Fat's back

Which basically means we can keep on eating the way we always have but with less guilt. And everybody else can lighten up. For example, the Washington Post reveals…

The whole truth about “whole milk” - The Washington Post

…whole milk, aka milk, is about 3.5% fat, not 100% (kids, even whipping cream is not 100% fat). So milk labeled 2% is about 60% fat milk, if you see what I mean. If you were a geezer you would know this already.

Once upon a time in the Days of Yore milk came in glass bottles. It was pasteurized (pasteurization was one of the great public health advances of the Twentieth Century which is, no doubt, why it is eschewed by some of the Most Modern of today) but not homogenized. Meaning, the cream rose to the top (hence the expression “cream rises”). And a person could see how much of the milk was cream, which is, if not 100% fat, the good, fatty part. And it was not much.

In order to get “whole milk,” aka milk, from the bottle one had to shake it first in order to re-mix the cream. It turned out, however, that there were certain older people in the family (it is, occasionally, to one’s advantage to be one of the older people) who wanted the cream for their coffee. So the cream got poured off and saved in a pitcher (there were some glass bottle designs that had bulb-shaped tops to make such pilfering of the good, fatty stuff even easier) and the younger people in the family got to drink what was left, aka fat free. Or just about. 

Unless, of course, the younger people, who eventually got wise to this skimming scam, got to the bottles first. In which case they were properly shaken, as they were clearly meant to be.