Day: November 11, 2021

I’ve just had a week of drinking artificial milk, experimenting with unsweetened soya milk and oat milk. I wasn’t looking to beat the taste/texture of cows’ milk, but for an alternative, which merely had to taste acceptable.

Either milk was acceptable.

I followed Charmer’s advice and bought chilled. Each one was good for about 10 days, five once opened. Neither could be frozen. But the “fresh” lifespan was perfect for me anyhow.

Do you remember those little UHT pots of creamy-white-stuff you used to get to put in coffee? Catered coffee? It was supposed to be a cream substitute, but UHT. Long life. You would open one of these pots, pour the entire contents into your cup of coffee, and end up with a whitened, creamy drink? Allegedly.

Do you remember how wrong those little pots used to taste, if you used them in tea? Because you just didn’t want that level of creaminess?

I found oat milk to be the same. For that reason, I had a preference for soya milk. A tiny shame, since I’m happier consuming oats than soya. A lot of forests are being destroyed to make way for soya. But I’m happy that either of these is less of a footprint than drinking cows’ milk. Cows are commonly fed on soya anyway, so I’m at least cutting out an inefficient bovine middleman.

Soya milk comes is all sorts of different styles. For a start, there is sweetened or unsweetened. As a diabetic, I figured unsweetened was the way to go.

Soya milk comes in different flavours. Dave Williams suggested vanilla. The trouble is, the price. Vanilla was about 50% more expensive than the regular milk. The one I tried was only slightly dearer than cows’ milk (89p versus 95p versus 150p for vanilla). I was certainly conscious of cost – ideally I didn’t want to spend a lot more than I’m already spending. Both oat and soya were the same price – there might have been 5p in it.

So, this week’s supermarket order will be soya milk (which happens to be vegan) and that, barring disasters, is what I will select going forward. I don’t intend becoming zealous over this. The goal is to consume less carbon, which I’ll be doing by consuming this milk at home. I’m sure I’ll still enjoy drinks at the local cafe, in the same way as I enjoy an occasional bacon sandwich from them.

On a separate note, we lost one of the chickens this morning. I know… we shouldn’t have favourites, but… She just went totally downhill in the last 48 hours. I need to bury my head into things today, take my mind off it.