Shape of milk (and other refrigerable things) to come

I’m old enough to remember the morning milk being delivered in glass bottles. The milk guy would cycle up in one of those pedal-driven cages and drop off bottles. The bottles had caps of shiny material that looked like foil and came in three colours. The milk delivery had peculiar sounds attached to it: the metal hiss of the cycle chain; the rattle of the metal crates that housed the bottles; and then, finally, the clink of the bottles themselves.Some of this could be false memory, confused with when I came across milk bottles again in Britain many years later. But there’s no doubt in my mind about the milk being poured from the bottles into a patila, and the smell of boiled milk that preceded my morning glass of Ovaltine or Bournvita and my parents’ second cup of tea (the first having been made with the previous day’s milk.)

I grew up disinterested in how the food got to my thali. Likewise, I was only concerned about how my Oval-Vita or hot chocolate tasted, rather than the milk delivery system. That changed when I went on a ‘family world trip’ with my parents at age 15. Staying with family friends in New Jersey, I discovered the amazing taste of foreign milk, drunk cold in a glass.

At home, I wasn’t allowed to touch my mother’s fridge. But here I could take the milk out by myself and drink as much as I wanted. The pleasure of drinking that sweet – I now realise, highly over-processed – milk was connected to taking out of the Tetra Pak carton and prising open the little flap.

When I went to America to study, I began to come in regular contact with Tetra Pak, not just for milk, but for all sorts of non-alcoholic processed liquid. The carton stayed constant while visiting and later living in Britain, with some variations in European countries. One of the markers of our great liberalisation was the constant presence of the Tetra Pak in our refrigerators and its bonsai versions on the street.

Invented in 1944 by the Swedes Erik Wallenberg and Ruben Rausing, the Tetra Pak carton is one of the symbols of our time. It traversed seven decades, the Cold War divide, different waves of globalisation, and different generations of food-processing tech. Someone could even argue that, like the Boeing 747 and other jetliners, this was one of the products that changed how a large mass of the world’s population lived.Returning to Germany this year, I was greeted happily by my friend with whom I normally stay. ‘I’m leaving for a few days tomorrow, but I’ve got basic stuff for you in the kitchen.’ I found almost everything I needed for breakfast: bread, coffee, eggs, butter, and cheese, except milk. Speaking to her on the phone later that day, I joked about the milk. ‘What do you mean?’ she exclaimed. ‘Look! It’s right there, in the fridge door!’I looked, and sure enough, there was a strange object next to the bottles that said ‘Vollmilch’. I’d missed it because I’d scanned the door shelves for a classic milk carton. The following day, I engaged with this new creature, which looked like a cross between a small woman’s handbag and a stuffed chicken.

The padded sausage shape on one side was a handle, but it took me a while to figure out that the small removable triangular flap at the ‘beak’ was the opening. Gingerly, I tilted the handbag, and magically, the milk poured out of the tiny opening. I tilted the thing back, and the spout closed by itself.

A few days later, while shopping in the local supermarket, I saw Tetra Pak cartons for other liquids but none for milk. Instead, there was a pile of these new containers snuggling into each other like newborn puppies. Just as the last of the 747s are being flown to their old age home in Arizona, the writing is now on the carton for the packaging GOAT of the Tetra Pak.