The Wegmans in Brooklyn’s Navy Yard is—sorry to be dramatic—paradise on Earth: 74,000 sq. toes of excessive ceilings and lengthy aisles, stocked with practically all the things an individual might conceivably need to eat or drink. It has tamarind and rambutan and malanga; pink pineapples and purplish, fresh-packed venison; a particular cheese that’s softly dusted with dried flowers and herbs collected within the German Alps. The milk choices alone embody drinks produced from soy, almonds, oats, cashews, flaxseeds, bananas, pistachios, and hazelnuts, as well as, in fact, to the lactational secretions of the American cow, all displayed prominently in well-stocked, brightly lit show instances.
One of many world’s most consumed, most handy, and least wasteful forms of dairy, in distinction, occupies an area concerning the dimension of a seashore cooler, on the underside shelf in an unglamorous and extremely missable nook of aisle six. It’s shelf-stable milk, a miracle of meals science—and a product that Individuals simply can’t be taught to like.
Shelf-stable milk is, as you may think, milk that doesn’t want refrigeration and may thus be stocked on cabinets. It will get this manner by being blasted to 280–302 levels Fahrenheit for one to 5 seconds in a course of that’s hotter and quicker—and way more efficient at killing micro organism—than different forms of pasteurization. It’s then poured into particular packaging that’s sterile and hermetic, the place it will probably final for months on finish.
Shelf-stable milk (also referred to as ultrahigh-temperature, or UHT, milk) doesn’t take up area within the fridge earlier than it must; it doesn’t have to be packed on ice when thrown right into a picnic basket or a lunchbox; it doesn’t start, like a automobile, to lose worth as quickly as you drive it off the lot. Andrew Novaković, a professor emeritus of agricultural economics at Cornell, advised me that it’s “nearly immortal.” It’s protected, handy, sensible, and notably helpful within the many city elements of this nation the place fridge area is at a premium, in addition to within the many rural areas the place grocery shops are unfold out. Extra meaningfully, it doesn’t require participation within the resource-intensive, greenhouse-gas-spewing system of refrigeration that the business calls the “chilly chain.”
For all of those causes, shelf-stable milk is wildly in style in lots of elements of the world. Hilton Deeth, a professor emeritus within the Faculty of Agriculture and Sustainability on the College of Queensland, in Australia, advised me that in some European nations, an excellent 90 % of the industrial milk provide is UHT. In France, to be extra exact, 19 out of each 20 liters of milk offered is UHT; in Spain, it’s 48 out of fifty. The Chinese language market is rising shortly, Deeth advised me, as is the Central American one. In dairy sections across the globe, the default is rectangular, unrefrigerated, plastic-coated cartons of milk that lasts for months.
However in the US—a market that’s, a minimum of theoretically, hooked on comfort, no stranger to processed meals, and increasingly attuned to local weather change—shelf-stable milk is unpopular. This isn’t for lack of attempting: Within the Nineties, Parmalat, the corporate that popularized UHT milk in Europe, tried to introduce its product to the U.S. through a splashy advertising and marketing push that concerned blanketing the airwaves in 30-second spots and throwing a free Pavarotti live performance in Central Park. By 1995, in any case that effort, shelf-stable milk nonetheless accounted for lower than 1 % of the U.S. milk market. As of 2020, it made for 3 %, in response to the evaluation agency Verified Market Analysis.
To grasp why, you need to perceive simply how bizarre, comparatively talking, Individuals are about milk. U.S. adults drink extra milk than their counterparts in Europe, consultants advised me, and are a lot finickier about temperature. “We’re simply educated to get pleasure from super-cold issues,” Amy Bentley, a food-studies professor at NYU, advised me. “Milk matches into that.” However Individuals are additionally notably enthralled by some enduring myths about milk. Right here, milk is meant to be contemporary and pure. And for that motive, it additionally must be refrigerated—as a result of it’s so contemporary that, like beef ribs or rooster cutlets or different animal merchandise, it was just lately just a little bit alive.
The earliest American commercials for milk, from the 1840s, emphasised its bucolic origins and uncontaminated contents, utilizing imagery of rolling hills and phrases reminiscent of healthful, contemporary, and unadulterated. These advertisements, directed at metropolis dwellers, offered milk as a small escape from city life, which was chaotic, crowded, and synthetic. Milk grew to become one in every of America’s favourite drinks, and greater than a century later, fashionable milk promoting nonetheless options rolling hills and phrases reminiscent of contemporary. Though our milk is now extremely prone to come from gigantic, thousand-acre farms within the Southwest, the place land is reasonable, promoting nonetheless sells us on small, family-run dairies. The final time I purchased conventionally pasteurized milk, the again of the plastic jug described its contents as “all-natural.”
E. Melanie DuPuis, a professor of environmental research and science at Tempo College, wrote a e book about this; its title, taken from an early milk commercial, is Nature’s Excellent Meals. She calls the mythmaking round dairy “the imaginary of milk.” “The imaginary of milk is that it’s coming from the countryside,” she advised me. It’s from a contented cow, and it’s bottled shortly, with minimal intervention. It’s old school Americana incarnate. It’s, as Bentley put it, “the epitome of wealth and well being and freshness”—or, because the advertisements put it, “pure.”
UHT milk, with its initialized identify and aseptic packaging, evokes one thing else. Its imaginary, DuPuis stated, is that it’s “a manufactured product that’s coming from far-off.” When Deeth tells folks concerning the work he does researching shelf-stable milk, he finds that many are utterly misinformed about what it’s. Primarily based on the identify and the packaging, they imagine it to be stuffed with preservatives, as a substitute of simply processed in a barely extra excessive approach than the milk they drink on a regular basis. “I believe individuals are suspicious,” he stated. (He and others have additionally famous a barely “burnt” or “caramelized” style to UHT milk, although clearly it’s not sufficient to show off shoppers everywhere in the world.) Shelf-stable milk is an affront to the tales that Individuals have been advised by the dairy business and popular culture about what milk ought to be.
These tales are so highly effective that Individuals refrigerate all types of milk-adjacent merchandise unnecessarily. Soy and nut milks are simply shelf-stable components blended into water, and as such don’t require refrigeration earlier than opening. However they’re sometimes offered within the refrigerated part, typically at a value to producers, who pay additional for the shelf area. To them, the symbolism related to refrigeration is value it. When Steve Demos launched the soy milk Silk, within the late Nineteen Seventies, he paid supermarkets extra to show it within the fridge, a canny advertising and marketing determination that some consultants credit score for the eventual widespread adoption of other milks.
“Milk in a bag, milk in [an aseptic container], simply doesn’t really feel proper,” Bentley advised me of American attitudes towards shelf-stable milk. It “feels substandard, subpar.” And in a wealthy nation with comparatively giant fridges, she identified, folks can afford to keep away from it: “As a result of the U.S. is so rich and may dedicate the assets to a chilly chain, we do.”
We accomplish that at no small price to the surroundings. As the author Nicola Twilley outlines in Frostbite, her latest historical past of refrigeration, mechanical cooling requires super quantities of energy for warehouses—refrigeration accounts for about 8 % of world electrical energy utilization—in addition to diesel for vehicles. It additionally requires chemical refrigerants, small quantities of which leak into the air as a part of the method; many of those refrigerants are “1000’s of occasions extra warming” than carbon dioxide, Twilley writes. Environmental scientists name them super-greenhouse gases.
That Individuals do that within the service of pure is weird, as a result of pure is a weird phrase to make use of for the method by which a substance meant for child cows leaves their moms’ our bodies at 101.5 levels and finally ends up a whole lot or 1000’s of miles away, refrigerated in plastic, to be consumed at 40 levels by a distinct species. Pure is an inappropriate descriptor for a drink that requires days within the huge vasculature of manufactured chill, which ships chilly air round a heat nation 24 hours a day, 12 months a yr. The milk in your fridge is a small monument to industrial equipment, the results of centuries of human intervention. There’s mainly nothing pure about it.
An odd paradox of American tradition is that individuals need to perceive meals—however solely to some extent. We need to reap the spoils of a massively industrialized meals system, however we don’t want our meals to really feel industrial. Shelf-stable milk is a reminder of all that’s synthetic about what we eat. It’s not a reminder that almost all Individuals need.
The milk I purchased at Wegmans price $3.49 and was made by Parmalat, which remains to be holding on to its tiny U.S. market share. It sat in my pantry for every week or so—even in any case this, I simply couldn’t carry myself to peel again its silvery seal and take a giant swig. However then life’s nice motivator—desperation—intervened: I ran out of chilly milk and forgot to purchase extra. So we opened the Parmalat. The first milk-drinker in my family, who’s 1 yr outdated, declared it yummy. I let it sit for an additional day or two within the fridge earlier than lastly attempting it myself. I actually don’t know what I used to be anticipating, nevertheless it tasted like milk: creamy, barely candy, as pure as anything.
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