July 18, 2024

My custom is to set my alarm an hour or so earlier than our scheduled wake-up. For coffee and Instagram and such.

Having done so this morning, and now with nothing better to mull before the phone rings, it strikes that the name “Half & Half” is both redundant and meaningless.

If a product is half of something, then it’s automatically half of something else, no? A single percentage sum, by itself, should take care of it, obviating any need for a second one. This product should be called “Half.” (Which, admittedly, doesn’t carry much of a ring.)

Further, we ask, “Half & Half” of what, exactly? The name goes out of its way to overstate the obvious, yet fails to inform us what these respective halves consist of. Olive oil? Cranberry juice? Sand? Why the mystery? Indeed, as revealed in the picture above, and despite the kind assurance of ultra-pasteurization, the carton front displays no ingredients whatsoever.

Once again we find ourselves beguiled by the whims and foibles of corporate branding.

Now, in fairness to both mathematics and marketing, the second 50 percent of content could be easily diminished into additional fractions of whatever might compose it. The product could be half of one thing, but smaller amounts of multiple other things. Thus the name “Half & Two Quarters,” or some such.

This makes the whole conversation somewhat semantic (if less fun).

What we also see in the photograph, to our considerable dismay, is one of the more sadly devolved touches of modern carton manufacturing: the plastic screw top.

Those of us of a certain age remember the old-fashioned fold-back carton top. We miss the simplicity once employed to open, then quickly re-seal, a carton of milk or juice or “Half & Half.”

The choreography of the act was more complex than it looked, acquired through habit until performed without thinking, akin to tying one’s shoe: a tear, an unfolding, a bend, a squeeze.

The carton had no separate or moving parts. Rather, it was manipulated through a kind of muscle-memory origami. And when finished pouring, the resultant spout was, even more effortlessly, flipped back and restored to its original shape.

When did the transition to screw-tops begin? I want to say it was the early 1980s.

An inspirational debt is owed here to the author Nicholson Baker. Or vice-versa, perhaps, since this complaint was composed, at least in my head, before I’d read his wonderful book, The Mezzanine — the only other other place, to my knowledge, in which this subject is explored (page 42 in my edition). The book dates to 1986, which gives my timeline credence.

“The radiant idea that you tore apart one of the triangular eaves of the carton,” writes Baker, “using the stiffness of its own glued seam against itself.” The hand-formed, diamond-shaped opening was, “a better pourer than a circular bottle opening, because you could create a very fine stream of milk very simply.”

Indeed. The screw top, barbaric in comparison, with its jagged throw-away pull-ring and propensity to drip and splash, presumably provides more freshness, but at the cost of an almost magically elegant design.

Equal parts curiosity and nostalgia had me attempt the old-style maneuver at home, on the carton shown below. Results were mixed. The basics still work, but the molded circular collar now gets in the way. The adhesive seems different as well. The seams are no longer as tolerant to tearing, neither do they re-fold with as much authority.