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"      Like every other interest group in the land, food-crusaders went into last night&amp;#039;s State of the Union address with a wish list. President Obama might have talked about what he&amp;#039;s doing to modernize farm subsidies, fund healthy school lunches, or regulate the use of antibiotics in livestock. In the end, our nation&amp;#039;s food-industrial system got just one mention from the president, and it was a joke about spilled milk. Around minute 38 (you can watch above \u2014 note the helpful graphic): &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve ordered every federal agency to eliminate rules that don&amp;#039;t make sense... We got rid of one rule from 40 years ago that could have forced some dairy farmers to spend $10,000 a year proving that they could contain a spill \u2014 because milk was somehow classified as an oil. With a rule like that, I guess it was worth crying over spilled milk.&amp;quot; It was a bad joke. Even Obama knew it was a bad joke \u2014 you can tell by that sheepish grin. It definitely wasn&amp;#039;t as good as the salmon gag from a year ago. But when did we start talking about &amp;quot;crying over spilled milk,&amp;quot; anyway? A long time ago, actually. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the saying originated in a 17th-century British proverb about &amp;quot;weeping over shed milk.&amp;quot; By 1738, the language had been modernized, with satirist Jonathan Swift writing, &amp;quot;&amp;#039;Tis folly to cry for spilt milk,&amp;quot; in his treatise Polite Conversation. A less plausible but more fun origin story has it that the phrase came about as a federal propaganda slogan during the Great Depression to encourage farmers to destroy surplus milk in order to prop up its prices. Also, February 11 is Don&amp;#039;t Cry Over Spilled Milk Day. You can&amp;#039;t make this stuff up, folks. Oh, and here&amp;#039;s the real story behind that regulation Obama referenced, which sounds too ridiculous to possibly be true: The EPA has had a spill-prevention-and-control policy on the books since 1973, which, while intended for petroleum, also technically included milk and other liquid animal and vegetable fats. This absurd oversight was discovered a couple years ago, and Republicans proceeded to promptly make hay with it. The EPA gave the dairy industry every assurance that it wouldn&amp;#039;t be enforced, but the exemption was only made official last year. So the supposed $10,000 savings to farmers is, as it turns out, entirely hypothetical. THE POLITICS BLOG: Charles P. Pierce on the State of the Union &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/food-drink/a12512/obama-spilled-milk-6645370/>