Extra Solids Give State the Cream of Low-Fat Milk : Dairies: California requires additives to make it more nutritious. Now the U.S. Senate is weighing it as a nationwide standard.

Eugene Sigler of Chicago Heights, Ill., was having breakfast at his daughter’s home in Newbury Park, Calif., when he noticed something different about the milk.

“Naomi, what is this?” he asked.

“Low-fat milk,” she replied, a surprise to Sigler.

“It had a fuller taste than the 2% we get,” said Sigler.

The secret of California’s milk lies in the milk solids that state law requires to be added to all 1% and 2% milk. The solids add nutrition, not fat, and they make low-fat milk look and taste a lot like whole milk.

It’s a standard that Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, wants adopted nationwide. It’s one component of his proposal to stabilize the wildly fluctuating economic conditions of America’s dairy farmers. The Department of Agriculture is going over more than 100 proposals from various sectors of the dairy industry and will make a recommendation to Congress by June 15.

The milk-fat proposal is important, Leahy says, because it would make low-fat milk taste better and people would buy more.

Milk straight from the cow has about 8.5% solids. They’re what makes milk white--protein, lactose, calcium, vitamins and minerals.

At the dairy, low-fat and skim milk are made by spinning off the fat, which is used to make butter. The water is partially evaporated from the skim milk to get condensed nonfat milk, or completely evaporated to get nonfat dry milk powder.

Either one can be mixed back into low-fat milk to make it a fuller bodied, more nutritious product with about 10% milk solids, but no more fat.

Nearly 75% of the milk sold in America’s stores is low fat--1% or 2% milk, according to statistics from the Food Marketing Institute.

But per capita consumption of milk has dropped in the last 30 years, with soda pop and coffee outstripping it as a beverage.

Californians drink more milk than the rest of the country on the average and dairymen there say that it’s because of the added solids in their low-fat milks.

In Washington, however, lobbyists for processors in other parts of the country argue that it will cost too much for dairies to add the equipment that puts milk solids back into low-fat products.

They also say that the government shouldn’t mandate the additives, and that consumers should have options.

“Some people like the milk just the way it is,” said Tom Balmer of the Milk Industry Foundation, a processors’ trade association here.

The California-style 2% milk is available in local grocery store dairy cases in some regions of the country, though it usually costs a cent or two more than regular 2% milk.

Although it’s labeled “protein fortified,” most consumers don’t understand the difference.

“It’s just a matter of education,” said Adri Boudewyn of the California Milk Advisory Board. “If people knew what extra solids could do they would like it. People might be thinking, ‘Ooooh, additives.’ ”

Protein-fortified milk also has a few more calories, but Robert Boynton, executive director of the Dairy Institute of California, said that has never been an issue in his state. The big draw is nutrition, he said.

California low-fat milk has 10 grams of protein and 352 milligrams of calcium compared to 8 grams of protein and 297 milligrams of calcium in most low-fat milk elsewhere.

Farmers in California like the process because it uses more milk, meaning there’s less chance of the surpluses that drive prices down.

Boynton, whose organization represents the processors, said the dairies have never complained because the method was mandated in the early 1960s at the same time low-fat milk was introduced. Until then, skim milk was the only alternative to whole milk. It continues to be produced without added milk solids, he said.

Sigler said he’d gladly pay a little more to get milk in Chicago Heights that tastes like the kind his daughter buys in California.

But he said it also reminds him of a joke. The one about two cows reading a milk truck advertisement that heralds all the vitamins, minerals and calcium added by the dairy. One cow says to the other:

“Kind of makes you feel inadequate, doesn’t it?”