Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Why Buy the Cow?

Home delivery of milk is making a comeback. Admittedly, in some communities, it never left. In many, however, regular appearances by the milk man ended long ago. Why have milk (and cheese and sometimes even ice cream!) delivered? Ideal Bite posts some compelling reasons, detailed below:

-Never make a trip to the grocery store just because you forgot must-haves like milk or cheese again. Some even 
offer ice cream.
-Milk deliverers reuse their bottles, which are often made of glass (Americans chuck out 470,000 tons of milk cartons each year); few people recycle them. 
-You'll support local farms, and avoid the transport energy associated with national brands shipped from 
who-knows-where. 
-An abundance of calcium-dairy's a great source of it. And organic milk has none of the hormone rBGH. 

In many cases, you don't even need to be home to receive your delivery. Suppliers provide an insulated cooler and pack your dairy deliciousness inside. Interested? Check out this state-by-state directory to see if home milk delivery is available where you live. You can also check local.com and insert "dairy farm" in the search engine. For those farms, you'll need to call and see if home delivery is available. If not, you might be able to get a delivery service going if you can wrangle up enough other interested folks. Why buy the cow when you can get the milk brought to your doorstep? 

*Image from here

5 comments:

nicole said...

what a great post! yet another way we can all get closer to the source of our food.

and on a purely aesthetic level,i just LOVE milk bottles. divine!

Jen said...

How neat! I have always wanted to be able to get milk delivered. I'm wandering over now to see if it's offered in my area. Thanks for another wonderful post!

Jen

Heather said...

Great post! I started having milk delivered to my office because there wasn't anyone that would deliver to my house. It works out so well, and the milk tastes SO much better!

EcoGrrl said...

I remember going to Senn's Dairy here in Portland as they used to have a drive through when they stopped delivery when I was a kid. I'm only in my 30's so it's great to see the resurgence. My only comment would be, even though this is cool, to make sure you're doing something about the carbon footprint caused by all that vehicle travel to deliver food. I would think it'd be a better idea to deliver these to grocery stores (New Seasons here in Portland has glass bottled milk), then they can sell them in bulk, and we can ride our bikes or walk to the stores to pick it up.

Another thing it made me think about is how much dairy we consume - the only animal that drinks milk after infancy. We get more lactose intolerant the older we get, do we really need this much milk? Something to think about...

Tony R. said...

This is great, thanks for the information!