Time to Try UHT Milk Again?

Milk by Flicker user calliope

"eggs and milk" by calliope @ Flickr

As a subscriber to Scientific American, I just read one of their regular columns “Ask The Expert” which asked “Why does organic milk last longer than regular milk?” That column is online here. Here’s the excerpt that caught my attention:




To summarize: UHT milk lasts longer and doesn’t need to be refrigerated, but Americans wouldn’t buy it because of taste or unfamiliarity. I’ve always wondered if this is why soy or rice milk is refrigerated when, with proper packaging, it doesn’t need to be kept cold until it’s opened.

However, it’s likely true that major costs of milk nowadays (in the era of >$4 gas) have to do with shipping and refrigeration from minute it leaves the cow to the minute it’s poured on your cereal. Besides what’s done on an industrial scale, how could one begin to calculate the amount of energy used to chill the milk sitting in millions of home refrigerators, or how much milk is poured down the sink because it’s past due? Imagine how much smaller the carbon footprint of un-refrigerated boxed UHT milk (organic or not) would be compared to traditional milk. I don’t know for a fact that UHT milk is a net win environment-wise, but I have a strong hunch that it can’t be worse than what we do now.

Is it time us to try UHT milk again? If people have no problem spending more for UHT organic milk and don’t mind the taste (I buy UHT organic and didn’t even realize until looking in to all this), would the rest of the country try UHT nonorganic milk if it meant saving a dollar and/or helping the environment to boot?

Some additional links I found on the subject:


One thought on “Time to Try UHT Milk Again?

  1. Born and raised in Portugal, I actually got desperate when I moved to the U.S. in 1995. I had spent the first 17 years of my life drinking UHT milk and loved it, so much that I would drink it instead of water if I was thirsty. Took me years to find out why the milk in the U.S. didn’t taste as good. Proof that personal taste is what matters. I now look for Parmalat or LaLa (Mexican brand) in California and I absolutely love it. It’s like being in Portugal again. I understand why people say UHT is bad. But to say it tastes bad…. that’s a matter of opinion. 🙂

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