Noun
Pronunciation: XXX
Plastic cup; plastic container for milk.

Used as the milk container for selling in villages and markets where non-Samburu will be buying. Also used to carry milk to market, or on other journeys. Lpirra are not classed as lmalasin, the general term for the wooden or gourd milking containers used by the Samburu.

Plastic containers are easy to clean, and importantly, if one is collecting milk for sale to an ethnically mixed clientele in a village or town market, then using plastic makes the milk more salable to non-pastoralists because it is not fermented or in any way flavored by the lmala cleaning process with burning sticks.Thus, milk for the market is more salable if it’s been milked into a plastic cup and then poured into a plastic bottle for sale. Old water bottles are the most common plastic containers for this purpose. 

Return to Types of Milk Containers.

This is the draft manuscript of the Samburu Milk Project, © 2024 William Rubel.

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Published by William Rubel

I am an author who writes about traditional food and foodways. My book, The Magic of Fire (2002) is about hearth cooking. I have written an introductory history of bread, Bread, a global history (2011) and am currently writing a history of bread for the University of California Press. Other areas of interest include wild mushrooms, and specifically the treatment of Amanita muscaria in the historic record. I also write about Early Modern British Gardens, and for a more general audience, I write for Mother Earth News on bread, gardening, and more. I have an ongoing research project into the smoke-cured fermented milk of the Kenyan Samburu tribe. I am a co-director of the Samburu Lowlands Research Station, Lengusaka. I am the founding editor (1972) of Stone Soup, the magazine of writing and art by young people.

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