Milk is sold in bags in Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritimes, but it could be approaching its expiry date. Part of the reason is changing consumer habits.
"Consumption of milk per capita has gone down every year over the last 30 years," says Sylvain Charlebois, director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University. "Actually, it's gone down by more than 20 per cent since 2015."
While bagged milk is often cited as a unique Canadianism, it's actually not sold west of Ontario. Those who prefer it, however, say it's more cost efficient and some even believe it tastes better.
Are these changing consumer habits mostly being driven by how insanely expensive and low quality milk products are becoming? Canadian cheese and butter are trash and cost an arm and a leg - especially when you get into goat and sheep cheeses that a lot of lactose intolerant west coasters prefer.
Why are you getting down voted so much? You are absolutely right. Canadian milk products (including milk) are complete garbage. We can thank our milk cartels for that, plus the really stupid regulations put into place over concerns of germs that basically limits the amount of raw or non-homogenized milk on the market.
How come most of Europe can produce far superior tasting cheeses and also consume fresh milk from milk vending machines, but there's an inane control on it in North America?
As a lactose intolerant west coaster I'm really confused if that's setting people off. We've got a huge Asian population out here and lactose intolerance is much higher among them. Personally, while we're not of Asian descent both me and my partner are lactose intolerant so finding reasonable dairy products that don't give us diarrhea is a priority - and we're not shy of making our own stovetop cheese if all we can get is milk.
Right, the dude used it as a flippant insult as if lactose intolerance is a West Coast fad when in reality there's lactose intolerance is everywhere and isn't a fad
Is milk somehow not a milk product? I think my point stands for milk products in general - goat milk is insanely expensive in Canada and it's not significantly more expensive to produce than cow's milk.
There are probably some slight differences between milk used for further processing and milk sold directly to consumers but it's of a very similar quality. A lot of cheese in Canada is made from third party milk rather than milk produced on premises.
You can make the argument that the quality of milk in general is dropping, and that's reflected in the quality of milk products. But to say that poor quality of milk products themselves are driving the decrease in milk consumption? I don't see how the logic follows.