Shelf-Secure Milk Is a Miracle. Why Don’t Individuals Drink Extra of It?
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 pieces an individual may 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 made out of soy, almonds, oats, cashews, flaxseeds, bananas, pistachios, and hazelnuts, as well as, after all, to the lactational secretions of the American cow, all displayed prominently in well-stocked, brightly lit show circumstances.
One of many world’s most consumed, most handy, and least wasteful varieties of dairy, in distinction, occupies an area concerning the measurement of a seaside 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 study 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 far more efficient at killing micro organism—than different varieties of pasteurization. It’s then poured into particular packaging that’s sterile and hermetic, the place it might 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 automotive, to lose worth as quickly as you drive it off the lot. Andrew Novaković, a professor emeritus of agricultural economics at Cornell, instructed me that it’s “nearly immortal.” It’s secure, handy, sensible, and significantly helpful within the many city components 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 trade calls the “chilly chain.”
For all of those causes, shelf-stable milk is wildly standard in lots of components of the world. Hilton Deeth, a professor emeritus within the Faculty of Agriculture and Sustainability on the College of Queensland, in Australia, instructed me that in some European nations, a very good 90 p.c of the business milk provide is UHT. In France, to be extra exact, 19 out of each 20 liters of milk bought is UHT; in Spain, it’s 48 out of fifty. The Chinese language market is rising shortly, Deeth instructed 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 USA—a market that’s, no less than 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 Nineteen 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 p.c of the U.S. milk market. As of 2020, it made for 3 p.c, 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 instructed me, and are a lot finickier about temperature. “We’re simply skilled to take pleasure in super-cold issues,” Amy Bentley, a food-studies professor at NYU, instructed me. “Milk suits into that.” However Individuals are additionally significantly enthralled by some enduring myths about milk. Right here, milk is meant to be contemporary and pure. And for that cause, it additionally must be refrigerated—as a result of it’s so contemporary that, like beef ribs or hen cutlets or different animal merchandise, it was lately slightly bit alive.
The earliest American ads for milk, from the 1840s, emphasised its bucolic origins and uncontaminated contents, utilizing imagery of rolling hills and phrases corresponding to healthful, contemporary, and unadulterated. These advertisements, directed at metropolis dwellers, bought milk as a small escape from city life, which was chaotic, crowded, and synthetic. Milk grew to become one among America’s favourite drinks, and greater than a century later, trendy milk promoting nonetheless options rolling hills and phrases corresponding to contemporary. Although our milk is now extremely more likely to come from gigantic, thousand-acre farms within the Southwest, the place land is affordable, 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 Good Meals. She calls the mythmaking round dairy “the imaginary of milk.” “The imaginary of milk is that it’s coming from the countryside,” she instructed me. It’s from a cheerful cow, and it’s bottled shortly, with minimal intervention. It’s old style 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. Based mostly 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 method than the milk they drink on a regular basis. “I believe persons 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 instructed by the dairy trade and popular culture about what milk needs to be.
These tales are so highly effective that Individuals refrigerate every kind of milk-adjacent merchandise unnecessarily. Soy and nut milks are simply shelf-stable elements blended into water, and as such don’t require refrigeration earlier than opening. However they’re usually bought within the refrigerated part, typically at a price to producers, who pay further for the shelf area. To them, the symbolism related to refrigeration is price it. When Steve Demos launched the soy milk Silk, within the late Seventies, he paid supermarkets extra to show it within the fridge, a canny advertising and marketing choice 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 instructed me of American attitudes towards shelf-stable milk. It “feels substandard, subpar.” And in a wealthy nation with comparatively massive 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 value to the surroundings. As the author Nicola Twilley outlines in Frostbite, her current historical past of refrigeration, mechanical cooling requires large quantities of energy for warehouses—refrigeration accounts for about 8 p.c of worldwide 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 instances 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 bunch or 1000’s of miles away, refrigerated in plastic, to be consumed at 40 levels by a unique 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 need 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 value $3.49 and was made by Parmalat, which continues to be holding on to its tiny U.S. market share. It sat in my pantry for per week or so—even in any case this, I simply couldn’t deliver 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 previous, 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, however it tasted like milk: creamy, barely candy, as pure as anything.
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