So while we’re on the subject of packaging, let’s talk about milk.

First, there’s what milk comes in. There’s  a fancy dairy-type store about a 5 minute walk from our apartment where the milk still comes in glass bottles, although there’s no daily door-to-door milk service like in the old days.

In all other stores, what you buy is a 1-liter “tetra-pack” carton of milk(1 liter = approximately a quarter of a gallon):

Cartons of Milk in Tübingen, Germany

Note that these cartons are different from milk cartons in the U.S.: there’s a plastic cap on the top, and you pour the milk from there from there.

Now, can you spot the differences in those two cartons of milk? Whether intentionally or not, the same company has two different carton styles, one for fresh milk (on the left) and one for the UV-treated milk (on the right. The treatment milk  can stay on the shelf for months without refrigeration.

I don’t recall the UV-treated milk being so readily available in the U.S. when we lived there, but we haven’t lived there for almost 8 years now, so I realized things could have changed. But it is interesting to see a whole aisle of the store-in-the-pantry milk – it’s a big business here, and very popular. We normally by the fresh (refrigerated milk), but we keep one of other ones on hand, so that we can have milk for times when we come back from after the supermarkets have closed.

I should also note that, at least here in Tübingen, there is no milk sold in plastic jugs, or in any containers larger than a liter. At least, I don’t think there is, although it occurs to me that I haven’t ever made an exhaustive search in the milk section of the supermarkets. My shopping style in a supermarket does not entice me to linger beyond the time I need to spend looking for items I haven’t ever bought before. I take a shopping list with me, I go in the store, I get the stuff on the list, I buy it and get out. I do enough wandering when forced to when I don’t know where in the store to find some item. The problem with buying an item that I’ve never bought before is that I’m never certain that the item will be available in that particular store, or even in the whole country.

For example, baking soda was hard to find the first time I went to buy it in Europe. While you can buy it in both Italy and Germany, it doesn’t come in the same type of little box that I associate with buying baking soda in the U.S.

Typical North American baking soda box

Instead, it comes in small little packets here, the size of yeast packets in the U.S. Of course, yeast is sold in cubes (that look like bullion cubes), not in little packages here in Germany.

Anyway, I guess they don’t use baking soda here for “so many things” (as it says on the U.S. packaging in the photo), since there’s not much more than a tablespoon’s worth in each little package. Plenty for baking something, though I suppose, but I don’t really know,  I don’t bake at all these days. Not that I ever did much when we lived in North America, either.

But speaking of baking, in the supermarket this morning I noticed a huge display of all the baking ingredients you’d need to bake traditional German Chrismastime desserts. One basic ingredient you need is the same as what you’d need to make chocolate-chip cookies in the U.S: vanilla.

Except, in the U.S. more often than not you buy a little bottle with liquid vanilla extract. Turns out that extract is made from soaking a whole vanilla bean for months in alcohol; in the U.S., in order to be called “pure vanilla”, the alcohol content has to be at least 35%. I never really thought about where vanilla extract comes from.

Now, since you can buy all kinds of liquor (wine, beer, spirits) in German supermarkets, the alcoholic content in vanilla extract can’t be the reason that you can’t find those little bottles of it here in Germany. According to an American friend who has lived in here for 20 years, you can’t buy vanilla extract in Germany anywhere. Either you cart it back as a treasured souvenir of your trip to the U.S., or you learn how to home-brew it in a jar in your cellar.

As I said yesterday, it’s all these little things I never thought about which really strike me as some of the key differences we encounter by living in another country.