The future... naturally

Iam page 3 this week. Like the coffee zcustomers Mikaela Wilkes writes about, oat milk has pretty much replaced cow’s milk in coffee in my house in the past few months - for reasons of taste.

But it’s hard to come by at my local supermarket (if you can get it, it’s worth buying the creamier “barista variety”) so, coincidentally, just last week we put in our first order from Boring Oat Milk, which unlike most store-bought brands, is New Zealandmade, and supplied in recyclable packaging.

The second cafe trend Wilkes says we should expect to see more of next year is milk taps installed in cafes by the likes of Waikato’s Kaipaki Dairies to replace milk supplied in plastic bottles.

Kaipaki Dairies recently appeared at our local farmers’ market, so each week I fill my milk bottles as if I was pulling pints at a pub. The queue gets longer each time I go. As with beer, there’s a knack to not getting too much head or, in milk’s case, too many bubbles: tip the bottle on an angle, keep the spout in the milk and push the tap lever away from you to get the milk flowing.

Pouring your own milk is not quite as “eat local” as Nadia Lim’s life.

This week, Lim writes about the wild food available at her farm in Central Otago – fields of lilac-flowering thyme, watercress, rabbits, mushrooms, and flowering elder trees that are soon to be overloaded with berries.

“It would be wonderful to see more free food around for all to harvest and appreciate,” Lim writes, “such as fruit trees at every school, at parks, and on berms in cities. Berry bushes as hedgerows on farms, pockets of wild greens.”

And a milk tap on every corner?