world meets rosie

By: rosie

Nov 01 2009

Category: Uncategorized

3 Comments »

(Left-right: Milk in a bag, punched with a straw (after I cut it with scissors), poured into a glass: Suzhou, China)

I like food; I like writing about it, tasting new delicacies and experiencing the joy of discovering how the food gets to me.  China (like many other countries) seems to be obsessed with convenience, even to its detriment.  A good example is what you can see here – this milk has been individually packed into little plastic bags and I consider that practice to be pretty unusual. Of course, I have used cartons and bottles and even the foil bagged juices that often appear in a child’s lunchbox, but it would never occur to me to package a liquid, especially milk, like this.

After we bought it, I worried that it might explode in my bag on the way home and I was also baffled by the instructions.  Although I can’t read it, the bag must say ‘insert straw here’ where the circle is printed, yet we were not provided with one.  Does every Chinese household have a box of tiny straws for puncturing bagged drinks?  And what if we don’t have a Chinese person’s straw stockpile foresight?  I did find a straw for photography purposes as it happened, but otherwise I would have to snip off the corner with scissors and carefully funnel the milk into my mouth or (slightly more reasonably) into a cup.  What initially seems like a super convenient single serving of milk is actually difficult to open without straws or scissors and it must get warm really quickly.  Altogether it seems like a bizarre way to carry milk around – especially as the inside of the bag is just black plastic, like a compost bag, not the foil plastic in cartons.  I decided to write about this but I was advised not to drink it by Ying’s mum!