Cream

[Aliantha]

This is one of the quotes from the bottom of the page:

Cream used to come in pitchers. These days it comes in little plastic trapezoids. If you get any of it into your coffee instead of onto your shirt, what it tastes like is water, hydrogenated palm kernel oil, sodium caseinate, sugar, di-potassium phosphate, propylene glycol monostearate, polysorbate 60, stearolyle-lactilate, salt, artificial flavor and color. That's what it tastes like because that's what it is. The advantage over cream is that it costs less and doesn't spoil as fast. Note that this is an advantage to the coffee shop, not to the coffee drinker. A further advantage is that waitresses, whose lives used to be boring, are now steadily amused as one customer after another squirts himself in the chest and utters hilarious and innovative oaths.
--Charles Kuralt, _Dateline America_

What I've often wondered (after watching lots of american tv) is when someone asks if you want cream and sugar in your coffee, do they actually mean milk, or do they really mean cream, in which case, isn't it normally real cream rather than that stuff that comes out of cans?