Where is your milk from?

A friend showed me a very cool website yesterday, whereismymilkfrom.com. For any of you in the US who are trying to purchase more locally produced food, or who are just curious about where the cows who made your milk are from, this website is for you!

It's super easy. All you have to do is find the code on the side of your milk (or yogurt, cheese, cream, ice cream, etc.) container and enter it into the milk box on the website. Most codes are easy to find, they're usually right next to the sell-by date. The one on my box of The Organic Cow milk reads 36-4016. So I entered 36 4016 (no dash) into the site and it spit this factory out at me:

The code for New York, the site tells me, is 36, the first two numbers in the series on the box. I'm a little disappointed since The Organic Cow claims to be "New England's Original Organic Milk" it says so right on the carton. But, last time I checked, Elma, NY, was not in New England. In fact it's about 482 miles away by truck from Ipswich, MA!

My family doesn't follow a strict 100 mile diet but we do like to try to buy food from New England, since it's a pretty small area of the country and is a good limit to focus on.

This doesn't mean I'm going to stop buying the Organic Cow all together, but I'll definitely be entering codes from other organic milk products I can find into whereismymilkfrom.com to help me make better decisions when I shop. A little code cheat sheet for fellow New Englanders out there:

25 = Massachusetts
23= Maine
44=Rhode Island
09=Connecticut
50=Vermont
33= New Hampshire

I'm going to try to stick with those numbers!