After my excitement last week to have a dairy vendor at the Riverdale Park Farmers’ Market, I’m ticked off that the milk I purchased from J-Wen Farms was bad when we opened it, five full days before the sell-by date. It wasn’t totally rotten, but it was putting off an odd smell that my partner thought was maybe just the grass aspect. Of course, he now has a headcold and I wasn’t here with my non-chemistry-lab-damaged nose to tell him the smell was definitely the milk going bad, so he had some. And now he’s feeling it. Probably I shouldn’t have bought milk that was not labeled pasteurized and was being sold out of a plastic tub filled with ice cubes; so much for assuming that the online comments I found about the milk’s inadequate shelf life had probably been addressed. However, I understood the vendor’s explanation of heating to 145F to be pasteurization, and the jug was labeled with a date of April 25th. At any rate, I emailed the Farmers’ Market coordinator and have saved the milk in case they need it to test for salmonella or whatever makes milk bad other than improper heating and/or storage.

Thus ends my foray into local milk sold from something other than refrigerated cases and labeled something other that PASTEURIZED.