This week and last week's questions combined
When I was a kid my parents had a strict rule that you couldn't have milk in a plastic container, so if you had a drink of milk or some on your cereal it had to be in a non-plastic cup, bowl etc. (I don't think you could get milk in plastic cartons then - the 70s - I only remember it being in glass bottles, which you hardly ever see now.)

Anyway, it was one of those things you just do without question and it wasn't until I was in my 30s that I discovered no one else had ever heard of this practice and it seems to have been confined to my family. I've always drunk lots of milk but even now, at 41, have only had it in a plastic cup once, and I had to force myself to do it just to prove I could. (I asked the 'rents about this recently and they said it was because plastic is quite porous and as milk is a 'living' thing which can go off quite spectacularly, if you didn't clean the cup/bowl/whatever scrupulously you might get food poisoning. So plastic containers - like milk cartons - which you don't keep don't matter because the milk will still be fresh when it's in there, but plastic things you keep and reuse over time shouldn't be used in case they harbour deadly decaying milkness. Got that?)

My brother and I thought we were alone in the world with this until I went to see the band Underworld (the "shouting lager, lager, lager" lot) last year. They have a song called Moaner which came out in the mid-90s (was on the soundtrack to one of the Batman films, fact fans). I've seen them quite a few times over the years and listened to that song many, many times, but without paying proper attention to the lyrics. I was very distracted by the singer's fab sparkly top but suddenly realised that part of the song goes: ".....I am the hunger above your town/A little sound in a little amp/I am dubious hard metal I am stainless/I am milk in your plastic"!! Yes, a kindred spirit!

I've not been on B3TA for a couple of weeks due to being super busy at work and was just reading the QOTW about procrastination before seeing what this week's question was. I thought at the moment of realisation I should try and find out where that line comes from. It's only been brewing in my tiny mind for about a year, so now's the time to act. I just have to sit back and work out at my leisure how I'm going to find out what the sparkly man was trying to say.
(purplelizzie, Thu 27 Nov 2008, 14:49, 1 reply)

Milk and plastic
Our family had the same view of plastic and milk. It did seem a lot harder at the time to remove milk from some types of plastic so I have always put milk in glass or ceramic containers.
(BearWithLittleBrain, Thu 27 Nov 2008, 15:59, closed)