Photo: U.S. Senator Roger Marshall has a drink of milk on the Senate Floor.
Our current government here in the U.S. is all about freedom. Including the freedom to drink whole milk.
Something that has been denied to school children, lo, these past 13 years.
Last week, Senators Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) and Peter Welch (D-Vt.) celebrated the strong bipartisan support that carried Senate Bill S.922 — the “Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act” — over the Senate hurdle on November 20 on “unanimous consent”. Each offering a toast to the gathered U.S. Senate.
A victory, finally, for butterfat… and freedom.
And a unanimous victory, to boot.
As Vermont Senator Peter Welch made clear when speaking to his fellow Senators last week, “The dairy farming industry… it’s not so much an industry as it is a way of life. And in Vermont, the hardest working people we have are dairy farmers.” He made this statement shortly after taking a sip of milk. Whole milk.
Reportedly, water and milk are the only drinks allowed on the U.S. Senate floor. For whatever reason.
Whole milk disappeared from federally-subsidized school menus in 2012 under nutrition standards set by the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act which aimed at reducing childhood obesity in a typically incompetent government manner.
Schools with subsidized lunch programs were restricted to serving only fat-free or 1% milk… and flavored options had to be fat-free as well.
Some of my readers may have tasted fat-free milk? If so, nothing more need be said. Except we will note that, given a choice between ‘plain skim milk’ and ‘sugar-sweetened chocolate skim milk’, the choice is obvious. Thus, the increase in childhood obesity since 2012.
And the rise of the butterfat crisis. When the U.S. government determined in 2012 that freedom was not so important… and that the butterfat must be removed from the milk sold to school children, the dairy industry suddenly had millions of pounds of unwanted butterfat to deal with. An article last week in Dairy Herd Management put the annual surplus of American butterfat at “the equivalent of 45 million to 66 million lbs. of finished butter.”
Butterfat that no one wanted. Americans have been led to believe, beginning back in the 1960s, that dietary fat causes heart disease and other illnesses. Especially dangerous were whole milk, and butter… two essential foods, produced by the hardest working people in Vermont and elsewhere, that had helped make America the greatest economy on the planet.
It’s been basically downhill for American industrial greatness ever since. To say nothing of the loss of freedom.
For readers who want to learn more about how the sugar industry quietly paid Harvard scientists to publish supposedly-reputable scientific studies during the 1960s, shifting the blame for heart disease from “excess sugar” to “excess fat”, you can read this NPR.com article from 2016.
Anyway, starting in 2012, we had millions of cows producing millions of gallons of whole milk, from which the industry was now required to remove 66 million pounds of butterfat annually. What do you do with 66 million pounds of butterfat that no one wants, because they have been convinced by Harvard scientists to eat “fat-free” foods? Perfectly good butterfat that could have been made into delicious butter.
I imagine a lot of it ended up in the dump. What else would you do with it? Even ice cream has become “fat-free”. And tasteless. Unless you added a lot of extra sugar.
From American Dairy Coalition CEO Laurie Fischer:
“We are thrilled to see the Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act gain passage in the Senate. Our grassroots dairy farmers produce a wholesome and delicious product that our nation’s schoolchildren should be able to choose…”
The freedom to choose.
I like the way Ms. Fischer inserted the word “grassroots” into her message. Because some of us want cows to have the freedom to eat grass. Some of us think cows should not be fed the kind of feed many modern dairy farmers are feeding them.
And they shouldn’t have to live caged up in dairy factories.
There’s “freedom”, and then there’s freedom.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all. You can read more stories on his Substack account.