Every morning, milk arrived at our doorstep in glass bottles, sealed with a thin aluminium foil cap. It was a small ritual, repeated across countless homes, and it carried a quiet kind of efficiency that I only recognise now.
The bottles would be taken in, and the milk would be boiled—systematically, almost ceremonially. Over time, the cream would rise and be skimmed off. That cream wasn’t wasted or ignored; it was collected over a few days and then churned into home-made butter.
In parallel, every family maintained its own yoghurt culture. A spoon of yesterday’s curd would seed today’s. The culture was preserved daily, carefully, and it formed the backbone of the whole chain—milk becoming yoghurt, yoghurt supporting the transformation of cream into butter.
Then butter became ghee. Slowly heated, clarified, stored. Most families had their own supply and rarely needed to supplement it from outside.
When I look back, what strikes me is not just the nostalgia of it—it’s the completeness of the system:
milk → yoghurt → cream → butter → ghee
Almost nothing left the loop. Packaging was reused. Processing happened at home. Skills were passed on without formal instruction. Sustainability wasn’t a slogan—it was simply the default operating system of daily life.
Fast forward to today, and that chain feels broken. Milk is store-bought. Yoghurt is store-bought. Butter is store-bought. Ghee is store-bought. Each step outsourced. Each product packaged. Each transaction separated from the next.
Maybe the question isn’t whether the past was “better.”
Maybe it’s whether we can rebuild parts of that loop—small, practical loops—so sustainability becomes a habit again, not an aspiration.
No comments:
Post a Comment