Italian dairy Coldiretti's fresh milk machine. Image: Graham Baws
AT Slow Food’s Salone del gusto in the Italian city of Turin a class of school children gathered around a refrigerated dispensing machine, illustrated with a large cow, drinking with gusto glasses of fresh milk. This is a Coldiretti milk-on-tap machine, the brainchild of Italian dairy producers’ co-operative Coldiretti, Lucca chamber of commerce and the Castelnuovo and Gallicano communes. Memories of farm visits to the Western Australian country dairying town of Harvey as a child, glasses of fresh milk for breakfast and lashings of cream on our fruit and cereals, made me try the milk direct from Coldiretti’s ‘cowshed’. Cool, so tasty and refreshing – what an experience.
This ‘milk-in-a-machine’ was introduced in October 2006 and now there are more than 250 across Italy, in schools, offices, hospitals, city distribution points, on farms and in some supermarkets. http://www.coldiretti.it/Distributori%20latte%20Coldiretti.pdf
Some of the reasons that led to this development were to give an opportunity to all to taste fresh milk as soon as cows had been milked. It is also to ensure that fresh milk is not wasted in the European Community’s quota system, where farmers are obliged to throw away excess milk, and to prevent milk from outside Italy being passed off as ‘made in Italy’.
Freshly expressed milk is produced from cows grazing non-genetically modified feed. The temperature of the machine keeps the milk at 0-4 degrees celsius. It costs one euro per litre A$1.50, less than the supermarket price. Bring along your own glass bottle and fill it up. After 24 hours the milk remaining in the machine is used to make ricotta and other cheese. The milk keeps for two days a a refrigerator and for another two days if you boil it.
Pauline Tresise
Co-leader
Slow Food Perth
22 Nov 2008
2 Responses
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Hi Pauline,
I loved the raw milk dispensing machine at the Salone and was delighted to find one in the central metro station in Milan! They had a full selection of dairy products (both pasteurised and unpasteurised) including raw milk in a one litre bottle and raw milk yoghurt. I think the mainstream distribution sites are what makes this initiative so brilliant. Fresh, raw, cold milk straight from the cow (almost) and available to everyone at a very affordable price. A great example of food democracy and of using technological innovation to make traditional foods more widely available!
This certainly sounds amazing! It would be great to see something like this in Australia- once the raw milk laws and regulations are relaxed a little bit.