Milk!

I can remember back in the 80’s getting door step delivery of milk in glass bottles. If you were awake in the early hours of the morning you would hear the milk float whir and clink along in the dark at 3 or 5 a.m. It was my job to go down to the front door in our communal entrance and fetch the post from the locked postbox on the wall and the milk on the doorstep. In our earlier house I can even remember bluetits puncturing the foil caps to get the cream. You put your bottles, washed, out each night for the milk man to collect and these were taken back to a depo to be sterilised and refilled.

Then milk started to appear in shops in tetra pak cartons that you had to fold the cardboard top out to get the milk out. Then there were plastic milk bottles. We kept buying ours from the milk man, but because the milk was cheaper in the cartons from the shop more and more people stopped buying the service. This forced the price of delivery up. Eventually it became uneconomical to buy the milk this way, and services stopped in many areas including ours.

Since supermarkets have had almost a monopoly on people buying milk, the deal for farmers has been getting raw. Our milk gets cheaper, but the profit margin stays the same and it is the farmers who have to produce more milk for less money. Animal welfare is effected, and so are our choices.

A renaissance in buying organic milk, alternative non-dairy milk and raw milk has widened our options again. But they are still all in plastic lined tetra pak.

When I spotted glass milk bottles on a neighbour’s doorstep I knew I would want to start this again, but it is expensive on a working wage budget. I do eat rather a lot of plastic potted yogurt, and so I worked out that if I did the ever-so-easy task of making my own from milk then I could lower the cost as well as dispensing with the packaging.

Getting up in the morning and opening the door to pretty bottles of fresh milk is like getting a present in the post every day.