So we drink milk from bags. Does that make us weird?

Story courtesy Cathal Kelly The Toronto Star Staff Reporter

I saw this article in the Toronto Star recently and wanted to share it with you.

"In the video, Sheryl Ng lays out a bag of 2%, a jug and a pair of scissors.

She runs through the milk drinker’s skillset: the proper triangular cut, the cautious first pour, preventive measures to keep an overfull bag from collapsing.

Collectively, the viewing world outside Ontario leaned back in its seat and said, “What. The Hell. Is that?”

“My friends find it pretty amusing, because we all grew up in Toronto,” Ng, a 22-year-old York University student said. “We thought it was normal.”

Apparently not. Ontario, the world has seen your milk drinking habits, and the world now thinks you’re a weirdo.

Ng posted her milk-drinking video as a way of illustrating the differences between Canadians and Americans. They drink milk out of jugs. We drink it out of bags. She titled the whimsical instructional, “Milk in bags, eh?”

Bagged milk hits an impassable imaginary wall at the 49th parallel. Almost uniformly, Americans are jug/carton people. Wisconsinites, people who know something about dairy, buck that trend.

Among other forward-thinking nations that have warmed up to the plastic udder – South Africans, Argentines, Hungarians and Chinese. Those latter also bag beer, which means we have some catching up to do.

In 1967, DuPont debuted the milk bag in Canada using equipment developed in Europe. The local dairy industry jumped on the change, happily abandoning the hassle of breakable glass bottles.

Bags also use 75 per cent less plastic than jugs.

Drinkers discovered that milk in bags costs less than a comparable amount sold in a jug. Mainly, that’s got to do with economies of scale. As bags began to dominate the market, the cost to manufacture single-use jugs jumped.

Today, you can’t find a young Ontarian who remembers that unhappy time when you risked a shoulder injury trying to get a drop of milk out of a 3-quart jug.

Ng’s been buried under the response. Enough American doubters piped up that she felt compelled to film a follow-up

showing bagged milk at the supermarket, “just to prove it really exists.”

Enjoy the video "Milk in bags,eh";

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTPgd4HUk4w

If they think that's discombobulating, the next entry is going to blow their minds. "Hey everyone," she begins. "Today I'm going to be showing you guys ketchup chips and dill pickle chips."