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Do you find you arrive home after any trip completely famished? No sooner than you drop the suitcases in the hallway, do you begin ransacking the kitchen cupboards looking for something more substantial than crackers?

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Travel makes us ravenous. If the airline has fed you en route, it’s rarely good, rarely enough, and it’s always somewhere over the Prairies or the Pacific Ocean. The plane touches down and you begin thinking of something to eat.

Apparently we need to sort this problem out before our departure, laying in supplies in preparation for this inevitable, insatiable hunger. Depending on who’s picking you up, you could stop en route home and nab a few things, but, after a long day of travel, that’s rarely welcome.

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The answer lies in a thoughtful storehouse of canned goods and shelf stable food. Beyond the obvious — canned chili, pasta and pasta sauce — you used to be able to find shelf stable milk on grocery store shelves.

Perhaps you remember shelf stable milk? Perhaps you, too, used to keep a few of those boxy tetra packs on hand? My cursory search for shelf stable milk, however, comes up empty. Whereas I used to always have at least one box on hand, I can’t find it anymore. Apparently, unlike Europeans, we North Americans didn’t take to this product and it slowly vanished from grocery aisles.

Shelf stable milk is better known as UHT milk. UHT stands for ultra heat treated. It takes milk a step beyond Louis Pasteur’s scientific breakthrough of pasteurization to a new, aseptic level.

Pasteurized milk is heated to about 72 C for 15 seconds in order to kill naturally occurring bacteria. Pasteurized milk lasts for about 10 days when refrigerated.

UHT milk is heated to twice that — 140 C — for a scant three or four seconds. The result is sterile milk that, as long as it remains in an airtight container, can last for seasons. Some say even longer.

If there’s a complaint about this product, it’s that there can be a slight change in the taste........

© Vancouver Sun