Barry Williams and Christopher Knight Had to Learn to Stop Eating Those Ever-Present Milk and Cookies on The Brady Bunch

One of the coziest parts of The Brady Bunch was when the gang of kids met up for a snack in the family’s kitchen — but Barry Williams and Christopher Knight had to learn not to actually drink the milk and eat the cookies while filming their scenes.

On the March 25 episode of The Real Brady Bros podcast, Williams, who played oldest brother Greg Brady, and Knight, who played middle brother Peter Brady, answered listener questions about the beloved series. 

One listener wrote in to ask about “the scenes with the milk and cookies.” She asked, “Was any of that even edible? Also, with the amount of milk poured in each glass, how many vats of milk was in the fridge at one time?”

Knight, 67, said that he didn’t think the refrigerator in the family’s kitchen actually worked, but Williams, 70, asserted that it did. Still, they didn’t store the milk there, Williams said, “because we might not get to it for three weeks.” 

“But when we had a milk scene, they would bring in a half gallon or a gallon of milk and put it in the refrigerator and hold it for the shoot,” Williams said. But Knight added that the prop master kept “vats of milk” in another refrigerator somewhere off camera. 

Knight explained that they didn’t actually drink all the milk that was poured into a glass. “We were very careful,” he said, because if you drank all the milk in a glass in a take, you would have to drink all that milk again in the next take. 

Williams said The Brady Bunch is where he learned “to not eat” while filming scenes with food because “you have to match every time you take a bite.” They would do the group shot first, he explained, and by the time they got to his closeup, “It's three hours later, and the food has gone bad and you still have to eat it. So I learned to just put the fork with the food on it up to my face, and then put it down to say my line. And not eat it.”

But Knight said that it took him quite a while to learn this lesson. “You as a little kid who's been doing something prior to sitting down to act out this scene, are now thirsty,” he said. “If you grab that milk and chug half the glass, you're committed to now chugging half that glass anytime the camera's on you from that point forward. You're going to have to drink that glass of milk. But it was real milk, and the cookies were real.”

Williams said that ultimately it seemed to viewers like the kids drank a lot more milk than they really did, and usually they only ended up drinking about half a glass each.

As for the cookies, he said, “They were fresh, or at least they started out that way. The food was okay, but the demands of the shooting schedule, sometimes it'd be out too long. Sometimes it would get hot. Sometimes there would be dust around. So it was not the most desirable environment within which to eat, but the food was good.”

But Knight said that as a young kid filming the show, “You're not really thinking about dirt and germs and stuff. And if you're hungry, like me, you weren't discerning at all. You just ate everything ... I didn't care so much that they sprayed it with bug spray or dulling spray or whatnot. I'd still eat it.”

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Williams laughed at that and noted that “no one else” but Knight could have brought “Peter to life.”

The Brady Bunch ran for five seasons, from 1969 to 1974.