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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

>Glass-contained milk delivery seems great

...until you realize that having a dedicated truck driving around delivering milk is probably going to cause as much oil usage (if not more) than picking up a plastic jug of milk on your weekly shopping trip.

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In the UK at least, many milk trucks had been electric since the 1940s. They would make even more sense with modern EV technology.

https://www.treehugger.com/electric-milk-trucks-still-workin...

Other side of the coin: 1 truck delivers milk (and bread?) to an entire neighborhood, instead of 50 people driving 50 cars to get 50 bottles of milk.

Right but what's the ratio of people making dedicated trips for milk vs people who buy it with their other groceries? I'd think most people plan ahead to avoid dedicated trips, but that's just based off my experience.

It's hard to keep milk and bread fresh as long as other things, so you don't buy as much in advance, and therefore run out sooner.

I can buy several weeks of stuff in advance, but not several weeks of milk and bread, or it'll expire, especially bread without many preservatives in certain climates.

Nevermind the fact that a lot of people live in an on-demand, last-minute world. A lot of people do a lot of things last-minute, so that's a contributing factor in this equation, too.

As someone who hates making frequent grocery trips and drinks milk too intermittently to ever finish a normal bottle before it goes bad, I highly recommend buying UHT (Ultra High Temperature) pasteurized milk which does actually often have 3+ week shelf life. In the US, typically the organic brands are all UHT since they often come from farther away and need longer shelf life, but some of the cheap brands like Hood also do it.

To me UHT milk tastes significantly worse than pasteurized milk.

3+ weeks? Unopened UHT milk can lasts months, without refrigeration.

>I can buy several weeks of stuff in advance, but not several weeks of milk and bread, or it'll expire

You also forgot: meat, vegetables, fruit

If anything those expire sooner than milk and bread (at least judging by the best before dates), so I'll need to go to the supermarket to buy those before I need to buy milk/bread.

Meat freezes very well, and can often be bought in bulk. Vegetables tend to last longer than milk in my experience.

>Right but what's the ratio of people making dedicated trips for milk vs people who buy it with their other groceries

From my experience, definitely more than 1:50.

It's pretty common for shoppers to do one large weekly shop, and a second smaller 'top-up shop'

Of course, you can do things like freeze bread - but if you're going into the store for milk anyway, you might as well pick up some fresh bread / bananas / avocados while you're there.

Another side of the coin, the cow milk production obliterates any savings on transport of the milk to the consumer. It's one of the most energy intensive ways to produce food. (impregnating the cow every year, feeding the cow to support more than 7 gallons of milk a day, creating insane externalities by mishandling cow poo).

We could all live on soylent powder exclusively... We could eliminate all kinds of unnecessary food production. /s

The third side of the coin: the milk delivery trucks in my town are the filthiest polluters on the road by a country mile.

Hardly. Delivery often beats out random one off trips in economies of scale. Even assuming it’s not an EV (see below), the fact that the truck engine is warmed up will alone beat out your typical short trip to the shops.

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