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Faunsdale, AL | The type of container was a challenge.
Glass bottles were traditional and worked very well to keep bacteriological quality since they could be returned, washed, sterilized and refilled. Basically the container caused no bacterial growth if the cleaning and sterilization process was controlled correctly.
However, a side effect of the glass bottle was a “cardboard” like off flavor that would develop in some bottles of milk that were not used within a day or two after delivery in spite of the milk being kept cold in a refrigerator. Since most milk was used promptly because refrigerators weren’t common in the beginning and milk was delivered every day anyway, this was never a big problem and it was always intermittent.
Finally some dairies began to realize that only the houses on the West side of streets would have problems and those on the East side never did. The key was if the milk in the clear glass bottles was exposed to sunlight sitting on the porch before it was taken inside. Sunlight was the problem, it caused the cardboard like flavor to develop. But only if the milk was not used promptly.
Bottles and home delivery fell out of favor to be replaced by paper cartons picked up in stores and the cardboard off-flavor disappeared completely for many years until the plastic jug became popular and replaced the paper cartons. This change was a double whammy. Jugs held enough milk that people would keep it a few days at least and the longer they kept it, the stronger the oxidized cardboard like flavor got. What had been an occasional problem back in the home delivery days became p
very common! Milk was no longer being left on porches to get damaged by the sun, so what was going on. The problem was back and worse than ever!
This was the situation in the late 1970’s early 80’s when I went away to college and began buying milk. I can tell you it was awful stuff. I could bring a gallon of raw milk from home and it would be good for a week or more if I didn’t drink it up before then but after that, had to switch to store milk. After a few days in the frig, I could hardly stand to put it on cereal much less drink it straight.
Finally some food scientists figured out it was UV light in sunlight or fluorescent bulbs in/over the dairy case that was penetrating the clear bottle of the home delivered milk sitting in the sunlight on a East facing front porch in the morning or the translucent plastic milk jugs under the bright fluorescent bulbs in the dairy case that were oxidizing B vitamins in the milk to start the process. Even kept in the dark in a home refrigerator, once started, the flavor developed over time.
From fall of 1982 through spring of 83, I was at VPI finishing up a degree in dairy science. Lived in a house with 3 other dairy science students and we all split the grocery bill. A couple of the guys would go to Kroger’s and buy a weeks worth of groceries including about 3-4 gallons of milk. A few days later we would be into the 3rd or 4th gallon, and that was some awful tasting stuff! We all came from different backgrounds so there was always some teasing back and forth about Holsteins’ milk to rinse your mouth after brushing your teeth vs Jerseys’ milk but we all agreed the Kroger milk was awful. One of the guys was milking at a local dairy most of that time so we really missed an opportunity by not having him bring milk home.
The solution took a while to be adopted by the retailers even though it was as simple as replacing the bulbs in the dairy case with a type that had low UV output. A big dairy in the southeastern US, Mayfields, changed their translucent blow-mold jugs to a yellow color that they were already using in their labels. Another jug that worked was a white non-translucent plastic that was adopted by some other dairies. Basically anything that would prevent the milk being exposed to UV light would prevent the problem. I haven’t run into a jug of milk with the cardboard taste in several decades.
The cost of this problem to the dairy industry is hard to measure, but it was so common and so severe that it had to have turned large numbers of people off drinking milk.
Edited by ccjersey 12/22/2024 14:24
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Part 2 of my raw milk question: taste
