Yep, sealed pasturized milk can last quite a while. It’s amazing what happens when you sterilized something.
Well, they had milk before they had refrigerators, to the best of my knowledge.
And, to the best of my knowledge, people sometimes got sick from drinking it before some silly French dude got the idea to pasteurize it before serving.
Yeah, but more often than not they didn’t. And the main reason for pasteurizing milk in the first place was because of the poor quality of life of the cows and the workers prevalent in the early part of the 20th century.
I actually don’t drink pastuerized milk. I’m doing just fine.
I´m done with fresh milk, I´m fed up of spraying the kitchen walls with stale milk after drowsly preparing a hot cocoa cup in the mornings. I moved to powdered milk; two spoons of that, one and half of this, three more of that other thing and poor the hot water in.
That’s a rhetorical question, right? 
My mother used to leave her dish in the sink after she finished her toast in the morning so she could sit in the living room and sip her coffee. She’d hear “clink clink clink” and sure enough, there would our Fluffy be, licking the butter off the knife and dish.
Cats love any dairy product-butter, cheese, milk, cream, ice cream, etc.
Turns out those who were realized that since it was unopened, it didn’t go bad immediately were right. Gave it a healthy sniff before pouring it this morning, and it seemed fine.
I’m guessing ryobserver (hi, ry!) is right, and this jug won’t last as long as usual, but I’m not gonna toss four bucks’ worth of milk before I need to.
No it doesnt, cows need to be milked at roughly 12 hour intervals or they get REALLY testy. Milch cows only give milk after calving so one of 2 things happens, the calf sucks the milk out frequently, or the farmer [who has taken teh calf away] expresses the milk out at roughly 12 hour intervals. It never just sits around in teh cow for several days. ASk a lactating mother - it is painful for humans to be lactating and not used, it triggers a stop in lactation fairly quickly if it isnt removed from teh breast. I think it took about 36 hours in me after I lost the second kid.
I think that a trip to a Comedy Club with a bunch of dopers would be a very sour experience.
You forgot to mention that milk isn’t created – or stored – in the womb.
Damn – sorry – that was supposed to be “preview.”
Forgot to add: :rolleyes:
My husband and I go through at least 8 L (a little over 2 gallons) a week. I drink most of it, actually. I can go through a bag (1.3L) alongside a meal, easily. I have to tell myself to drink juice and water sometimes, because I tend to default to milk when I’m thirsty and I go through it too fast. My brother is the same way. My sister, OTOH, HATES the taste of milk (funny, since she had a job milking cows until her recent move). When we were younger and all living at home, my parents used to tell us to drink coke at supper, because we went through the milk too quickly. If my brother and I are both home, a 4L bag disappears at least once a day 
mnemosyne, you buy your milk in bags? How does that work? What sizes do they come in?
How can you leave a grocery bag on your kitchen floor for 2 days? Didn’t you see it? Trip over it? Bang into it?
And I let the butter soften, too. But I throw old milk away–I am paranoid about milk and hate the taste of it at room temp.
I did kinda wonder that myself, although I think she only left it over night. My dogs would have eaten everything including trying to get into the milk carton if I had left groceries on the floor.
Allow me to dig out my dusty old microbiology degree and interject some facts:
-Pasteurized milk is not sterile. It still has bacteria in it that will eventually cause spoilage. If you want to prove it to yourself, get a sealed gallon and leave it in your yard for a week or two in the summer. Pasteurization kills most of the harmful bacteria, so it takes longer to spoil. But it will still go bad.
-Butter doesn’t go bad mainly because it has very little free water in it for bacteria to live on. Rancidity is a whole 'nother matter, but that has nothing to do with microbiology, so I’ll leave that alone.
-You wouldn’t expect milk to go bad inside a cow (or human, or any other mammal) in part because in a healthy one, there shouldn’t be any bacteria swimming around in the lactation glands.
In summary, if I were in twickster’s position, I’d keep drinking the milk until it started smelling funny. But I’d keep it in the fridge from now on… I’d also expect it to go bad more quickly than the average gallon you get from the store.
In other news, don’t panic about expiration dates. Those are VERY loose guidelines.
Thanks, Smeghead. I’m continuing to start each morning with a healthy whiff to see what the milk smells like – so far it doesn’t smell like much of anything (vaguely milky, perhaps), so I’m still drinking it.
As far as my leaving the bag on the floor for two days – um, well, I’m not the most meticulous of housekeepers. Plus I have an enormous kitchen, so it’s not hard to walk around anything sitting in the middle of the floor. And yeah, I did know there was something in the bag (if it had been empty, the cat would have knocked it over and moved in) – but since it was a paper bag inside the plastic bag, I couldn’t see what it was. I vaguely thought it was a couple of two-liter bottles of pop, which could either sit in a bag in the middle of the floor or three feet away on the edge of the floor, out of the bag. Six of one, half dozen of the other.
(Really? no one else leaves full bags of groceries just sitting on the kitchen floor for days at a time? I find that fascinating. I do generally take out perishables, but canned stuff, bottles, etc. …)
(Sigh. As my working-class aunt, who kept a meticulous home, once observed, “intellectuals aren’t much for cleaning.” Smart woman, she.)
Danes who like butter. Unheard of!
Just finished the science experiment – er, gallon of milk. It was, as Teddy Roosevelt so famously said, Good to the Last Drop.
Now we know.
Mmmm. Milk so good, you have to eat it with a fork!