Milk will have to get pretty damn expensive for me to actually stop buying it. I don't want to say I'm addicted, but I am.

What the hell is going on that milk is hitting $5 a gallon? What the hell are we feeding our cows?

@bluegus32: Corn. And corn also goes into ethanol, which is becoming more popular as oil prices rise.

Gross

Fine with me.. Haven't drank milk in years.

Thanks for the reminder. I had planned to start doing this and have a partially empty freezer to put it all in. This probably doesn't seem like a big deal unless you have kids that practically inhale the stuff, oh and for coffee. If regular gallons of milk hit $5 how much will a half gallon of organic end up costing? Possibly about as much as a carton of smokes?

No, its the fact that there is a push for biofuel which is made primarily of corn and other farm grown items. Corn is a main constituent in cow feed and as more is pumped into biofuel, the price rises. Therefore the farmers must raise there prices

Hopefully soy milk does not go up at the same time. More people might consider it if it costs less than regular milk.

Cows can eat grass and hay.

I think this is fear-mongering. Milk is currently overpriced because you can't sell it at low prices, right? If the price starts going up, the government will just knock out that price support and the price will fall.

@Televiper:

Ice cream.

@Televiper:

Milk chocolate.

@Televiper:

Shrimp in garlic butter.

@Chicago7: Not always. If production is the goal, that has to be supplemented by feed. Most feed has corn in it. What's ridiculous is that it takes more oil to make ethanol then the gasoline it replaces. We could import it cheap from Brazil which makes it out of sugar cane but the tariff is way high on that.

I'm lactose intolerant. I gave all that up except for the butter.

@chrisgoh: For me personally, milk would have to hit $10 a gallon for me to even consider using soy milk. Even then, I'd donate plasma or pawn some stuff before I drank soy milk!

Dang, guess I have to starting using wine in my cereal.

I would prefer not to consume bovine lactose at any temperature.

@Rusted: The sad part is that the only reason corn prices are going up is that we're still paying farmers to NOT GROW IT. The farm bill is a HUGE (I mean long - hundreds of pages) piece of legislation that's been amended each year for like 80 years. No one except the committee that works on it really understands it, and we basically pay farmers to grow mostly "raw materials" for junk food and then pay them to let a lot of land sit idle to keep prices where they are.

So as a result, we make ethanol from corn rather than something better (switch grass) and we pay higher prices now for dairy and meat because of the push for "green fuels".

@Chicago7: Yeah, I had the "opportunity" in India to try milk and beef from cows that eat grass and hay instead of corn.

You wouldn't recognize either product as beef or milk as Americans and Europeans know it. After trying each ONCE, I avoided both as much as possible until I got back to Europe...

I was appalled when I went to the market yesterday, and found out that a package of four sticks of butter rose to slightly less than $4.00. I was buying the same product a few months ago for only $1.49!!!

Can you freeze butter? Because i'm tempted to stock up before it gets worse.

@hoo_foot:

I am pretty sure you can freeze butter.

Yes, you can freeze butter. I do so as a matter of course. I also froze milk 20 years ago when I was poor and on food assistance. There is no change to either the butter or the milk.

Now that I'm old, comfortable, and lactose intolerant, I bought a gadget to make my own soymilk. I find that mixing it with rice in the hopper, as well as carefully selecting the right beans, makes for a more palatable product.

Milk has costed five dollars a gallon here in Hawaii for aaaages.
It's not a very big deal tbh

Has anybody tried freezing milk and drinking it afterward? It tastes awful. I did it by accident once. Not only that but if you're stocking up on enough to freeze it, that means it's sitting in the plastic for awhile. I imagine that plastic taste would get into the milk too.

milk is already $5/gallon here. its a conspiracy by big milk.

Has the price of cheese gone up as well?

@dbeahn: Worse yet, much of that land we are paying to not grow corn on is marginal, at best. So it is unlikely farmers would cultivate it anyway.

Also I've heard of land owners stocking their property with game and having rich business people come for "hunting" expeditions. It seems to me that if they are utilizing the land for some other commercial purpose they should not get the subsidy.

2% still $3.09 a US gallon. Yay for government controls in California over milk. (Normally I am all for deregulation and open markets, but in California that is seemingly asking for trouble ;) )

@speedwell: I disagree with your statement that freezing milk does not change milk. Tried it a couple of times, and it tasted awful - and this was only after thawing within a day of freezing, not a case of absorbing odors. The milk solids seemed to irreversibly separate from the water (and whey?). I'm sure it's fine in recipes. I always freeze butter, and I would say it lasts a lot longer than the 2-3 months suggested by Frugal For Life. I've had butter in my chest freezer for over a year that's just fine.

----

The powdered milk suggestion is a great one. I rediscovered it when I started making my own yogurt. The recipes I used suggested adding instant powdered nonfat milk to the skim or 1% milk (which makes for a yogurt with better consistency). I had an unforgettably bad experience with powdered milk when I was a kid; in the morning after a sleepover with a bunch of other pre-teens, the household had no milk for breakfast -- they didn't drink milk, I guess. The mom made up powdered milk for us to drink or use on cereal. It was one of the most foul things I could have imagined. I remember it being sort of yellowish and a little clumpy. Eeew. Fast forward, I was really skeptical to try it again for my precious yogurt. After finding that adding the powder to existing milk didn't result in anything horrid, I tried making some up as "straight milk" using cold water. You definitely need to let it sit overnight in the fridge to fully dissolve, but you can make it thicker than the instructions call for and it makes a really good drinkable milk! Powdered milk is also pretty inexpensive, and you can buy the store brand to save even more. You can make up any volume, so if you don't use much you can just as easily make 1 cup or 10 gallons, provided you have the powder, cold water, and room in the fridge :) I will continue to buy my 1% half-gallons, but I'll also always keep some packets (or boxes) of nonfat powdered milk on hand.

For everyone who's saying that they wouldn't drink soy milk if their life depended on it - I don't know anybody who _drinks_ soy milk, and I know a lot of lactose intolerants and vegeterian/vegans. Soy milk is good in cereal (try vanilla), as a recipe additive (plain), and in general when you need to thin out a mixture (e.g. in smoothies). If you are the type of person, like my father, who pours himself a glass of 100% USDA whole milk every evening with dinner, you will never, ever understand the usefulness of soy milk. But if you generally use milk with other things, and rarely as a drink, just try it and you'll probably understand that milk was hardly adding any of the flavor that you thought it was in the first place. On a side note, Soy Dream is better than most store-bought ice cream, i sh*t you not. No, it doesn't taste "like ice cream," and soy milk doesn't taste "like milk" - but when our precious milk and it's derivative frozen dessert triple in price, it's time to rethink the idea that we need particular, traditional flavors in our foods and start looking elsewhere for satisfaction.

The milk solids seemed to irreversibly separate from the water (and whey?).

That never once happened to me. Make sure you are defrosting your milk in the refrigerator, not on the counter.

It may also be time to take a good hard look at milk purity; there seems to be a lot of incentive to adulterate milk, with prices going the way they are.

For cereal, I like soy milk better then regular milk. For straightt drinking, it takes a bit of adjustment, but for me the adjustment was easier than the switch from regular to diet soda (which I'm now even weaning off of to drink unsweet tea). We are not big milk drinkers, so part of the switch was economics. We end up wasting a lot of milk because we don't always drink it before it goes bad. Soy milk lasts over a month when unopened and usually tastes fine for at least two weeks after opening.

Once again, my lactose intolerance works in my favor.

Cows eat mostly grass and hay with corn as a supplement. It's simply too expensive to feed an all corn diet to cattle because they need 40-50 pounds of dry feed a day.

@dbeahn: We can't yet make ethanol from cellulose (switch grass) economically. But I agree we need to overhaul farm policy.

It has been pointed out that farmers are paid not to farm. On the flip side, much of the land for which farmers are being paid not to farm was done so in the name of conservation to stop farming on steep hillsides that erode or near streams and rivers (hence the name Conservation Resource Program).

@Rusted: No, ethanol from corn doesn't require more oil than it replaces. But yes, we do need to remove the $.54/gal ethanol tariff. But there are other environmental issues with Brazilian ethanol, namely the creation of farmland by cutting back rain forest.

Ewwww. I hate milk anyway. To freeze it and then thaw it to drink.... No thanks.

hmm, if the price rises and the farmers actually get more $$ for it, I don't mind paying for it. The farmers are usually the ones getting screwed.
Besides all those bums on welfare will have less of my tax dollars to spend on Doritos.

Milk prices are set by the price of cheese.

@Chicago7: Not only are grass and hay supplemented with corn feed but a lot of grazing land has been turned over to corn production because of the corn ethanol program. Less grazing land means fewer dairy cows and more expensive milk.

@dbeahn:

Haha! You expected to get good beef in India? The cow has to die naturally there, doesn't it? So you get old rangy meat.

@Morton Fox:

Really? Because I would think that most range areas couldn't grow corn if you irrigated non-stop. There is a reason why those lands are range.

Corn feed is mostly for beef production and not for milk production, isn't it?

@HeyHermano:

Why are the other occasions that lactose intolerance works to your favor? When you want to clear a room, you just drink a glass of milk?

:D

www.milksucks.com

I drink soy milk. I love it. After drinking it for years, it tastes better. It's better for you. Your stomach really isn't made to be drinking all that milk anyhow. Get off the teat already.