The Weight of Money

I was prepared to write up a fairly eloquent post on how you can save money using dry, instant milk. I’ve seen this suggestion mentioned by the most frugal of frugal and figure that it wasn’t for me. I don’t know, but something about reconstituted milk just didn’t sit right. Crazy part of this untested assumption is that I’m not a milk drinker, so what would it even matter if it tasted funny? It’d still work just fine in cooking and baking, right?

So, I finally whipped up a test batch to test my assumptions and was unexpectedly impressed. What I figure to just be a sign of scraping the barrel of frugality turns out to be a reasonable solution to increasing milk prices. To test it even further, I poured it into the near empty milk container and waited for a blind taste test from the daughter — sure enough, it passed without detection (ie. success).

At the grocery store, I told the daughter that dry milk was on our list. We hit the dairy isle first (because we still needed regular milk, more on that in a bit) and was shocked to see that milk prices have climbed up to $4.25 a gallon - wow!. That means we’re paying more than a quarter for each glass of chocolate milk consumed. Outraged by this price, I vowed that we were now 100% committee to drinking powdered milk. The daughter freaks at this idea — no way is she going to drink powdered milk! I inform her she already has, much to her astonishment, and she’s stumped for an argument.

In the baking isle, powdered milk in hand, the daughter continues the case against the new change in her drinking habits, insisting that she didn’t drink anything like that. Once I tell of the blind taste test procedure, she admits defeat and doesn’t seem so overwhelmed by the idea. Feeling proud and thrifty, I head home with my purchases; but something in my mind starts wondering about the actual cost per gallon on reconstituted milk and how much this new milk is going to cost.

Once home, full grocery bags still waiting on the counter, I whip out the calculator and start playing with numbers. The 4 pound box of dry milk will make 5 gallons of milk, at a price of $2.90 a gallon — for some reason, this doesn’t seem thrifty enough for me.

Also, because we’ll be mixing regular milk with the dry milk to improve flavor for the occasional glass of milk and for cereal, that bring the price per gallon even higher. A 1:1 ratio will give us, at current market rates, a price of $3.57 a gallon. If we increase the ration to 3:1, price drops to $3.23 a gallon — the price we were paying last year for regular milk. Sigh.

These numbers are not very encouraging. Basically, it’s more work for less quality (I said I was unexpectedly impressed, I am not ready to go 100% dry milk - yet) and the price is still more than $3.00 a gallon. All in all, I think it is time for us to consider a dairy goat.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 24th, 2007 at 6:26 pm and is filed under frugal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.