Milk by Anne Mendelson

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 toutcalcium-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” andimitation 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 morehealthful than what now passes for plain milk? TheAmerican 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 freshsoy 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 onheart disease in the last half of the twentieth century. Today a great deal of