OK, so I’m shopping in the supermarket awhile back, and I get to the milk section. I go to grab the ordinary store-brand milk and note the sell-by date is something like two weeks into the future.
Then I happen to glance over at the organic milk (“The Organic Cow”) and note that the sell-by date is more like two months in the future. That is not a typo: two months.
At first I assumed it was just a printing error, but on my next few trips to the store there was a similar time discrepancy in the sell-by dates between the regular 'ol milk and the organic milk.
So what’s the straight dope? What are the organic folks doing that allows them extend the sell-by date so far into the future? And is whatever they are doing the reason why the organic stuff costs over twice as much as the regular milk?
-The Organic-Industrial Complex
In ultrapasteurization, the milk is heated to 140°C. That’s hot enough to kill all the bacteria that account for the spoilage of traditionally pasteurized milk. Ultrapasteurization prolongs the shelf life, but also affects the flavor of dairy products. Here’s the details.
Another point - are you sure it was a “sell by” date and not a “best if used by” date? I’ve seen different products use different methods to date their freshness, though I’m not sure if I’ve seen milk with “best if used by” on it lately.
Ferret: I believe that milk has to have a sell-by date by law (i.e., the grocers have to pull it from the shelves after the marked date passes or face fines).
This brings up another milk question. Back when I lived in Manhattan, the milk had two dates stamped on it: a sell-by date, and a sell-by date for NYC. The NYC date was generally about a week before the regular date. So why does NYC have stricter rules for selling milk?
Sorry to bump this, but I was searching the archives for this question and I have an answer for Dewey. The reason NYC has a separate date on it is because in NYC, grocers can sell the milk until midnight of the date printed on the carton. I learned that this morning from my carton of Horizon.
I assume “ultrapasteurization” is the same as what is called “UHT” in the UK. Milk treated in this way will last for several weeks/months if the carton is unopened, but once opened it tends to go off quicker than ordinary milk (I assume because there are none of the usual bacteria in there to compete with spoilage organisms). Plus, it tastes nasty.
No, that’s the organic label you’re paying for. My guess is that there weren’t enough people buying the organic milk before it went off, so they decided to ultrapasteurize it so it could sit in the supermarket for weeks while people looked at it and said: “Well I’m screwed if I’m paying that much for a carton of milk”…
UHT pasteurized milk is best used within five days after opening (according to my carton of Organic Valley). This isn’t a problem for me, as milk doesn’t last much longer than three. Maybe it’s just me, but organic milk tastes, on average, better than regular milk. I wouldn’t discredit the entire process–it can come out much better than “normal” milk, but it varies from manufacturer to manufacturer.
Not quite. When you’re not allowed to take certain chemical shortcuts, such as pumping your cows full of hormones to make them grow faster and produce more milk, and you have to buy organic food for them, and treat the milk in a non-invasive way, then you’re going to get a significantly lower yield per dollar on your cows. I assume some of the cost is the label and the smug factor we get from helping the earth, but it’s not all about the label.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that it’s only the label. I meant that the added expense is from the fact that it is organic (hence extra production costs plus extra cachet), rather than from the fact that it has been UHT treated to prolong its shelf life.
I am also interested by your comments about the flavour of organic milk. Normally I would agree with you that organic milk can taste better than non-organic. But in my experience, the huge impairment in flavour caused by UHT treatment is orders of magnitude bigger than any subtle difference in flavour between non-UHT organic and non-UHT standard milk. To be honest, non-UHT yak’s milk would probably taste better than UHT cow’s milk. Do you really enjoy drinking the UHT stuff?
One source of confusion is that there are actually several ultrapasteurization techniques using different temperatures. The higher the temperature (or longer the cooking time or combination of the two) the longer the milk will keep. The highest levels produce the “shelf-stable” milk that will keep without refrigeration indefinitely. The technique has been in use for decades.
The problem is that more cooking produces what the industry calls, straightforwardly, a “cooked” taste that consumers tend not to like. So the industry balances taste with convenience.
Therefore some milks can last a couple of months, some several months, some longer depending on need and use.
Low-selling milks, like organic milk or lactose-free milk, use the basic technique, which keeps them sellable and drinkable for a couple of months. This imparts the minimal change in taste, and one that most consumers don’t notice or else assume it’s part of the “specialness” that they’re buying the milk for in the first place. There is some extra cost in doing this, but probably 90% of the difference in price of organic milk is simply that it’s a specialty item and lacks the economies of scale of regular milk.
All commercial pasteurized, homogenized milk tastes different from raw milk in the first place, and raw milk varies with breed of cow and feedstocks and time of year and lots of other things, so what milk is “supposed” to taste like is as mythical as what cola is “supposed” to taste like. Europeans rely much more heavily ion UHT milk than Americans and the latter are often surprised by the taste of milk there. If you like the taste of your milk, though, then that’s all that matters.
Even though we have a local distributer and farm and everything and my milk is about as fresh as it could be, I still go to the organic brand from about 200 miles away. Something about how they handle the milk is different–fat free organic tastes just as good as 2% “regular” to me.
I’ve had friends try the blind test on me, as everyone suspects I’m just full of it, but I usually come out in favor of the organic.
Oh, and I only put regular in scare quotes like that because it seems odd to me that we consider normal to be hormones and chemicals and weird the most natural.
Look more closely at Horizon’s carton. It says the milk is best only 7 days after opening. The sell-by date is actually a sell-by date, and they did think of the customer as well.
Yes. We have friends in Belgium, and when we visit them, we always wonder (quietly) how a nation that prides itself on good food can put up with such awful milk.
Mind you, they do have non-UHT milk in grocery store cold cases, so clearly some people think the less-pasteurized stuff is worth the hassle. But the shelf-stable stuff seems to be more popular.
I think that the reason there is an earlier sell-by date in NYC is because there’s an assumption that rather than making a couple of big deliveries, each truck is making many small deliveries, each time opening up the back and warming up the milk, causing it to spoil faster. I don’t know if this is true anymore, what with all the refrigerated trucks and such, as I’ve always gone with the sell-by date for the 'burbs, am quite sensitive to the smell of spoiled milk, and haven’t noticed a problem, but the rule’s still on the books.