"It came right out of the cow!"

Paul and Mary Lou Wesselhoeft own a creamery in Florida. One of the products they sell is skim milk. The Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Affairs is demanding that they call it imitation milk. Mary Katharine Ham tells the story at Hot Air:

Sometimes government’s dishonesty, incompetence, wastefulness, and misguided nannyism combine to make a perfectly ridiculous story. Today’s comes to us from Florida, where the Ocheesee Creamery is being forced to dump gallons upon gallons of good, natural skim milk because the state is requiring the business to label its good, natural skim milk “imitation” because they haven’t added anything to it.

As the AP reports, the judge in the case seems confused by the government’s position, not the act of calling skim milk skim milk:

Webster’s dictionary defines skim milk as simply “milk from which cream has been removed,” with no mention of added vitamins. But Department lawyer Ashley Davis told a judge consumers expect whole milk and skim milk to have the same nutritional value and that the Wesselhoefts’ skim milk is nutritionally inferior because vitamins are removed when the milk fat is removed.

“Ocheessee’s product is imitating — literally imitating — skim milk,” Davis said.

Judge Robert Hinkle said he’s not so sure consumers expect skim milk to have the same nutritional value as whole milk.

“You know something’s been removed in order to make it skim milk,” he said.

Hinkle also seemed to have problems with the word imitation.

“It’s hard to call this imitation milk. It came right out of the cow,” Hinkle said. “Anyone who reads imitation skim milk would think it didn’t come out of a cow.”

Read more here.