2216: Percent Milkfat
| Percent Milkfat |
 Title text: "So what's dark energy?" "Cosmologists and the FDA are both trying very hard to find out." |
Explanation
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This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by a DARK MATTER COW. Please mention here why this explanation isn't complete. Do NOT delete this tag too soon. If you can address this issue, please edit the page! Thanks. |
Whole milk is a dairy product which contains all of its naturally occurring milkfat. Whole milk generally contains about 3.5% milkfat by weight, according to the comic and some sources; other sources list similar but not identical numbers such as 3.25%.
Dairies commonly sell whole milk as well as products with less fat produced by removing milkfat. In the United States, there are three common products with less fat: 2% or "reduced fat" milk, 1% or "lowfat" milk, and "fat-free" or "skim" milk with 0 to 0.5% milkfat.
Since whole milk is labeled as "whole" (or "Vitamin D") milk and not as "3.5% milk," one might naively assume that whole milk is 100% milkfat, though this is not the case; 100% would be a product which is entirely milkfat (also known as butterfat), such as clarified butter or ghee. In milk, the remainder is mainly water along with proteins, lactose (a sugar), and other substances.
The comic analogizes this difference to the fact that physicists believe "ordinary" matter only constitutes 5% of the actual mass-energy of the universe. Scientists predict the existence of another kind of matter known as "dark matter," invisible to our current instruments but exerting gravitational force on ordinary matter, which would constitute 85% of total matter and 27% of the universe's mass-energy, with the remainder an even less detectable and more mysterious "dark energy" accounting for the increasing speed of expansion of the universe.
Ponytail uses these quantities to "explain" the "missing" percentage in whole milk between the actual 3.5% and a potential 100% "whole."
Cosmologists are working to better understand dark energy or another reason for the universe's accelerating expansion. The title text supposes that both cosmologists and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which regulates milk and other food items in the United States, are trying to understand the dark energy of the whole milk. In real life, the work of cosmologists and FDA scientists does not overlap at all.
Transcript
[Ponytail and Cueball are talking.]
- Ponytail: "2% milk" is 2% milkfat. But "whole milk" isn't 100% milkfat–it's 3.5%.
- Cueball: Weird. What's the rest of it?
- Ponytail: About 27% is dark matter. The remainder is dark energy.
