eating the store-bought, jarred variety. What's wrong with this man? For purists among us, that's nothing short of a shock and an outrage! You can't judge a dressing by its store-bought simulation! He really needs to exercise better judgment in the future.

Moving on to what all this has to do with my daughter/revolutionary . . . As a father, am I supposed to think that mere chance can explain this phenomenon: milk, the main staple for an infant, is also the main ingredient for Ranch dressing? What one man calls chance, I call fate. So here's what I'm proposing to my wife as soon as she gets back from the gym tonight: as we prepare every bottle of milk for our new daughter, we start by adding a few healthy tablespoons of mayonnaise and a few generous dashes of Ranch seasoning. Voila -- a diet fit for a Titan.

Viewed in that light, mother's milk seems like a paltry source of nutrition for a kid to live on day after day after day. Why not add some minerals and protein and make it Ranch? The kid loses nothing; she only stands to win.