Special-interest gimmickry promised an out. Dairy processors had investigated it to an extent after World War I, the success story of chocolate milk being one 1920s example. But their efforts were mere dabbling until the miracle of “standardization” by homogenizing came along. And even that might not have had the spectacular results it did if not for a swift reversal of nutritional orthodoxy about the benefits of whole versus skim milk during the late-twentieth-century cardiac donnybrooks summarized further on (this page). Suddenly milkfat was not proof of quality, but one of nature’s blunders in designing an otherwise virtuous food. From the ’60s or ’70s on, hasty public-health re-education campaigns sought to convert consumers to “the less, the better” attitudes regarding fat percentages in milk, with zero being the new ideal.
Zero was easily attainable through centrifuging, but centrifuged skim milk lacked the flavor-saving smidgin of cream that remained in the milk after hand skimming. Some people uncomplainingly adopted zero-fat milk; many more balked. The milk-processing industry eventually arrived at a spectrum of products starting with 0 percent milkfat milk and progressing through various homogenized gradations of fat content: 0.5 percent (officially “low-fat”), 1 percent, 1.5 percent, and 2 percent (these last three “reduced-fat”). Not all are equally available everywhere, but in most states you will find at least three or four of them. All quickly acquired fan clubs that are now an entrenched part of American culture. For a long time the hardest sell remained skim milk, and for good reason: The usual commercial versions are a singularly thin, vapid travesty of decent hand-skimmed milk. But eventually processors hit on the stratagem of using dried skim milk solids to add body and selling the result under names like “Skim Milk Plus.” (Despite any promotional malarkey on the label, the real difference between this and plain skim milk is not extra “creaminess” or “richness” but more lactose and casein.)
Other possibilities opened up with news of the lactose-tolerance issue, which began reaching consumers in the 1970s and seriously sank in about a decade later. Instead of acknowledging that people do not in the least need to drink fresh milk, dairy chemists eagerly began working to produce something that would approximate fresh milk without the usual lactose content. In all fairness, this head-in-the-sand approach must be attributed less to industry guile than to cultural biases so deep that even intelligent public-health advocates don’t recognize them as biases.
Making lactose-free milk turned out to be far more difficult than making fat-free milk. Lactic-acid bacteria do it all the time—but no one wanted the souring and thickening that are part of their wizardry. Instead, the human wizards had to directly expose milk to the lactase enzyme. Unfortunately for flavor, the result was a release of very sweet free glucose into the milk when the original lactose—one of the least sweet sugars in nature—was enzymatically chopped into galactose and glucose. More recently, advanced techniques have been developed to physically extract the lactose from the milk instead of splitting it into component sugars. No technique so far makes lactose-free or lactose-reduced milk taste particularly like plain unmodified milk. Taste, however, doesn’t seem to be the point.
Regardless of the new products’ deficiencies, they have brought us still more value-added categories of fluid milk. Along with the aforementioned kinds of fat-free or reduced-fat milk, supermarket dairy cases now display lactose-free or reduced-lactose “whole” (i.e., homogenized 3.25 percent), skim, 1 percent, and 2 percent milk. If your head isn’t already spinning from this surfeit of choices, some retail sources also tout calcium-fortified milk—either “whole” or reduced-fat, full-lactose or reduced-lactose. Why add calcium to a food that already happens to be a rich source of calcium? Well, call it the Nothing Succeeds like Excess theory of nutrition. Despite the fact that neither osteoporosis nor childhood skeletal maldevelopment is more prevalent among well-nourished people in societies where no one consumes milk than in the United States, it would take a lot to displace the “no milk, no strong bones” syllogism from popular nutrition education. You can even buy milk fortified with fiber, undoubtedly in response to some perception of a market.
Among the final absurdities in this sequence of nutritional bad jokes is the rehabilitation of “filled” and imitation milks, once synonymous with cheap impostures. In the era when creameries were awash in unwanted skim milk, various quick-buck artists conceived the idea of buying it up for a song and emulsifying (“filling”) it with some kind of vegetable oil, perhaps partially hydrogenated to mimic the “mouthfeel” of the milkfat in whole milk. Dairymen’s associations and health experts—who in those days usually furthered each other’s agendas—denounced the budget-price results as unwholesome shams. They were still louder in condemning the nutritional deficiencies of “imitation milks” compounded from vegetable oil, sugar, corn-syrup solids, some protein source, and emulsifiers.
Who could have foreseen that one day we would see these old ringers peddled in new guises as more healthful than what now passes for plain milk? The American Heart Association serenely certifies a product called SunMilk, made by emulsifing skim milk with sunflower oil. Soy-based imitation milks are rapidly encroaching on real fluid-milk sales. Quite unrelated to the plain fresh soy milk sold in small Chinatown groceries, they are created from improbable farragoes of ingredients with heavy doses of sugar and added flavorings to counteract an underlying “beany” pong. Today’s dairy aisles are crammed with filled milk and soy milk in such flavors as strawberry, chocolate, green tea, and mango, proudly billed as “lactose-free,” “casein-free,” “cholesterol-free,” and “heart-healthy.” Dairy farmers may regard the trend with dismay—but not the world’s largest conglomerate of milk processors, Dean Foods, which has hedged its bets by acquiring the Silk and Sun Soy brands of soy milk.
Can this spectacle get any crazier? It can and will. Dairying experts everywhere are trying to see whether adding substances like fish oil to dairy cows’ rations will result in milk with more unsaturated fatty acids. It has been difficult to administer feed supplements that won’t either impart off flavors to the milk or end up being turned into saturated fatty acids after all by the ruminal bacteria. But at least one success story is now on retail shelves in Ontario: Dairy Oh!, developed by members of the University of Guelph’s renowned dairy science department. Similar products will eventually jostle for U.S. shoppers’ attention with the already dizzying roster of value-added twists on milk that we now take for granted.
THE FAT FACTOR AND THE FEAR FACTOR
We all know the reason behind the bastardized products flooding the market: the reputation as a killer that milk acquired during successive debates on heart disease in the last half of the twentieth century. Today a great deal of the diet-and-cardiac-mortality gospel as originally promulgated has had to be profoundly revised or, in some cases, thrown out. But for some reason the milk parts of the creed have never come in for serious re-examination.
Many facts of the case are undisputed. In the first place milkfat as found in all full-fat dairy products is very rich in saturated fatty acids. (For the nuts and bolts of the saturation concept, see the description of butter, this page.) Beginning as unsaturated precursors in the fresh grasses or hay eaten by the cow, these acquire their saturated form in the great chemist’s workshop of the rumen with its population of fermenting bacteria. The same is true of other ruminants like goats, sheep, and water buffaloes. All produce milkfat with more saturated fatty acids than any vegetable-derived fats except coconut oil, palm oil, and palm-kernel oil.
The picture is clear from a few simple comparisons. A 100-gram portion of most commercially available vegetable oils contains about 10 to 18 grams of saturated fatty acids and 82 to 90 grams total unsaturated fatty acids, with widely varying proportions of monounsaturated to polyunsaturated fatty acids. The figures for olive oil are about 14 grams saturated fatty acids, 77 grams monounsaturated fatty acids, and 9 grams polyunsaturated fatty acids. But 100 grams of cows’-milk butter that has had the water mecha
nically removed would—allowing for large variations in composition among different animals—probably average out at roughly 62 grams saturated fatty acids, 29 grams monounsaturated fatty acids, and 4 grams polyunsaturated fatty acids together with a few grams of other milk-derived substances.
Undisputed though all these figures are, the interpretations different people have placed on them are anything but. We can start with the campaign to point out saturated fatty acids—and foods like milk that contain a great deal of them—as artery-clogging menaces. This movement was led during the ’50s and ’60s by the energetic, influential Ancel Keys, whose country-by-country comparative studies of diet data and mortality statistics provided the initial evidence for a sustained public-health war on saturated fats and cholesterol.
Several aspects of this battle, however, remained strangely underreported for many decades. One is that Keys’s attempts to link national dietary habits and coronary heart disease ignored many populations in which high consumption of saturated fats wasn’t accompanied by high rates of atherosclerosis. (The most obvious examples are parts of Asia, Africa, and the Near East with heavily milk-dependent diets, and various tropical regions where palm or coconut oil historically was the cooking fat of choice.) Another is that his contentions about the genesis of arterial plaque have proved surprisingly hard to verify in detail as he first proposed them. And from the start, many equally qualified frontline researchers came to conclusions different from those of Keys.
As time went on, both interpretive disagreements and official course corrections began to strain the public patience, until a certain popular backlash erupted late in the 1990s. The first hints of trouble to come appeared when Ancel Keys and his allies in the public-health sector realized that they had oversimplified the saturated/unsaturated–fat dichotomy by telling people that “more unsaturated” automatically equaled “more life-saving.” To their surprise, monounsaturates turned out to afford more cardiac benefits than the polyunsaturates in which they had initially placed their trust. Links between dietary cholesterol and the levels that show up in the bloodstream as builders of arterial plaque also failed to meet early expectations. Some years later researchers realized that blood-serum cholesterol was not one uniform substance but an amalgamation of different fractions with different effects; moreover, its path from dinner table to artery wall didn’t match the beautiful simplicity of the first formulations. A yet more jarring discovery was that the labels “saturated,” “monounsaturated,” and “polyunsaturated” were inadequate to indicate different fatty acids’ roles in triggering or protecting against atherosclerosis. Certain saturated fatty acids in milk and meat didn’t seem to raise blood cholesterol levels. Certain monounsaturates appeared to be desirable, others quite the opposite. As for polyunsaturates, they turned out to come in several molecular configurations that now are thought to play dramatically different roles in cell chemistry and plaque formation.
Epidemiologists surveying twentieth-century mortality figures further weakened the Keysian argument by failing to agree on whether there had ever been an “epidemic” of fatal heart disease, as opposed to statistical shifts during a period of increasing longevity and decreasing likelihood of dying from diseases of childhood or youth before cardiac conditions had had time to manifest themselves. Another embarrassment surfaced in the early 1990s, when the authorities had to do a highly public about-face on blanket recommendations of shortenings and margarines. Far from being beneficial, it developed, the partially hydrogenated vegetable oils responsible for these test-tube wonders contained possibly atherogenic trans fatty acids in hugely greater amounts than plain butter. The turn of the twenty-first century saw a far worse setback: The general lean-and-trim diet blueprint to which the antisaturated fat agenda belonged was thrown into disarray when a vocal wing of dietary specialists denounced low-calorie, low-fat alternatives to such traditional full-fat foods as milk, butter, and cream as factors in a rising national tide of obesity and diabetes.
By the mid-1990s some rebellious types were heretically celebrating a return to steak. A few years later red meat and eggs—early victims of nutritional McCarthyism—were getting a small, grudging rehabilitation from the self-constituted food police. Not so butter and full-fat milk, though they happen to have a striking piece of negative evidence on their side. As shown by USDA and census statistics, consumption of both whole milk and butter was steadily declining during the 1950s and ’60s while the number of fatal heart attacks rose—along with decreasing use of animal fats overall and increasing use of vegetable oils. Yet to this day the American Heart Assciation—which readily accepts money from manufacturers in return for putting AHA approval stickers on products like Cocoa Puffs breakfast cereal and Smart Balance De Luxe Microwave Popcorn—still inveighs against milk with the milkfat that is simply part of the nature of milk. And the shakiest tenets of the Keysian party line continue to inspire tinhorn politicos like the school-district administrators who have succeeded in getting whole milk banned from public schools in both Los Angeles and New York City. Probably most people who think of themselves as nutrition-savvy would be astonished to learn that evidence of whole milk’s being a ticket to an early grave is conspicuous by its absence.
How did a good and useful food come to be buried in such misunderstanding? For one answer we can look to well-meaning authorities on nutrition and disease who have spent fifty-plus years repeatedly issuing blanket dietary recommendations for the whole population without waiting to think through many ifs, ands, or buts that have had to be inserted piecemeal at erratic intervals. Their pronouncements, as rehashed by a corps of food and health journalists, have reached most of us as a series of disjointed bulletins compared to which the blind men’s reports on the elephant were marvels of coherence.
Add an endless chorus of commercial persuasions to buy more and more (for obvious reasons, never less) of this or that value-added niche product targeted to real, imaginary, or highly misrepresented needs and deficiencies, and you have what I can only call a schizoid mentality. Consider the millions of people taught to fear and distrust a common food to the point of banishing it from their diet. Do they look elsewhere for ideas about eating that don’t involve its use? On the contrary, they rush forth to spend extra bucks on crude artificial mimicries of the dreaded offender.
NOT ALL THINGS TO ALL PEOPLE
This sad ending might have looked like the only ending a decade or two back, but I see increasing evidence that it doesn’t have to be.
Seventeen years ago I went to a “milk tasting” organized by the New York branch of a national gastronomic organization, meant to illuminate some of the factors affecting milk flavor, like what animals it comes from and what sort of processing it undergoes. The next week a New Yorker “Talk of the Town” reporter—unable to taste any particular difference among the six samples on display “except for the chocolate milk, which tasted like chocolate”—had a quiet snicker at the general foofaraw (especially the lunatic aspirations of any anti-pasturizers trying to turn a public health hazard into “chic milk,” in scornful italics). Moral of story, as of 1991: Modern dairying had been working to treat an innately variable, highly perishable biological secretion like a bulk commodity long enough for wags to chortle over even a modest attempt to call this absurdity into question.
I doubt that an exercise designed to stimulate curiosity about milk from various animals, handled in different ways, would draw the same sort of putdown today. The idea that milk doesn’t have to be a gastronomic neuter wished on the public under misguided dietary assumptions, but actually is capable of tasting like something, is not quite as foreign to people who eat and think about what they eat. What now seems to be happening, for at least some of us, is a more liberating perception of food in general as a source of both sustenance and pleasure.
Notwithstanding the Babel of sales pitches and ideologies charging us to view everything we put in our mouths as either a miracle cure or a death warrant, a gathering conflux of the i
ndependent-minded is recognizing the really great thing about today’s food scene: It gives us the stuff of several different kinds of enjoyable and nutritious diets based on time-honored foodways of peoples everywhere in the world. It feeds and nourishes a mentality that seeks varied, flexible answers to the question of what to eat rather than competing Doctrines of the Faith about what not to eat. There are, for instance, different ways to be a vegetarian, inspired by eating patterns from parts of the Far East, Near East, Mediterranean basin, and India—routes paved with choices of pleasure, not deprivation, and blessedly free of products arm-wrestled into simulations of what they are not.
If this dietary liberation theology has any prime doctrine of its own, it’s that starting with a “what to eat” firmly centered on a very wide spectrum of minimally processed fresh fruits, vegetables, and vegetable protein sources ought to free us from agonized struggles to ration out other foods—for example, milk—by miserly formulas from this or that ministry of fear. No food has to pretend to be all things to all people. Nothing has to suffer exaggerated reactions against false labels like “Nature’s Perfect Food.”
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