Originally Posted by slowandsteady
Maybe you need to visit a dairy farm. But, skim milk is not processed to get it to be skim. It just comes out that way. Ever heard the expression, "cream rises to the top.?" That is because cow's milk is not naturally homogenized, unlike goat's milk. It normally separates into cream and skim. They homogenize it to get it to be "whole" milk. Also, the fat content varies widely amongs various cows. Holsteins are known for their production of milk(lbs per day), but not fat content. Jerseys, brown swiss and guernseys however can have up to 5% fat in their milk. The whole milk you see in the store is simply homogenized skim milk with a certain portion of cream to get it to 3.25% minimum fat.
Well actualy I was buying fresh, straight out of the cow no pasturization Jersey milk for a while so I have some experience with it. While it would sepperate on its own with time in today's fast paced world time is money so it goes through a sepperator at the least. Now while it can be produced by simply running it through a sepperator a lot of low fat milk products are produced by recconstitution or recombination. I haven't found a deffinitive reference for this at the moment so I was letting it slide.
Something I read was that you don't realy have skim milk anymore in America and that most of it's labeled low fat milk so maybe that's the technical loophole. In Australia there are a lot of low fat milks labeled with proprietry names promising all sorts of benifits and I know that they are made from powdered skim milk so maybe its the same in the USA.
Regards, Anthony