I Have Seen The Future, and it is Spoutless

The very day this article appears in the New York Times touting a new environmentally friendly redesign of the milk jug, I happened to be at Sam's Club--one of the early adopters of the new jug design--and in need of milk. Welcome to the future of your milk jug, folks:

Here at Penguin Perspectives, we strive to do all the awkward stuff first, so you don't have to wind up on the great cosmic blooper reel. In that spirit, here's a rundown of the new milk jug experience.

The new design eliminates the little plastic ring around the cap, replacing it with a foil under-seal. The difference is that I needed a fork to get the ring off and a knife to get the foil seal off. The pour experience, much maligned in the NYTimes article, is on par with a lemonade pitcher. As a matter of fact, if you can hit a glass pouring liquid out of a pitcher, the new jugs won't be much of a challenge. The milk aperture is a little on the wide side and there is not a lot of headspace, making flow control on the first pour or two somewhere between "dicey" and "nonexistent." I made my first experimental pour into a juice cup, and while I did not spill, I had filled the 8-ounce cup with my first slosh out of the carton. The flow control got better once there was about an inch and a half of space between the top of the jug and the milk level. In sum, don't try to add milk to your morning coffee out of a newly-opened jug if you would like the milk:coffee ratio to remain tilted in favor of coffee. In future jugs, I will check to see if merely punching a pour hole into the foil underseal fixes that problem.

With the new jug design lacking more than a vestigial spout, I had assumed that my days drinking straight from the carton were over. Not so. It takes considerably more lower lip dexterity, but still a manageable feat. And no, I don't drink from the carton when we have guests at the Rookery. Then, I get a glass.