Milkman
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- This article is about the occupation of milk delivery. For the Phranc album, see Milkman (album).
A milkman is a person — traditionally male — who delivers milk in milk bottles or cartons. Milk deliveries frequently occur in the morning and it is not uncommon for milkmen to deliver dairy products other than milk like egg nog, cream and even yogurt or butter. The term "milkman" is used to refer to either a man or woman doing this work.
Originally milk needed to be delivered to houses daily as poor refrigeration meant it would quickly spoil. The near-ubiquity of refrigerators in homes in the developed world has decreased the need for frequent milk delivery over the past half-century and made the profession shrink in many localities, and disappear totally in others. Additionally, milk delivery incurs a small cost on the price of dairy products that is increasingly difficult to justify and leaves delivered milk in a position where it is prone to theft.
Despite these drawbacks, the enterprise is still common in the UK and Ireland.
Historically, British, Irish, and other European milkmen have travelled in an electric vehicle called a milk float. In Australia the delivery vehicle was usually a small petrol or diesel engined truck with a covered milk-tray. In hotter areas, this tray is usually insulated.
[edit] Milkmen in popular culture
- The frequent deliveries of milkmen to homes during the day has led to a high level of familiarity with many homemakers — often female — which has made the occupation a central figure in numerous milkman jokes about adultery in this context.
- In the Uganda region an often used title for "king" is "Omukama", which means "superior milkman/milk bringer": a title that refers both to the role of the leader as a feeder of the people and the historical tradition, that the ancient ruling class of some Ugandan kingdoms was of Hima-tribal stock (the Hima were cattle-holders).
- 'Milkman' is the title of a song by Aphex Twin, and is also the name of an extremely violent flash cartoon based on the same song, made by David Firth.
- 'The Milkman of the human kindness' is also a title of a song by Billy Bragg.
- Before becoming famous, Benny Hill worked as a milkman.
- In the Xbox, Windows, and PS2 video game Psychonauts, there is a character who goes insane after he is fired from his job, and who develops a separate identity called the Milkman. The Milkman hurls glasses of milk which explode like molotov cocktails.
- For many years, the WNEW radio station carried an overnight Big Band broadcast called "The Milkman's Matinee".
- "Milkman" is also the name of a disc jockey at CKKL-FM in Ottawa, Canada, and the manager of a popular website for the Canadian radio industry, MilkManUnLimited.
- Reid Fleming, World's Toughest Milkman is a comic book character created by David Boswell.
- Milkmen is also a term given to males that lactate and could potentially breast feed. See male lactation.
- Milkman & Cakeboy vs. Dracula in Dodgeball is a short, fiction/comedy story written by Aiman Alramahi & Maher Yassin.
- Milkman is the nickname of one of the central characters in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon.
- Aphex Twin wrote a track called "Milkman", which contains the refrain, "I want some milk from the milkman's wife's tits".
