Shelf-Stable Milk Is a Miracle. Why Don’t Americans Drink It?
7 min read
The Wegmans in Brooklyn’s Navy Yard is—sorry to be dramatic—paradise on Earth: 74,000 square feet of high ceilings and long aisles, stocked with nearly everything a person could conceivably want to eat or drink. It has tamarind and rambutan and malanga; pink pineapples and purplish, fresh-packed venison; a special cheese that is softly dusted with dried flowers and herbs collected in the German Alps. The milk options alone include beverages made from soy, almonds, oats, cashews, flaxseeds, bananas, pistachios, and hazelnuts, in addition, of course, to the lactational secretions of the American cow, all displayed prominently in well-stocked, brightly lit display cases.
One of the world’s most consumed, most convenient, and least wasteful types of dairy, in contrast, occupies a space about the size of a beach cooler, on the bottom shelf in an unglamorous and highly missable corner of aisle six. It’s shelf-stable milk, a miracle of food science—and a product that Americans just can’t learn to love.
Shelf-stable milk is, as you might imagine, milk that does not need refrigeration and can thus be stocked on shelves. It gets this way by being blasted to 280–302 degrees Fahrenheit for one to five seconds in a process that is hotter and faster—and much more effective at killing bacteria—than other types of pasteurization. It’s then poured into special packaging that is sterile and airtight, where it can last for months on end.
Shelf-stable milk (also known as ultrahigh-temperature, or UHT, milk) does not take up space in the refrigerator before it needs to; it does not need to be packed on ice when thrown into a picnic basket or a lunchbox; it does not begin, like a car, to lose value as soon as you drive it off the lot. Andrew Novaković, a professor emeritus of agricultural economics at Cornell, told me that it is “almost immortal.” It is safe, convenient, practical, and particularly useful in the many urban parts of this country where refrigerator space is at a premium, as well as in the many rural areas where grocery stores are spread out. More meaningfully, it doesn’t require participation in the resource-intensive, greenhouse-gas-spewing system of refrigeration that the industry calls the “cold chain.”
For all of these reasons, shelf-stable milk is wildly popular in many parts of the world. Hilton Deeth, a professor emeritus in the School of Agriculture and Sustainability at the University of Queensland, in Australia, told me that in some European countries, a good 90 percent of the commercial milk supply is UHT. In France, to be more precise, 19 out of every 20 liters of milk sold is UHT; in Spain, it’s 48 out of 50. The Chinese market is growing quickly, Deeth told me, as is the Central American one. In dairy sections around the globe, the default is rectangular, unrefrigerated, plastic-coated cartons of milk that lasts for months.
But in the United States—a market that is, at least theoretically, addicted to convenience, no stranger to processed foods, and more and more attuned to climate change—shelf-stable milk is unpopular. This is not for lack of trying: In the 1990s, Parmalat, the company that popularized UHT milk in Europe, attempted to introduce its product to the U.S. via a splashy marketing push that involved blanketing the airwaves in 30-second spots and throwing a free Pavarotti concert in Central Park. By 1995, after all that effort, shelf-stable milk still accounted for less than 1 percent of the U.S. milk market. As of 2020, it made for 3 percent, according to the analysis firm Verified Market Research.
To understand why, you have to understand just how weird, comparatively speaking, Americans are about milk. U.S. adults drink more milk than their counterparts in Europe, experts told me, and are much finickier about temperature. “We’re just trained to enjoy super-cold things,” Amy Bentley, a food-studies professor at NYU, told me. “Milk fits into that.” But Americans are also particularly enthralled by some enduring myths about milk. Here, milk is supposed to be fresh and natural. And for that reason, it also needs to be refrigerated—because it is so fresh that, like beef ribs or chicken cutlets or other animal products, it was recently a little bit alive.
The earliest American advertisements for milk, from the 1840s, emphasized its bucolic origins and uncontaminated contents, using imagery of rolling hills and words such as wholesome, fresh, and unadulterated. These ads, directed at city dwellers, sold milk as a small escape from urban life, which was chaotic, crowded, and artificial. Milk became one of America’s favorite beverages, and more than a century later, modern milk advertising still features rolling hills and words such as fresh. Even though our milk is now highly likely to come from gigantic, thousand-acre farms in the Southwest, where land is cheap, advertising still sells us on small, family-run dairies. The last time I bought conventionally pasteurized milk, the back of the plastic jug described its contents as “all-natural.”
E. Melanie DuPuis, a professor of environmental studies and science at Pace University, wrote a book about this; its title, taken from an early milk advertisement, is Nature’s Perfect Food. She calls the mythmaking around dairy “the imaginary of milk.” “The imaginary of milk is that it’s coming from the countryside,” she told me. It’s from a happy cow, and it’s bottled quickly, with minimal intervention. It’s old-fashioned Americana incarnate. It is, as Bentley put it, ”the epitome of wealth and health and freshness”—or, as the ads put it, “pure.”
UHT milk, with its initialized name and aseptic packaging, evokes something else. Its imaginary, DuPuis said, is that it is “a manufactured product that’s coming from far away.” When Deeth tells people about the work he does researching shelf-stable milk, he finds that many are completely misinformed about what it is. Based on the name and the packaging, they believe it to be full of preservatives, instead of just processed in a slightly more extreme way than the milk they drink all the time. “I think people are suspicious,” he said. (He and others have also noted a slightly “burnt” or “caramelized” taste to UHT milk, though obviously it’s not enough to turn off consumers all over the world.) Shelf-stable milk is an affront to the stories that Americans have been told by the dairy industry and pop culture about what milk should be.
Those stories are so powerful that Americans refrigerate all kinds of milk-adjacent products unnecessarily. Soy and nut milks are just shelf-stable ingredients blended into water, and as such do not require refrigeration before opening. But they are typically sold in the refrigerated section, often at a cost to manufacturers, who pay extra for the shelf space. To them, the symbolism associated with refrigeration is worth it. When Steve Demos launched the soy milk Silk, in the late 1970s, he paid supermarkets more to display it in the refrigerator, a canny marketing decision that some experts credit for the eventual widespread adoption of alternative milks.
“Milk in a bag, milk in [an aseptic container], just doesn’t feel right,” Bentley told me of American attitudes toward shelf-stable milk. It “feels substandard, subpar.” And in a rich country with relatively large refrigerators, she pointed out, people can afford to avoid it: “Because the U.S. is so wealthy and can devote the resources to a cold chain, we do.”
We do so at no small cost to the environment. As the writer Nicola Twilley outlines in Frostbite, her recent history of refrigeration, mechanical cooling requires tremendous amounts of power for warehouses—refrigeration accounts for about 8 percent of global electricity usage—as well as diesel for trucks. It also requires chemical refrigerants, small amounts of which leak into the air as part of the process; many of these refrigerants are “thousands of times more warming” than carbon dioxide, Twilley writes. Environmental scientists call them super-greenhouse gases.
That Americans do this in the service of natural is bizarre, because natural is a bizarre word to use for the process by which a substance meant for baby cows leaves their mothers’ bodies at 101.5 degrees and ends up hundreds or thousands of miles away, refrigerated in plastic, to be consumed at 40 degrees by a different species. Natural is an inappropriate descriptor for a drink that requires days in the massive vasculature of manufactured chill, which ships cold air around a warm country 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The milk in your refrigerator is a small monument to industrial machinery, the result of centuries of human intervention. There’s basically nothing natural about it.
A strange paradox of American culture is that people want to understand food—but only to a point. We want to reap the spoils of a massively industrialized food system, but we do not want our food to feel industrial. Shelf-stable milk is a reminder of all that’s artificial about what we eat. It’s not a reminder that most Americans want.
The milk I bought at Wegmans cost $3.49 and was made by Parmalat, which is still holding on to its tiny U.S. market share. It sat in my pantry for a week or so—even after all this, I just couldn’t bring myself to peel back its silvery seal and take a big swig. But then life’s great motivator—desperation—intervened: I ran out of cold milk and forgot to buy more. So we opened the Parmalat. The primary milk-drinker in my household, who is 1 year old, declared it yummy. I let it sit for another day or two in the fridge before finally trying it myself. I really don’t know what I was expecting, but it tasted like milk: creamy, slightly sweet, as natural as anything else.
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