Milk was sold in bags in Finland until the mid-1970’s, but then cartons took over. There’s still a milk bag holder at my grandparents’s summer cottage. My mom says milk bags had a tendency to leak, sag in the holder, develop punctures and, on one memorable occasion, explode in an unsuspecting 10-year-old’s face (put her off milk for a while, that one). However, milk bags developed a near-legendary status when the ever-thrifty old Finnish ladies discovered you could cut them into strips and weave them into plastic rugs useful in the bathroom or washroom in a sauna. If I say there’s probably still close to 250,000 summer cottages with milk-bag woven rugs on the bathroom floor, I probably wouldn’t be too far off.
I’ve seen milk in a bag in several places scattered across the upper Midwest of the US (Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Michigan, Illinois).
Usually when I see it, it is being sold at a convenience store/gas station, in towns that no longer have their own grocery store. In places like this, the local gas station/convenience stores sometime start carrying more groceries. All of the ones that I have paid attention to are designed to be pours into a pitcher and served that way.
Love the demonstration! And the flowery pitcher.
We used to have a boring green plastic pitcher supplied by the milkman for our bags of milk. This was up in Canada a number of years ago. My mom now gets cartons because she found the bags too likely to flop the wrong way and spill, even with the support of the pitcher.
The one nice thing about bags is that they take up less room in the trash when empty. No squishing, stomping, or breaking down of containers required.
Whoever heard of milk in anything other than bottles? Delivered fresh to your doorstep each day … and when you’ve finished it, ya gotta free vase! 