Fat Maxxing

Interesting Atlantic essay on whole milk and the state of the dairy business. As a kid, I wasn’t aware of different grades of milk. There was a milkman who came around with his cow. The cow was milked near our balcony under my mother’s eagle eye. She was quick to object if there was too much froth, or to suspect that the pail might have been pre-filled with water. The milkman would refute these allegations and claim complete innocence. My mother made ghee at home, so I was familiar with the entire process and was always enlisted to help. That was the only kind of milk I knew. The idea that milk came with different fat levels, each with its own supposed merits, never really made sense to me. But once I moved here and those options existed, I felt like I had to make a choice without any basis.

In 2000, the average dairy cow produced about 670 pounds of fat in her milk each year; today, that number is closer to 1,025 pounds. According to Chad Dechow, a dairy-cattle geneticist at Penn State, no single trait in dairy cows has improved as rapidly through genomic selection as fat. By any measure, it’s a triumph of dairy science.

Lately, though, all is not well in the world of butterfat. Dairy science has arguably made our cows too good, too fast, at fatmaxxing.

I hadn’t realized that cows could be tuned to produce variable amounts of fat based on what’s trending. In reality, it may work the other way around: whatever the cows end up producing must be turned into a trend, because there’s a long lead time and tastes change faster than biology. Milk may fall out of fashion just as the cows begin producing the thickest, richest, most luscious version of it. At that point, it would take an entire army of influencers to move the product. The milkman with his cow, and the daily bickering between him and my mother, feel almost prehistoric now — relics from a simpler world compared to the elaborate, optimized, and absurd system we live with today.