The return of the milk round

How do you help the environment and improve your quality of life? Why, buy milk in bottles. Some of us can remember them – foil topped, left outside the door, washed, then returned…a virtuous cycle which worked because it made practical sense. Life went downhill when the milk industry was deregulated in the 1990s and milk turned up in plastic cartons, homogenised and in supermarkets, and so it has remained, until quite recently. But the rattle of the milk van is returning to the streets in parts of London and elsewhere…things, folks, are looking up.

It was one of the great advances in human civilisation when we developed lactose to enable us to digest milk. And recent investigations, recorded in Nature Communications, on ancient human skeletons in Africa suggest that human beings have been consuming milk products for more than 6,000 years – interestingly, even before we developed the enzyme to break it down.