Senator Butterfat enlists schoolkids to fatten Big Milk’s bottom line | Opinion
Hi kids! I’m Roger Marshall, and I’m here to put more saturated fat in your lunch.
I’m not making that up. It actually happened recently at a Garden City elementary school.
Sen. Marshall plunked himself down at a cafeteria table, with a schoolburger and bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, for a “cute kids” photo op and a victory lap on his bill to overturn requirements that schools serve low-fat milk instead of the high-fat variety.
The caption with the photo on Facebook reads: “Had lunch with some pint-sized milk experts today. Good news: whole milk is headed back to their trays!”
Last week, the Senate gave final approval to a Marshall plan to let schools switch to whole milk — 3.25% butterfat by weight, instead of the milk schools currently serve, which clocks in between 0.5% and 1%.
It also exempts whole-fat milk from dietary guidelines regulating the amount of saturated fat that schools can feed kids in their lunches.
Another MAHA Ha Ha
Senator Butterfat is one of the chief congressional enablers of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s MAHA agenda — which stands for Make Arteries Hard Again.
Along the way from idea to looming law, the honorable senator told a whopper on the floor of the Senate: “This (bill) corrects a decade-old policy made here in Congress that consequently created over 10 years of kids without having access to whole milk at school, and indeed created a whole generation of young Americans with weak bones.”
Ahem, Senator. Every study I can find shows that butterfat content has no effect whatsoever on the bone-strengthening properties of milk. Skimming off some of the fat doesn’t reduce the nutrients that contribute to healthy bones, primarily calcium, which is naturally present, and Vitamin D, which is added post-udder.
Bone density is indeed dropping among America’s children, but it’s not caused by a lack of fatty milk — it’s that screen time has replaced play time. A study by researchers at Oregon State, Iowa and Loyola Marymount universities found that physical activity in childhood is so critical to building bone that it even helps prevent osteoporosis in the golden years.
When I was in school, we had whole milk to wash down our Prison Pasta and Gila Monster Stew.
But we got at least an hour a day of recess to go out and run it off. Now, kids are lucky to get 15 minutes (often at the very end of the school day) and some schools have cut it to 10.
So if Senator Butterfat is serious about strengthening children’s bones, he’d have done better to start a food fight so they’d get some exercise, instead of putting more fat in their milk.
You can find an endless number of contradictory studies about the fat content of whole milk. Some say it’s better and some say it’s not. It kind of seems to depend on who funded the research, the dairy industry or health advocacy groups.
Y’all can argue about that in the comments section, but I’m not going down that rabbit hole.
Fattening profits for Big Milk
What I can say for certain is that increasing the fat content of school milk represents a windfall for dairy producers, who have more butterfat on their hands than they know what to do with, ever since people inconveniently started eating healthier.
An article by economist Daniel Munch for the American Farm Bureau tells the story:
“In 2024, schools served nearly 4.9 billion lunches, with 85% of students choosing milk — mostly skim or 1%. Whole milk contains about three times more fat than 1%, so reintroducing it would pull more butterfat into fluid use instead of butter, cheese, or powder. If 25%, 50%, or 75% of schools adopt whole milk, annual butterfat demand could rise by 13–18 million, 25–36 million and 38–55 million pounds, respectively. A near-universal shift could divert 45–66 million pounds of butter — about 2–3% of U.S. production — into bottled milk …”
“The Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act wouldn’t dramatically change overall milk use, but it targets one of the few areas where demand can grow. Even modest gains in school milk sales strengthen fluid milk markets, boost butterfat utilization and improve returns to farmers.”
So drink up, kids. America’s dairy producers are counting on you to fatten their wallets.
I know 66 million pounds of butter sounds like a lot. But there are 30 million of you, so it only works out to the equivalent of eating about eight extra sticks of butter per year.
You can do it!
And Senator Butterfat says it will do your body good.
