I've been thinking a lot about public school lunches lately—not just because it's a subject that's perpetually in the news these days. For the past few months, I've been volunteering at Public School 157 in Bed-Stuy, for a grassroots non-profit called Wellness in the Schools. I'm part of the salad bar squad: I slice and chop veggies, prepare bean and pasta salads, and serve the kids both. Though New York City lunchrooms still have a long way to go—we can't get local produce or any olive oil, for instance (using subpar soy oil for salad dressings)—at least these first, second, and third graders of all ethnicities are enthusiastic about eating carrots, cucumbers, and celery. It's only taken a few months, but now it's the rare student who passes the salad bar by without at least trying something.
So it was with great interest that I listened to this NPR segment on how the milk industry is lashing out at parents at this Boulder, Colorado school for taking chocolate milk off the menu.
"Chocolate milk is soda in drag," one mom (nickname: "the renegade lunch lady") says to NPR reporter Jeff Brady, noting that it has 3.1 grams of sugar per ounce. (Soda has 3.3.)
Apparently, this school isn't the only one to ban chocolate milk.
The dairy industry, worried about losing more milk drinkers nationwide,
has rather desperately launched a "Raise your hand for chocolate milk"
campaign on Facebook including this propaganda-filled video. (Hmmm... I
wonder how much these dieticians and actors were paid to say that
chocolate milk is just as healthy as regular milk?)
Has it really gotten so bad that parents can't persuade their kids to drink plain whole milk? Oh—that's right, whole milk is not an option anymore, at least in New York City public schools where city education officials removed it from cafeterias in 2006. At PS 157, the only choices kids have are low-fat or skim milk and low-fat chocolate milk. If I were them, I'd probably choose chocolate milk, too. Who wants to drink blue-ish skim milk or watery-tasting 1% milk?
The truth is, kids are not getting fat from drinking whole milk. (When was the last time you saw a 3rd grader guzzling whole milk? I think that'd actually be cause for celebration.) I'm with Nina Planck on this subject—you need the saturated fat that's in whole milk to absorb the calcium and fat-soluble vitamins in milk. Whereas sugar (and an early addiction to it) leads to everything from ADD to cavities to diabetes.
As we say at the P.S. 157 cafeteria, one step at a time. We've got the kids eating fresh veggies on a daily basis—maybe next semester we'll figure out how to get some seasonal produce from New York state farms. And maybe, like that Boulder school, we can tackle the chocolate milk issue soon.
Second-grader Ella Lyons says it best, "No one's going to get regular milk if we have chocolate milk, because, I think, they're going to like it better because it tastes better...But it's not good for you, so I think we shouldn't have chocolate milk."
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