Why the milk I buy comes in plastic bags.

[Anna N]

Click. 
 

much of the information in this article is news to even me. I tend to be of the opinion that the rest of the world is mad and only those of us in Ontario and get our milk in bags can claim any level of sanity. 
 

whatever at various times the subject has come up so I hope a few of you might enjoy this. 

[palo]

Bags would be my choice, even if I had a choice. The jugged bag takes up less room than a plastic 4 litre container and the other two bags can be squirreled away in a back corner.

 

p 

[Darienne]

We own about 8 plastic containers for bagged milk.  At any given time, several of these are down in the cellar freezer with milk bags already placed in them.  As the milk in the fridge is used...a new container with bag is retrieved and thawed.  It's not a problem and we've just done it for a long time now.  Makes sense to me...but then no one asked.

 

As for the metric system...we were both already out of high school when it was imposed upon us.  Some of my life I do in Metric...and some in non-Metric.  Oh well...

Edited January 3, 2020 by Darienne (log)

[demiglace]

5 hours ago, Anna N said:

Click. 
 

much of the information in this article is news to even me. I tend to be of the opinion that the rest of the world is mad and only those of us in Ontario and get our milk in bags can claim any level of sanity. 
 

whatever at various times the subject has come up so I hope a few of you might enjoy this. 

I remember dropping a bag of milk and watching it explode all over the sidewalk. Instant frozen milk! I never knew the metric system played a roll in them existing.

[lindag]

I can only hope that milk in bags never catches on here.

i don’t want wiggly jiggly bags of liquid anywhere near my fridge!

What’s wrong with rigid containers?

Besides, I usually buy mine in quart (liter) containers.

[Darienne]

16 minutes ago, lindag said:

I can only hope that milk in bags never catches on here.

i don’t want wiggly jiggly bags of liquid anywhere near my fridge!

What’s wrong with rigid containers?

Besides, I usually buy mine in quart (liter) containers.

This wiggly, jiggly aspect of the bag is not a problem.  The bag sits inside a container and you just snip off one corner of the bag to use it.  

[liuzhou]

I've never seen milk in bags, but we do get vinegar in bags, here! 米醋 = Rice vinegar。

 

[lindag]

21 minutes ago, Darienne said:

This wiggly, jiggly aspect of the bag is not a problem.  The bag sits inside a container and you just snip off one corner of the bag to use it.  

But my milk already includes its own container.

[Anna N]

48 minutes ago, liuzhou said:

I've never seen milk in bags, but we do get vinegar in bags, here! 米醋 = Rice vinegar。

OK we Canadians have solved the problem of both storing and using milk in plastic bags:

 

Taken from the Amazon.ca site. 

 

. How is rice vinegar in plastic bags handled?

[Margaret Pilgrim]

Fascinating!    I have never seen dairy sold in plastic bags.    We are used to square cardboard cartons.    I suppose one gets used to anything if that is one's option.   

[chromedome]

Supposedly it uses/generates less plastic than the rigid jugs.

 

I generally buy mine in old-fashioned cartons, which also go into the blue-bag recycling here.

[liuzhou]

28 minutes ago, Anna N said:

 

 

. How is rice vinegar in plastic bags handled?

 

It's poured into empty vinegar bottles in my kitchen. Don't know what others do.

[Porthos]

I would need smaller bags than 4 liters. I buy milk by the 1/2 gallon. For a long time (when we were raising our daughters) we bought two 1-gallon jugs at a time and froze one. Since we're empty nesters and, save visits from the grandchildren, I'm the only milk drinker as well as the one who grocery shops 1/2 gallon last about 5 days. I've gotten severe food poisoning from tainted old milk more than once so I am rabid about not letting milk sit around too long.

 

I would have used 4-liter bags if that is how milk came from the store.

[liuzhou]

Typical!

 

As soon as I mention that I've never seen milk in bags, guess what! About an hour later, I'm in a supermarket and spot this.

 

 

纯牛奶 (chún niú nǎi) = pure cow's milk. I'm not sure if it's the milk or the cow that is pure! Whichever, it doesn't come in multi-litre packs. 180g = 186.3 ml.

In my defence, I'm not a milk drinker, so maybe it was always there , but I didn't notice. I only ever use milk to make yoghurt and then I buy it in 1 litre cartons. I'm not sure  what I'll do with this amount.

 

Edited January 4, 2020 by liuzhou (log)

[Martin Fisher]

Our milk at school came bag-in-a-box.

That was a long time ago.

[chromedome]

9 hours ago, Porthos said:

I would need smaller bags than 4 liters.

 

It's not a 4-litre bag as such. The outer bag is just packaging and contains 3 smaller bags, which are what you actually use. They fall between a US quart and half-gallon in volume so it's a handy household size.

 

 

[blue_dolphin]

1 hour ago, DiggingDogFarm said:

Our milk at school came bag-in-a-box.

That was a long time ago.

 

For a while when I was a kid (that was a long time ago, too 🙃) we got bag-in-a-box milk.  Kind of like boxed wine but bigger - I think it was 3 gallons or more - with the same sort of spout. 

Then there was an incident where one of my brothers broke the spout on a nearly full box resulting in gallons of milk all over the kitchen floor.  

So, we went back to cartons, delivered 3X/week by the same milkman who brought the box, deposited in an insulated box on the porch at some very early hour before any of us were up.  

[lemniscate]

There was milk-in-a-bag for a  short time in a regional part of Michigan.   We bought it directly from the dairy farmer.   He had equipment to bag the milk after the pasteurizer.  So it was single source milk.   I liked it.  We drank A LOT of milk so there were bags piled up in the drawers of the fridge all the time.  We had the Canadian pitcher too.    

[rotuts]

in College and other high-volume cafeterias

 

where you drink as much as you like

 

milk came in large cardboard cartons and went into a designed just for milk

 

dispenser , refrigerated of course , w a rubber ' outlet '  and a weighted

 

dispensing arm , the weight kept the rubber spout closed , as it was just outside the refrigerated

 

contianer.   the boxes did work like Wine-in-the-Box , but the spout was outside of the refrigerated area

[rotuts]

P.S. :

 

Im so pleased 

 

the3 Wine-in-the-Box

 

massive conglomarates

 

Con-Agra  , Agra-Com

 

Mendelezz  etc

 

have not come up w a Box-of-Potable Table Wine

 

dry  , no Oak , and no flavors that don't come from Grapes

 

i.e.: " benzene "

 

that would stick out of my Ho-Hum mid level HomeDepot  white refrigerator

 

Id be on the floor for some time , here and there.

 

just saying

 

have to grateful for something 

 

these days

 

 

[Nyleve Baar]

The individual milk bags are great storage bags if you rinse them out and hang dry. We don't use a lot of milk these days but when my kids were small I bought the 3-bags-in-a-bag and always reused the bags.

[kayb]

Milk-in-a-bag never made it to my part of the world, I guess. We always got the half-gallon paper cartons when I was a kid, which were then mixed with  another half-gallon of non-fat dry milk mixed with water. I think that was an economy measure. We used a fair amount of milk; my grandmother and I were milk drinkers, Daddy drank it in his coffee, and Mama made biscuits every morning.

 

As a young adult, I could, and did, buy milk in returnable glass half-gallon bottles for a while. Then that dairy got bought up by someone else, and we were back to the by-then plastic jugs.

 

I buy half-gallons. Usually, I use it by the time it would go bad. Not always.

[rotuts]

Quote

 

Chiming in a bit

 

but not to much

 

aside from the cartons andpalstic

 

and what the industry and we might save etc

 

it seems quite dome time ago

 

some BigPlacticMegaMart

 

decided that we

 

of the Carton Nations

 

needed that plastic threaded spout

 

w the plastic thing-ey  we needed to put ojut

 

so are now carton of milk

 

had a plastic pour spout

 

not that opening g the carton

 

for a baziillion years

 

never got the milk in Your Glass 

 

nor on your Cereal

 

just saying  

 

 

[Smithy]

@rotuts, I have a love/hate relationship with that plastic threaded spout attached to the cardboard milk or cream carton. It seems an unnecessary use of plastic, but it does make for a spill-proof container. That spill-proofness is important when we're traveling. Since the waxed-cardboard cartons don't seem to be recyclable anyway, I think it's more a personal kink on my part than any practical reason to object to that plastic spout.

 

I don't remember whether I was in Northern Ontario or South Africa (I know, about as far apart as possible) when I first encountered milk--in-a-bag. Never saw it in my U.S. places of residence. It's interesting to read about the development of the system, and to know that it has turned up in parts of the U.S.

[Porthos]

When using cartons of dairy product I prefer the threaded cap since I can destroy paper cartons trying to open them. Where I shop my milk comes in plastic jugs but half & half and whipping cream come in cartons with the screw-cap.