[Tonchi]

I googled it too and turned up a lot about yogurt coloring and not much else useful. In fact, Google seems to become less useful now that everybody knows about it. A few years ago I was able to find the most amazing articles, nowdays it is mostly stuff from technical sites which has nothing to do with what I am wanted. Expanding the capabilities of their search engines has not necessarily made Google better, Yahoo seems to find more of the things I am looking up lately.

I wish the Arizona Republic could let me search their archives from November 1984, because I believe that was when I read about this happening. Well, maybe sometime soon I'll drive out to one of those huge producers we have around here and try to find somebody who will talk about what they did with the milk 20 years ago. Could be that they put a stop to it, but I did NOT dream up reading about it when I lived in Phoenix.

As far as why investigate if it is permitted to add color, they were adding TOO MUCH as I recall. I also remember reading a book called "Beautiful Joe" when I was a kid which described unscrupulous milkmen during Victorian times in the USA adding white powders to the milk because the cows were sickly and their milk was thin. In places where milk comes from small producers and not the huge dairy conglomerates which are taking over entire counties in California, it might be harder to regulate and milk might be sold which did not precisely meet FDA requirements. We milk drinkers in 1950's North Carolina used to dread the early springtime because the cows would be eating sprouted wild onions in the fields and the milk produced had a decidedly onion flavor. With milk being mass-procssed by fewer companies, we don't have that problem anymore and all the milk is uniformly tasteless.