While in college, I learned way more than I ever would have otherwise about dairy farm operations and 'bovine lactation' thanks to a friend who grew up on a dairy farm and a school project aiming to optimize the milking process at a small dairy farm ("Milking Operations Optimizer: MOO"). TMI.Anyway, in the news today, a report that indicates that milk prices will continue to rise, thanks to an increase in global demand and an inability for dairy farmers to keep up. Fun fact: the world's demand for milk has risen more than the world's demand for oil. The above-mentioned friend's dairy farm has transitioned to an Angus farm a couple years ago, and the world lost yet another supplier of milk. My husband consumes LOTS and LOTS of milk, while I prefer my dairy in the form of ice cream and cheese, though I have the occasional glass myself. That said, we go through over a gallon of milk a week, when you factor in his drinking and my cooking. To cut down on the number of gallons we have to buy, especially in light of the rising prices, I keep a container in the fridge with my "cooking milk"- milk reconstituted from dry milk. Buying the dry milk in a HUGE box and using it in cooking only cuts our grocery budget by allowing us to buy milk only to fulfill the 'drinking' requirement, and not the 'drinking and cooking' requirements of our household. I have not noticed a difference in the quality of the food cooked with dry milk, so this solution is really working for us. I don't think we'll get to the point where we'll drink the reconstituted dry milk, but that's OK. This works for us, for now.
2 comments:
Powdered milk is yucky to drink. :-p That's all we had available to us in Peru, and we pretty much only used it for cooking and to pour on cereal. One thing we really liked to do is make our own hot chocolate mix - powdered milk, powdered cocoa, sugar, cinnamon, and cloves. Mmmm... Powdered milk worked really well for that!
I go through about a gallon of milk a week too. Paul hates milk and it's his soapbox that humans should not be drinking cow milk; that it's not healthy for us and in actuality it's only Europeans (and their descendants) whose systems can handle cow milk. I ignore him most of the time.
We have some powdered milk.
And some grocery store buttermilk.
And, usually, some grass fed organic cow milk.
Only the third one is deemed suitable for drinking. But if we drank a gallon a week, that might stretch the wallet a little too much. I'd definitely look into joining a cow share in that case.
Of course, we also have people milk.. but that's not what your post is about.
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