Got Milk?

Laive Entera: Look for the smiling cow

Picture It: In Metro last week, I found myself in a milk lover´s nightmare: supermarket shelves stocked only with milk substitutes—rows and rows of coconut, pineapple, and soy parading themselves as milks in flashy blue, yellow, and pink bottles. I frantically searched for the unassuming bottle of Danlac milk I had bought the previous week and began to silently panic about the future osteoporosis that might ensue after six milkless months abroad. Nothing on the top shelves, nothing on the bottom ones.  My bones felt frailer by the minute.  I was just about to resign myself to a milkless existence when I found what I was looking for. Well, sort of. I was looking for bottled milk; what I found was bagged.

Bagged milk? While the initial thought might seem puzzling to most Americans (How do you pour it? Where do you store it after it´s opened?), bagged milk—most commonly found in Latin American and Middle Eastern countries—actually makes a lot of sense. For one, its packaging uses less plastic than its plastic jug counterpart. After bagged milk is opened, it can be poured into washable, reusable containers.

Containers That Hold Bagged Milk:  In the absence of a jug or jar in which to pour the bagged milk I bought (and too cheap/lazy to go out and get one), at some point or another I considered transferring my bagged milk into a beer bottle. The only thing that stopped me was that I also lacked a cap to seal the bottle.  Other containers I would have considered for milk storage if readily available: Coke bottle, sugar bowl, vase.

Ironically, in the meantime I found good old Danlac at a grocery store down the road.  So I ended up waiting until I had drunk the Danlac milk and reused its container as a receptacle for my bagged milk, thus defeating any noble intention I had of saving the planet while building stronger bones.

How to Use Bagged Milk: The experience of transferring milk from bag to bottle for the first time is a strange one. In my estimation, it´s a five-step process:

1.)    Place reusable container and milk bag together in kitchen sink.
2.)    Cut corner of milk bag with scissors or kitchen knife, careful not to puncture any part of the bag containing the milk itself.
3.)    Delicately grip corner of bag and tip it at approximately a 30 degree angle to meet lip of plastic jug.
4.)    Begin squirting milk from bag to bottle. Treat the milk bag like a tube of toothpaste: press gently at first, and then, when the bag looks nearly deflated, squeeze the bag from bottom to top to remove the last bits of liquid.
5.)    Cap milk and refrigerate or, if you´re like me, enjoy immediately.