Imperial Valley Press

NO MORE "FILLED MILK"

Congress has specifically declared "filled milk" to be "an adulterated article of food injurious to the public health and a fraud upon the public," and has forbidden its sale. Thus ends a long fight between the manufacturers of this product, on one side, and the dairymen, pure food champions and various women's organizations on the other. The big majority recorded for the new law settles the matter decisively.

It does not seem ever to have been charged that the "filled milk," which is skim milk with the butter fat replaced by cocoanut oil, is actively harmful. It is not poisonous. Its evils are of the negative sort. The cocoanut oil is pronounced far less digestible than butter fat, and thus not so nutritious for adults and quite unsuited to the needs of small children. For infants there is no proper substitute for fresh milk except the scientific compounds made by specialists in baby diet. There is the additional objection that consumers have often bought the filled milk without knowing what it was, and so have cheated, however unintentionally.

In some ways an absolute prohibition of the synthetic milk seems unfortunate. It can be made at half the cost of ordinary evaporated milk, and it affords a use for skim milk that otherwise often goes to waste. It would make cheaper milk for husky adults able to digest it. But there is no possibility of that at present. And perhaps it is just as well. There cannot be too much emphasis placed on pure milk of the highest possible quality.