Kitchen Garden Forum

Maybe it's passed me by, but is there some sort of European milk lake?
I only ask because every time I switch on the television half the adverts seem to be fresh-faced rosy-cheeked young women slurping yoghurt, some in the privacy of their own homes, some walking down the street! Then there's the chap taking home litres of liquid yoghurt to pour on his breakfast cereal.

Don't get me wrong. I have always been partial to a bit of live set yoghurt to use in Indian cooking, or Greek sheep-milk yoghurt with a little honey. But what we have now includes the whole range from yoghurt-type "gut" drinks to sugary fruit flavoured concoctions. Seemingly miles of the stuff in every supermarket.

And then there's the cheese. Now, I love cheese, that is, traditional cheeses from Britain, France, Italy and Spain. So why do UK producers find it necessary to try to promote cheese consumption by inventing new and inappropriate additions to what is usually cheap and nasty cheese? The worst I have seen recently was white cheese with raisins and chocolate chips!

Must be that milk lake again - got to shift it before we're all flooded.

It's margins and value added. There was a short series of programmes on TV a few months ago about the vast margins and profits on stupid products like probiotics and bottled water. I never touch either of them. We'll have to rename that other range of crap products TV Soaps to Danones.

I'm a bit partial to Greek yogurt with honey and chopped nuts.The rest I can take or leave them.

How did you do that? I posted that ages ago not today.

You have to be very careful when buying yogurts. The 'natural' ones seem to be OK but anything with fruit or flavour in it is loaded with a lot of 'junk' ingredients. This is a list for a strawberry one:

Yogurt with Bifidus ActiRegularis® (Whole Milk, Skimmed Milk Concentrate / Powder, Cream, Yogurt Cultures),Strawberry (10%) ,Sugar (6.3%) ,Fibre (Oligofructose) ,Glucose-Fructose Syrup ,Stabilisers (Modified Maize Starch, Pectin) ,Acidity Regulators (Citric Acid, Calcium Citrate) ,Flavouring ,Colour (Cochineal)

We always buy the real stuff and add our own fruit.

John

Geoff wrote:How did you do that? I posted that ages ago not today.

Clicked "Bump topic". Never knew it changed the date of the last post

I'd rather stick to natural or Greek yoghurt and add my own home-grown frozen fruit - at least that way I know what I'm eating.

With all that surplus milk, maybe we'll have to use it to water our gardens instead of water, with the forecast waster shortage. That might give us some interestingly flavoured plants !

I can't stand the stuff.
However, you are right, there must be vast margins, the supermarkets have aisles full of it.