Yesterday Swimming Freestyle featured a video (above) in which a Canadian woman explained to Americans how they dispense milk from a plastic bag; the advantage of this packaging is that the plastic bag can be recycled.
That's quite different from the way we drink milk here in Wisconsin...
In my elementary school we used to get milk in little single serving bags; chocolate, skim, or whole. Then you grabbed a little plastic straw with a "sharp" end and poked it in the bag. The worst was when you accidentally poked a hole through both sides of the bag. I also don't think we recycled the bags.
ReplyDeleteI recycle my jugs. The only difference I could see is in saving space while in transport both before or after its been used.
ReplyDeleteThey've been using milk bags (with the same pitcher technology) in Germany for at least 30 years.
ReplyDeleteLooks like a matter of preference to me. My plastic milk container can be just as easily recycled, but I don't have to worry about the container falling apart, getting too heavy at one end, or whatever else. I would be interested in a shelf-stable brand of milk, however, which seems to be an anathema to people in the US.
ReplyDelete@Nathan, can't you get Parmalat where you are? (It's not infinitely shelf-stable; I think it's about four months.) I get the nonfat type as a backup supply; can't speak for the 1% and up, but the skim tastes fine.
ReplyDeleteHey, that Wisconsin style looks a lot like the way we drank milk growing up in Tennessee and still do here in Alabama.
ReplyDeleteI live in Ontario, and I honestly didn't realize that Americans didn't have milk bags.. we've had them since I was little
ReplyDeleteIn Finland in the sixties we had milk in that kind of plastic bags. They had black inside and colored outside. Especially elderly women sliced them and knitted carpets.
ReplyDelete@Mark - no we don't?
ReplyDeleteI'd say it's about 90% 1l-cartons and 10% glassbottle.
No plastic bags.
At all.
This is a great. Yes, we can also recycle the plastic cartons, but more material is used to make the cartons and, in this case, less is better. Recycling also requires energy and creates waste. Reduce.
ReplyDeleteAnother advantage of the plastic bag is that the milk can be stored in the freezer. I grew up in rural Northern Ontario, and a trip to the store was a major excursion.
ReplyDeleteanother ontarian here...never would have guessed that our methods for milk distribution were odd.
ReplyDeleteOur black squirrels in ottawa are apparently also odd.
Black squirrels?!? ;)
ReplyDeleteBlack squirrels? Do you guys wear your shoes on your head too? Crazy Canucks... :D
ReplyDelete@swift loris - Getting parmalat around my area seems to be a Herculean feat. And this is the SF Bay Area, for Pete's sake. But I've come across it once in a while.
ReplyDelete@Rose - VERY good point, that I hadn't considered. I mean, I haven't ever considered freezing milk. The bags would probably work way better than the plastic jugs we have.
In West Tennessee there are white squirrels, maybe they prefer the cartons over the Canadian bags that the black squirrels drink from.
ReplyDeleteyep, we take our black squirrels for granted. Apparently we have a large population of grey squirrels with melanism here, I think the black ones are about as common as the greys, they also seem to live in the same areas as each other and get along with each other just fine...
ReplyDeleteI suspect that the melanism may somehow be caused by our bagged milk.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stephenbegin/3835173008/
Finally! I had been confused for 10 years after reading the comic strip For Better or for Worse in which the daughter has an accident while bringing home a bag of milk.
ReplyDeleteI've seen the black squirrels in Michigan (near Petoskey, if I remember correctly). Their distribution is discussed at Wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_squirrel).
ReplyDeleteErr, plastic bags are considerably harder to recycle than the 'hard' plastic used for milk jugs. Talk to anyone in waste management to get a feel for how awful plastic bags really are.
ReplyDeleteuhhh i've lived in BC until i moved to Quebec to go to university and i've never seen milk in bags or milk bag jugs in BC lol didn't know this was how it was done in Eastern Canada. So its not just americans that don't know ! :P
ReplyDeleteWhy not just pour the milk from the container directly into the pitcher? Some pitchers actually come with covers as well.
ReplyDeleteSo are you from Minnesota or Wisconsin?
ReplyDeleteMinnesotan living in Madison.
ReplyDelete"Our black squirrels in ottawa are apparently also odd."
ReplyDeleteNot in Kent, OH. They have proliferated there after some tests done with them at Kent State University. I have seen them in person, they are the dominant squirrel now.
You know what I find funny? That Canadians keep calling U.S. Citizen "Americans." They're from this continent, too. Same goes for Mexico.
ReplyDeleteI drink it from a bag. Lolz... Idk that Americans don't drink from bags...
ReplyDeletePs: Blonde squirrels.. XD