THE THIRTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE SKIM MILK

May 03, 2014 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

While all attention is being focused on the commission of inquiry into the death of renowned Guyanese scholar and historian, Dr. Walter Rodney, not much people are aware that this year will mark an important milestone: the thirty fifth anniversary of the mass introduction of skim or non-fat powered milk in Guyana.
It was about one year prior to the death of Walter Rodney that Guyanese were told that they would have to use powdered milk because the country could no longer afford to import evaporated milk such as what is now being sold in liquid form in the tins.
The country was in crisis. The Feed, Clothe and House the National Plan had flopped. The self sufficiency drive which was to cover for the acute shortage of foreign exchange to import food, was not going well and milk production was nowhere near meeting national demand.
Evaporated milk disappeared from the shelves. As for condensed milk, well that was out of the question, even though we were told that one of the last acts of Burnham was to gobble down a tin of condensed milk which was at the time a restricted item in the country. The masses were denied condensed milk which Burnham, we are told, relished.
Guyanese who under colonial Guyana had grown accustomed to using fresh cow’s milk and imported tinned evaporated milk were told around 1979 that they would now have to use powdered milk, including non-fact or skimmed milk.
If you lived in the city and wanted pasteurized milk, you had to join a long line for hours outside of the Milk Plant in Kingston which produced pasteurized milk. There was never enough milk for those who wanted it and some persons simply were not willing to line up for hours just to get a few pints of milk.
The milk from the Milk Plant also did not agree with everyone. A lot of persons had trouble controlling their bowels after using the pasteurized milk sold there. It was suspected that some of the milk sold by the Milk Plant was made from skim milk which gave some persons diarrhea because they were not accustomed to it.
Skim milk was also sold in powdered form. It was cheaper than the evaporated milk but the experience of many persons with this milk was not good. They developed what was known as “belly wuk”.
At one time, the authorities used to give children in the school skim milk. A lot of children ended up going regularly to the toilets have drunk their portion of skim milk. It just did not agree with the constitution of large numbers of persons.
As such, traders began to bring in powdered milk which from which the fact was not removed. But it sold at an exorbitant price. As a result many people opted to go for fresh cow’s milk but since the agricultural sector was also in serious decline, the quantities supplied could not feed one-fifth of the population and as such the price of fresh cow’s milk skyrocketed.
The WPA at the time had made a joke about the introduction of powdered skim milk into the diet of Guyanese. But for many who were forced to use skim milk and even other forms of powdered, this was no joke. It was humiliating. But milk is an important source of protein and children need milk and so this how powdered milk became so popular.
Thirty five years on, Guyanese are still using powdered milk. They have grown accustomed to it and it is far cheaper and economical to use powdered milk than to use evaporated milk. However, a variety of evaporated milk is now available giving Guyanese greater choices and more and more Guyanese are using evaporated milk.
As for skim milk, it has now become a health fad with many health conscious persons switching to this form of low fat milk. But it is still known to be disagreeable with the bowels of some persons just as it was thirty-five years ago when Guyanese were forced to use skim milk en masse.

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THE THIRTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE SKIM MILK

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