Milk bags are a uniquely (eastern) Canadian concept

According to The Canadian Encyclopedia, the advent of the plastic used in milk bags by DuPont in the 1960s allowed dairies to phase out breakable bottles. Photo by Peter J. Thompson

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Steven Page of Barenaked Ladies fame explained where milk bags come from when he appeared on the new Prime Video series The Tom Green Farm.

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The conversation turned to a grocery giant prominent in Eastern Canada while the Canadian stars were riding a side-by-side ATV across the farm the comedian has called home for the last four years (check out the series on Crave to learn which one).

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“Remember those plastic jugs of milk?” Page asks. “Like, somebody would return it and they would have put gas in it, and you’d get this faint smell of gas in your milk bottle?”

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Green swears in exclamation.

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“That must be why they moved to milk bags in Canada — something that nobody in the world understands,” Ontario’s newest farmer, once married to Drew Barrymore, theorizes.

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“That’s certainly why we had the milk bags at our house,” the two-time Grammy nominated artist continues. “My parents wouldn’t get the refillable things, because they were nervous there had been gas or something in there. This way we just had those clean bags of milk.”

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“Sealed — you can trust it,” Green agrees.

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Page also notes how efficient the bags are to roll up and trash — and Green reminds the audience of one of his favourite early TV gags — popping milk bags and spraying them all over co-host Glenn Humplik.

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(If Green could have got his hands on some gassy milk, you have to believe he would have.)

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Like his searing upbraid of Beatlemania in the timeless hit Yoko Ono, Page is close to if not on a ringer with his recollection. According to The Canadian Encyclopedia, the advent of the plastic used in milk bags by DuPont in the 1960s allowed dairies to phase out breakable bottles.

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Reusable jugs were on the scene, too, but the gradual adoption of the Metric system in the 1970s and ’80s pushed many Canadian producers to the thin polyethylene bags. Changing their volume was much easier, and putting three 1 1/3-litre bags together gave customers between an American and a British gallon of milk — perfectly Canadian.

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The Encyclopedia corroborates part of their appeal stemmed from the fact that “some people would reportedly use the jugs to store toxic substances, like weed killer or gasoline” before returning them.

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The relaxation of some rules on the metric system and the development of harder plastics led to the milk bag’s demise in some provinces, but though the two-litre carton is gaining in popularity, the moo juice sacks remains the most popular and — once you have your jug and Snippet — cost-effective format in Ontario.

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Even if you had a million dollars.

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