When Milk is Milk

We love milk at this time of year. I poured some onto Smudge’s porridge this morning and a clot of cream the size of a ha’penny piece fell out of the bottle with a luxurious plop. The cows at Ashgrove are calving, and they’re producing milk that’s thicker and creamier than usual.

It takes me back to the milk we had delivered to our doorstep in Lancashire when I was a child, in bottles with foil tops. The bluetits would peck through the foil but only drink as far as their little beaks could reach. When you pressed your thumb into the cap with its tell-tale hole, it lifted off to reveal a thick plug of cream.

On the other side of the British Isles in Suffolk, meanwhile, my Other Half was growing up on a farm where the whole family had dollops of cream straight from the cow on their breakfast cereal.

We’re both delighted, and occasionally a little plumper, to be living in a place where we can buy ‘real’ milk, straight from the farm via a small independent greengrocer, all these years later.

In Tasmania there are a few sources of ‘real milk’ straight from the cow. We buy Ashgrove milk produced at the Bennett family's farm at Elizabeth Town, and Real Milk, from the Pyengana Cheese Company in the beautiful Pyengana Valley. Their milk is a very different product from the 'ordinary' milk the supermarket sells, because it comes from a farm rather than a factory.

We get full fat milk for the kids, with the cream content left in, anywhere between 3.3% to 4.5% depending on the time of year and what's happening with calves. It's pasteurised but not homogenised, although Ashgrove produce a homogenised version (where the fat molecules are distribute evenly through the milk). The taste is sensational. I watch my kids drinking it and think of all the fat soluble molecules of calcium and minerals that they’re digesting and what strong teeth and bones they’re building.

For the more mature members of the family for whom middle aged spread is an issue, we get the ‘farm light’, with 1% fat: still flavoursome but it doesn’t go straight to your hips and stick there.

Ashgrove has been farmed by the Bennett family for five generations, as a mixed farm, a dairy farm and now they’re renowned producers of handmade Cheddar. I met Managing Director Jane Bennett for a magazine article and she told me things about milk processing that made my hair curl.

There isn’t much that Jane doesn’t know about milk. She trained in dairy technology and worked at a major milk processor, before learning artisan cheese production in Lancashire and returning to the family farm.

You’d think that milk was milk, wouldn’t you? Sure, some has added calcium, reduced fat. But you wouldn’t think they trifle with it too much beyond that. But it’s not the case. The milk sold on the supermarket shelf is very much a processed product.


Milk from major producers comes from farms in a tanker and passes through a processing plant. It’s separated into retentate, the thick stuff, and permeate, the water content. The permeate contains the lactose – the natural sugar content of milk. Most of the retentate goes off to make cheese and yoghurt and other dairy products. What’s left is remixed with the permeate to conform to the minimum fat content of 3.3% and sold as bottled milk.

This means the lactose content of the end product is higher than the natural lactose content of milk – up to 6% instead of the natural lactose content of 4.5%.

When one of Australia’s major supermarkets began stocking Ashgrove’s milk, one of the branch managers collared the Ashgrove delivery truck driver and demanded to know why his son was able to drink their milk despite being lactose intolerant and not being able to drink any other milk.

The answer seems plain as the nose on your face to me.

We pay more for our milk. Ashgrove’s is an expensive product. With one of the major supermarket chains offering standard milk for a dollar a litre, the gap between what we actually pay and what we’d be saving if we settled for the processed product is even greater.

But we stick to our guns, knowing that the milk we buy is the real deal. It might have been pasteurised, and fat reduced for those of us with waistlines to think of. But other than that, it’s milk as nature intended it to be - straight from the cow, bottled on the farm, with the goodness on top.