Więcej o mleku - More about milk

A few notes on how milk is sold in Poland.

Milk in Poland and Slovakia, and elsewhere, used to be commonly sold in 1 liter bags - woreczki, or w folii (in plastic). In fact, milk is still sold in bags in Canada and in other countries. I was surprised to find that the topic has its own entry in Wikipedia.

If you do buy milk in bags, which can be messy to deal with, you need something reasonable to put it in, so they even sell special containers to put the bag into when you've opened it:

More traditional ones looked like this:

Source: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/

This custom, however, seems to be becoming a thing of the past. The dairy cooperative (spółdzielnia) above announced in 2011, for example, that it would stop packaging milk in plastic bags, and switch instead to plastic bottles (plastikowe butelki) like this one, from a different dairy:

They used to be even more common before the introduction of Tetra-Pak milk cartons (long-life, UHT -- kartony), which is probably now the most common form of packaging for milk in Europe:

However, some people have told me they prefer to buy the milk in bags because it is fresher - it can't sit around on shelves for months on end.

Now you can find discussions in the internet about what is best to buy - milk in plastic bags, plastic bottles or Tetra-Paks, and maybe even in paper cartons (papierowe kartony) and glass (szklane butelki) (we all know it is best in glass!), though I haven't noticed those specifically yet.

(Under communism, my aunt in Bratislava used to get a couple of bags of milk delivered to her house each morning, to a container hanging on her gate, along with six long rolls that are typical of Slovakia. After communism fell, this was one of the first things to go -- a service they miss even today.)

The plastic jugs and paper cartons common in America are not often used there, and I've never seen milk sold in anything other than a liter container -- maybe very rarely a liter and a half (but I think that was juice carton size, not milk!). You'd certainly never see a gallon-sized container of milk!

Szklane butelki, at least in my experience, are also rarely seen, though they used to be used, too:

Źródło: terenzabudowany.blog.pl/

You can get condensed milk in tubki, however:

And in puszki:

A real novelty for you might be the mlekomaty ("milkomats") like this one, where you can buy milk straight from the dairy, which is put directly into containers you bring with you. These appeared in Slovakia around 2010, so perhaps in Poland around the same time:

  Autor: Wistula; Wikipedia