Milk in bags, long a symbol of Canadian oddballism, may be on its way out. But who would we be if our milk came in cartons? Without milk in bags, would Ontario just be upstate New York?
Mostly sold in Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritimes, bagged milk comes in four-litre packages containing three bags of just over one litre. So if you’re buying milk this way for your home, you likely have at least two kids. But family sizes are declining. From 1961 to 2011, the average number of people in a Canadian household went from four to two and a half. The most common sizes of households in Ontario are one person (26 per cent) and two person (33 per cent). In a recent La Presse article, Concordia food-marketing professor Jordan LeBel cited this — in addition to broader adoption of non-dairy alternatives and smaller profits for merchants — among reasons for a possible discontinuation of bagged milk.
That diversification of milk products has certainly played out in our home. We have one small child. When she transitioned from breast milk to dairy, we purchased as much milk at a time as possible. Once she was fully eating solid foods, we slimmed down to the two-litre carton. These days, our fridge contains whole milk for my wife’s coffee, almond milk for her smoothies, oat milk for my cereal, and buttermilk for ranch dressing and pancakes (it all gets used, I promise).
Canada isn’t the only country that sells milk in bags. The United Kingdom, Israel, Mexico, India, Uruguay, Argentina, Ecuador, Colombia, and Russia are all smitten with sacks (though generally in smaller sizes). But our three-packs are less profitable for retailers — another reason they may be targeted for extinction.
What would that mean for our identity? Quebec has the French language. The East Coast has seafood. Who are Ontarians if our milk doesn’t come in bags?
Like Austin, Texas, Canada needs to keep it just weird enough to feel quirky without being so bizarre that the jocks stop inviting us to their parties. And part of that weird-kid-next-door vibe comes from the seemingly random ways that our food culture deviates from that of the United States. I’m talking about ketchup chips, clam-and-tomato-juice cocktails, cheese curds and gravy on fries, coffee-flavoured candy bars (Nestle doesn’t distribute Coffee Crisp in the US), sweet and dense bagels, Kraft Macaroni and Cheese branded as Kraft Dinner (a distinction sufficient to confuse every American editor I’ve worked with), and smoked meat made with brisket instead of navel (like pastrami, which I have always felt is a more fun word to say). But the bowtie and suspenders on our otherwise normcore look is milk in bags.
We gleefully share this video of former Toronto Raptor Precious Achiuwa, from Nigeria by way of Miami, shopping for milk in bags, then demonstrating his method of dunking Oreos (he impales them on a fork to keep his fingers dry).
We’re like a planet they land on in Star Trek that’s not unique enough to qualify for the main plot but has a culture just close enough to Earth’s that the show can get away with reusing sets and costumes from another production on the lot. We need to be just different enough for Captain Kirk to remark on it without distracting from the main story. Let him wriggle his nose in disgust while sniffing a Caesar as the other characters deliver exposition about some space god who’s taken control of the ship.
We also have a financial stake in those milk bags.
Without them, what would we do with our milk-bag jugs and our milk-bag cutters, the costly paraphernalia in which we’ve invested so much?
I’ll never forget the day my father, after years of slicing open milk bags with common scissors, came home with that ingenious, pocket-sized disc of plastic, the tiny twin blades hidden in an opening too small for even a child to accidentally catch a finger.
“One day, Son,” my father said as he demonstrated the technique, pinching the milk bag with the fingers of one hand while using the other to manipulate the device, “One day, this will be yours.” I’ve looked forward to one day passing on that milk-bag cutter to my daughter — my heart breaks when I consider that it may by then be as useless as a buggy whip or an iPhone 10 is today.Yes, we could conceivably open bags of chips with the milk-bag cutters. But that’d rob us of the satisfaction you get from pulling the chip bag apart at the top and the triumph of doing so without causing a chip explosion. Yes, we could use the milk pitchers to water house plants. But there’s no spout for those vines I keep on the high shelf. I can already see the spill happening.
As citizens, we may not grasp supply-management economics or how Canada’s protectionist rules for dairy production and importation keep milk prices high. But we can all calculate just how much each household has spent on milk-bag jugs and milk-bag cutters over the years. It’s got to be at least $15. Maybe as high as $18, if after repeatedly losing that milk-bag cutter in the cutlery drawer (not the main one with all the knives and forks — the one below it with the whisk and the grapefruit spoons and I think the corncob holders, unless maybe they’re with the barbecue stuff), we had to replace it. Yes, the magnet version snaps conveniently to the fridge, making it hard to lose. But it costs an additional $3. Maybe this is the sunk-cost fallacy talking. But fiscally, we’re in too deep with bagged milk to back out now.
Perhaps we were wrong to hang our cultural identity on a packaging format for a beverage primarily consumed by children. But for every Drake or poutine we export, we must retain a bagged milk or Hickory Sticks to retain our distinction and status.
NBC’s franchise spin-off Law & Order: Toronto, a godsend to production designers who no longer have to make the city of 3 million look like somewhere else, sits at the cultural precipice.
In order to do its job, the show must have that scene in which an indifferent barista languidly slices open a bag of milk to make microfoam for a macchiato while glancing at a photo of the episode’s murder victim and telling the homicide detectives, “Sure, double-shot latte. Comes in every morning just before eight. Good tipper. Don’t think I saw her yesterday.” If that actor were to pour the milk from a carton, we might as well be watching Law & Order: North Tonawanda.
Donate