Milk

So the rule is that whatever food packaging I use must be reusable. Recyclable is not enough. Very few products come in reusable packaging these days.
I have been getting my staples in containers I bring myself.
But what about yogurt? I've never been a huge milk drinker. I'm ovo-lacto vegetarian so no meat, but I eat a lot of eggs and yogurt. Soymilk is now totally out of the question. I used to keep a lot of soy or almlond milk on hand for making smoothies or baking or in case someone came over that liked that stuff in their coffee. But there is way too much packaging. Those boxes are a recyclers nightmare- a layer of paper, a layer of foil and a layer of thin plastic sandwiched together. The soymilk may be shelf stable for ages but the packaging is considerable. So without soymilk or purchased yogurt I am turning back to milk. There is a dairy processor in Montebello ( East Los Angeles) that still bottles milk in returnable bottles. You pay a deposit for the bottle and bring it back to the store to get your deposit back. Luckily the milk is available at a local store, so I went and picked up two bottles of chocolate milk for drinking and a bottle of regular whole milk to make yogurt with. It was interesting, looking at this huge grocery store where I couldn't buy anything. I bought the milk and a couple of onions. There was virtually nothing else there I could get without packaging.
The chocolate milk is divine. I could drink the whole bottle in one sitting probably and I'm not a milk person at all.
I have an old yogurt maker that was my mom's from the 1970's. This is surprising since my mom is not exactly Martha Stewart. I learned to bake with her mostly using mixes and our household specialty, pumpkin pie, is just Libby's canned pumpkin and canned sweetened condensed milk.
But the yogurt maker still works thirty years later (good to see some things are built to last). I made a batch last night but haven't tried any yet. I added some homemade chocolate syrup to half the batch, so I'm looking forward to my dessert.