Fresh Food, the Old Way

Why so much interest?

"I think most of us just want the best we can buy for our families. And in this day, the fewest number of hands that touch the products, the more natural and better they are for you," customer Katharyn Cantor said.

For Rugo, the word that comes to mind is wholesome, not just for her and her children's health but for their sense of family.

"I've been talking to my first-grader about it a lot," she said. "It gives us the opportunity to discuss how things used to be and focus on where the milk really comes from -- and it's not Giant. I love it because even though it costs a little more, there's a certain feeling of nostalgia -- bringing back the past -- and having the opportunity to live that with our families despite the crazy, hectic life we can have at times. It's almost like having the milk delivered, enjoying it together at dinnertime and discussing where it came from brings back the times of our ancestors and gives us a chance to reminisce about how life was way back when . . . a little bit of the past and the country in our crazy city lives."

She spent much of last week on eBay searching for old milk boxes.

Carol Wagner said she liked the idea of knowing exactly where her milk comes from.

"Besides the convenience of home delivery, I am interested to know where the milk comes from and how the cows were raised," she said. "I learned recently that hormones in milk are part of the reason that young women have larger breasts than has been historically the case."

The Bruscos said their farm is organic in everything but certification, which they say is too cumbersome a process for a small family operation that does everything from growing the hay to milking the cows to bottling the milk. The milk is pasteurized, a heating process that kills germs. Customers choose whether they want it homogenized, which smooths out the fat globules in milk, the Bruscos said. Without it, the cream settles on top.

Others like knowing that the farm's bulls are named Reggie and Brutus and that some of the 230 milking cows have names as well as numbers.

Colleen Levine is doing it for her kids. "As a new mom, I started paying more attention to what I ate when I was pregnant," she said. "The more I read about the effects of pesticides and food additives, the more troubled I became about conventional foods. Now that my son's 1 and eating what we eat, we and he eat nearly all organic foods, especially when it comes to produce, dairy and meat products."

Long ago, seeing the milkman leaving milk on the porch was as common as the paper boy hurling the morning paper from his bicycle. But with the rise of technology that enabled milk to be mass-produced safely and huge grocery stores that made one-stop shopping cheap and easy, the milkman started to disappear.

Some home-delivery dairies stayed afloat. One Chicago area dairy, Oberweis, still has 30,000 home-delivery customers. But most have died out.