Why Isn't Cream Cream-Colored?

While cream from the dairy aisle is pure white, most people would agree that cream the color is a pale shade of yellow. So why the discrepancy? It turns out that language preserves a form of dairy that has all but disappeared from our diets.

Though it's over a decade old, Emily Green's essay Is Milk Still Milk? is a fascinating history of how milk was transformed from a high-fat, high-protein and highly variable food into a homogenized industrial product. In regards to cream-the-color vs. cream-the-liquid, Green describes the results of a milk taste test performed with UC Davis students. While the students ranked raw milk from Jersey cows as better-tasting than supermarket milk from Holsteins, they also gave it the lowest scores for appearance. "It wasn't white," Green notes. "They had never seen cream-colored milk."

Just as we're surprised to learn the origin of the color cream, our children may be surprised to find out that the 'ca-click' of their smartphone's camera is actually the sound of an analog shutter.

Read more over at the LA Times.