9.22.2008

Review time! Milking It: Horizon Organic Single Serving Milk

I grew up in a family of six: Mom, Dad, three stinky brothers, and me. We took our motor home on at least one extended camping trip every year, exploring the corridor from our home in Orange County, California, to my mother's native British Columbia.

I will always cherish the memories from those trips. July snow at Crater Lake. Convincing my dad to eat MacIntosh Toffee, which pulled out one of his crowns and sent him into nearby Grand Forks for emergency dental work. Abusing our parents' patience by obsessively re-playing our eight tracks of Dreamboat Annie and Living in the USA, and later our cassettes of Freedom of Choice and Beauty and the Beat. My dad spending all three weeks of our Camp Richardson vacation lying on a lawn chair under the fragrant pines, with his back in traction to help recover from a fall through a factory skylight. My mom handing me my own copy of Jane Eyre, touching off my life-long love affair with the twin powers of skilled storytelling and righteous indignation. My two younger brothers' crusade to trap and release every squirrel in our campsites. My mom not remembering until twenty minutes on the road that she'd forgotten to pay for gas in a small B.C. town, turning our mobile behemoth around, and encountering the squad cars that had been sent after her.

I will also never forget the awful taste of the powdered crud that was our only camping milk option. Hack. Spit. Ptui.

So, while I am not a fan of packaging, I do appreciate products that make sense under specific circumstances. I am grateful that Horizon Organic makes single serving cartons that give a real milk option to sad little campers who would otherwise be stuck with nasty powdered milk. The regular milk doesn't even taste funny. So, yay for Horizon's single serving regular milk. I will pack it along on our next overnighter outdoor excursion, and never again fear my campside morning cereal.

The regular single-serving milk is useful. But Horizon also provides single serving milks in three flavors: vanilla, strawberry, and chocolate. I was prepared to disfavor them all (again, I am packaging-averse). But I also spent many afternoons of my childhood experimenting with Quik, and Horizon's strawberry milk tastes and smells exactly like Strawberry Quik -- except organic. As I am a sucker for childhood sense-memories, I suspect I will be squirreling away a few packages of the strawberry single serving milk. Yay for Horizon's strawberry milk.

I didn't even know I liked vanilla milk until I tasted the Horizon single serving version, but now I will make sure that there is vanilla milk on hand, for those times when sadness descends and a sixth cup of coffee just won't do. Yay for Horizon's vanilla milk.

But what about the chocolate milk? Well, I know well enough that few people are content with a mere sip of chocolate milk, and I do not need any additional addictions at the moment, so I tested the single serving chocolate milk on my girls.

Iz enjoyed it. Yay chocolate milk, of course it's good, HELLO, Mommy.

Mali, however, will not normally drink milk or even touch it unless it is dampening her cereal. But she thought Horizon's chocolate milk was so delicious that she swore she has always liked milk. She also swears that she will drink it if I put it in her lunch, which made me re-evaluate in favor of the utility of single serving packages. Mali is not as picky an eater as her "I eat only six items" brother Leelo, but she is close. The opportunity to feed her anything different, especially something with a few grams of protein, is always welcome, so yay for Horizon's chocolate milk.

Pictures and video proof of chocolate milking:

Going to Get That Straw
Mali trying to put the straw in by herself.

I Like Posing With Chocolate Milk!
Yes I do like chocolate milk! I do I do! (My mother also wants to show you that I get healthy meals on occasion)

Iz Chocolate Milking
Iz demonstrates her more mature approach to chocolatey nom.


Please note that anyone who cares to discuss or debate the facts about Horizon can do so at www.horizonorganicfacts.com.

5 comments:

  1. Anonymous11:59 AM

    Amazon sells this in their Grocery Dept...subscribe to it monthly and save some money. :-) We buy the Soy Silk in the same packaging for my sons preschool lunches. Love it - and no stinky thermoses. :-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous11:59 AM

    Mali is the cutest, cutest thing!

    And now I want some chocolate milk.
    Love, Roo

    ReplyDelete
  3. did she say 'what about chocolate milk in a yellow buc?' - oooh...i think bubble's articulation reversals may have rubbed off on her!

    btw, that is very cute. supergirl says the same thing about the strawberry milk. that she ALWAYS liked it. ALWAYS, MOM. Sheesh.
    it's just that i never BOUGHT it for her.
    all my fault that she has been calcium deprived all these years.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous2:59 PM

    The flavored Horizon milks were gateway foods for Max to finally take up regular milk. He used to refuse all but room temperature liquids, also, so that was helpful. I'm sorry that Trader Joe's no longer packages & sells the single-serving organic milk (regular and chocolate - no vanilla or strawberry) for some reason, but I do subscribe to the Horizon via Amazon, and it's a little cheaper that way. For those who just don't endorse the Horizon version of "organic," there's also a brand called "Organic Fields" with regular, chocolate, and vanilla.

    - Veronica

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  5. Anonymous6:55 PM

    Julia would park herself under a cow and just start gulping if I'd let her. The child has been known to consume nearly a quart in a sitting. Disgusting. There must be a happy medium between "ick...never" and single-handedly supporting the dairy industry.

    I have nothing more to say about the milk (except that I hate artificial strawberry anything...bwarf) but your childhood music choices were excellent. Love love love.

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Respectful disagreement encouraged.