"I can make that at home"

My father-in-law was, what you could charitably call, a character. He was an Italian American of the old school - sprawling families in multi-level homes and pots of gravy (or marinara, to the uninitiated) burbling on the stove until it reached the consistency of hot lava. He loved going out to eat Italian food, usually at someone else's expense, but would invariably peruse the menu with predictable and mounting indignation as he saw dish after dish that he could personally make at home, to a higher standard and at lower cost than the restaurant was offering. He was not bashful and would repeat this mantra, loudly until my mother-in-law intervened with a dagger glare and he would subside into low level grumbling.

I was reminded of my father-in-law after our recent Zero Waste Earth Care event. Our dedicated and passionate Earth Care Coordinator, Shirley, had a whole host of sustainable alternatives for everything from toilet paper to toothpaste and dry cleaning bags to dishwasher detergent. Most impressively, in my mind, she had made her own yoghurt at home and I heard my father-in-law again.

When I started reading Waste Not by Erin Rhoads, I began to notice all the ways that plastic food packaging makes my life more convenient. Everywhere I looked in my pantry and kitchen cupboards I saw plastic bags, pouches, tubs, bottles - a mountain of packaging. It was overwhelming, but one of the tidbits of wisdom from Waste Not is to make small changes and to be kind to yourself on your journey to zero waste. So I thought about what I could make at home and, inspired by Shirley, I decided that yoghurt would be my first bite of the elephant.

Did you know that yoghurt is just fermented milk? It's one of those things that I feel like I should have known but, honestly, as long as the tangy deliciousness was coming in a plastic tub from the dairy aisle, I hadn't given it much thought. People have been making and eating yoghurt for over 7,000 years, probably unintentionally to start when some wild bacteria combined with Near Eastern temperatures turned raw milk into yoghurt. It was a very happy accident. Yoghurt is not only easier to store than milk when you're living in Neolithic Mesopotamia and home refrigeration is a few thousand years away, but the conversion of lactose to lactic acid during the fermentation makes the milk easier to digest. This is a big deal when you realize that some 65 percent of humans are lactose intolerant, meaning that all the proteins, calories and fats available in the milk from newly domesticated sheep, goats and cows were inaccessible to a lot of our Neolithic ancestors. If they could do it, surely I could too?

It turns out that modern at home yoghurt-making is a little more complicated than leaving a bowl of milk out in the middle of summer and hoping that a strain of wild bacteria amenable to yoghurt-making happened to find it and ferment it. But, even so, it was simpler than I imagined. The magic of the internet brought a little packet of lactobacillus bulgaricus and streptococcus thermophilus straight to my door. They hung out in some milk at a cozy 110 degrees Fahrenheit in my bread proofer, and about eight hours later they had worked their bacterial magic and I was the proud owner of a quart of homemade yoghurt.

Now I can keep using the yoghurt to make more yoghurt. I haven't gone so far as to name my new unicellular friends but they live, happily I assume, in our fridge ready to turn milk into yoghurt on a whim. We're buying the milk in glass jugs and the only ways we could be more sustainable would be to have our own cow or run the incubator from a mini wind turbine. But that is for another day. For now I'm just happy that we've avoided sixteen large yoghurt tubs to date and that my father-in-law's wisdom of making things at home lives on. And I'm wondering what my make-at-home venture will be...

Delmar Presbyterian Church is proud to be an Earth Care Congregation. We'd love for you to join us in some of our endeavors to live more sustainably. Look out for a book study on Waste Not in April, planting a garden for our friends at Family Promise later in the spring and removing invasive species with the Mohawk Hudson Land Conservancy in the fall. Contact office@delmarpres.org to find out more.