We drink a lot of milk in our house. Growing up, the options for beverages in my family were: milk on regular days and Kool-Aid on Sundays. Water wasn't anything we drank with any kind of regularity, and I've passed that ethos on to our kids (although we lemonade instead of Kool-Aid on Sundays, and sometimes juice). I remember going to college and having dinner at friends' houses and being completely mystified as to why they drank water at meals. It was one of the strangest things I'd ever seen.
After I lived overseas, I missed a lot of things about the US. I missed parking lots, Target, English speakers, bacon, and milk that came in gallon containers. I didn't realized what a luxury it was to buy milk in such enormous quantities until it was no longer an option. In Egypt, we had access to a commissary, so our milk came in half gallon paperboard jugs, complete with 1950 illustrations of how to store milk properly.
After Cairo, milk went seriously downhill. In Azerbaijan, we were reduced to drinking UHT milk in 1-liter boxes, and our kitchen trash would often consist mostly of empty milk boxes. Azerbaijan did not have any kind of local dairy industry, so the UHT milk was even more disgusting because it was powdered milk from New Zealand that had been reconstituted and then put through the UHT process.
When we moved to Dushanbe (the first time), my housekeeper found us a milk lady, Jumagool, who would bring fresh, unpasteurized milk by the house once a week. I invested in a pasteurizer and had to cook, cool, and filter the milk myself every week, in addition to washing and sterilizing all the milk jugs. That was when I really started missing American milk that came in gallons without any effort on my part.
Not only was it a lot of work to pasteurize the milk, but the milk often wasn't even that good. At least a quarter of the milk would taste off, and probably every few weeks, it would just be bad and we'd have to pour some of it out by the end of the week because it didn't keep in the refrigerator.
This continued for four years in Tashkent, and so when we discovered fresh, bagged, pasteurized milk in Astana, it was a whole new way of living. Sure, it came in one-liter bags and we had to order it several times a week because it only stayed good for 4-5 days, but it actually tasted good (at the beginning of those 4-5 days) and I didn't have to do anything other than remember to order more milk (which didn't always happen on time).
When we moved back to Dushanbe, I was shocked to discover the price of UHT milk had risen significantly, and we would be paying about $10 a gallon for our milk. The children, however, had no desire to return to the days of off-tasting chunky milk, so I just resigned myself to spending their college tuition on milk.
The first week I sent my housekeeper out for grocery shopping, however, she didn't come back with UHT milk, but instead with fresh, unpasteurized milk. So I pulled out the pasteurizer (which I had just questioned its value taking up space in the basement the week before) and figured that if the milk was gross, it was only one week of disgusting milk and we could go back to spending all of our money on boxed milk.
But, to everyone's complete shock and surprise, the milk was good. And not only was it good, it stayed good for an entire week until we got more milk. Sure, I had to pasteurize it, but at less than half the cost of boxed milk, it was a lot of money to save on groceries when you're buying 30 liters of milk a week.
So life was good. We had access to fresh, tasty milk that came in 3-liter bottles (which is almost as good as gallons) that I didn't have to do anything to procure. It was the best milk we'd had since the amazing German dairy that got flown in to the commissary when we were in Cairo. The kids were happy. I was happy. Brandon was happy.
But my housekeeper was not. The store that she bought the milk from occasionally would have less than the 10 jugs we bought each week. Being a conscientious housekeeper, she felt that she needed to make sure that we had enough milk, so she would have to go back to the store the next day and bring us the missing milk before she started work for someone else in the neighborhood. It was a lot of extra work for her.
So she started exploring other options. First she found our original milk lady, Jumagool. I mentioned that the milk had never been that good, so that was out. Then she found a guy who delivered milk from another milk company, and we tried that for a week. This time the milk came in 5-liter bottles, which are a lot less convenient to pour from than 3-liter bottles. Also, they don't fit in the refrigerator very well. And even worse, the milk was bad. It started off tasting strange, bringing back memories of Jumagool's milk, and by the end of the week it was just bad. The children started drinking a whole lot less milk, which only compounded the problem of the milk going bad.
I figured that I'd rather just have enough milk most of the time and deal with the weeks that we didn't have enough milk, and so told my housekeeper to just go back to buying milk at the original store we started at. Better to have some good milk than too much bad milk that nobody wanted to drink anyway.
The next week, she came to house with the good news: in a feat of amazing diligence, she had tracked down the milk company that sold the milk to the store she was buying the milk at. They agreed to just deliver milk straight to our house once a week so that we could always get as much fresh milk as we needed.
The first time they showed up, my housekeeper had me come out to meet them and see how things went so I could understand. I went outside my gate and discovered a milk tanker parked in front of my house. One of the guys hopped out of the cab, pulled out 10 fresh, empty 3-liter bottles, opened up the tap at the back of the milk truck and filled up the bottles. The other guy put on a carrying handle, capped the bottles, and then handed them over to me.
As I was standing in the street watching this entire procedure, I couldn't help but laugh to myself. This was one of the quintessentially Central Asian things that happens sometimes, something that you'd never, not in a hundred years, ever have happen to you in the US. I needed a lot of milk, so the milk company just sent the truck over to my house, and voila, fresh milk for me and my family. No need to mess with bottling plants, food inspection, handling requirements, or any of those silly things. If you need milk, we've got a truck that has milk in it, and we can fill some bottles for you while the truck is parked in front of your house. I think that this will remain one of the more bizarre ways that I've obtained food for my family ever. But, that's how things get done in Central Asia.
And one day, in the less-distant future than it used to be, when I load up my grocery cart with gallons of pasteurized milk that was just waiting in a refrigerator case for me to come by and take as much as I wanted, I will remember that milk truck with two random Tajiks stopping by once a week for my own personal delivery. And I'll laugh, but I definitely won't miss it. However, it will make for a good story for many years to come.