Flavored milk: Why bother?

I was more than impressed this past Tuesday to see that the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) school board voted to eliminate flavored milk from its cafeteria. Now, the more than 1,074,691 students in the district won’t be guzzling extra sugar, food dyes, and high fructose corn syrup with their milk. While the board made the right decision, I knew it never would have happened if it wasn’t for Jamie Oliver, the creator and host of Food Revolution.

I watched the first season of the show and loved the way Jamie was able to turn an unhealthy lunch program into one that was not only healthier, but better for the environment. (Fresh food is always better than pre-packaged stuff that has been processed and trucked half-way across the country.) That’s why I was really sad when I saw the troubles he had with the LAUSD, who wanted nothing to do with Jamie or his revolutionary food tactics. And yet, even with their reticence to let him in to do his magic, he was still able to create real, meaningful change within the district. (Although I would have been happier if they said they were switching over to organic plain milk! I won’t give my kids non-organic dairy, but I digress as usual…)

This week I was lucky enough to grab a few moments of Jamie’s time to ask a few questions about flavored milk. Here’s what he said.

KB: Why do you think people are so reluctant to give up flavored milk?

Jamie: Two reasons: The Dairy Board has done a really good job scaring parents and we’ve gotten our kids addicted to sugary milk. They prefer it. But that’s not the point really. They prefer chocolate cake too, but we don’t let them eat chocolate cake every day sometimes twice a day for 180 days a year because they prefer it.

KB: What are the dangers of flavored milk?

Jamie: The added sugar. Pure and simple. There is no need to add so much extra sugar into kids’ daily diets.

KB: What do you say to the people who insist flavored milk helps get children to drink their milk?

Jamie: I say we should be responsible adults, educators and parents and not give children the choice. We can market to them as well. When I was in Huntington, the entire kindergarten class chose white milk and drank it, and when I asked them why, they told me because their teacher told them to. IT IS that simple. Show leadership. Educate. Be responsible for the health of the future generations.

KB: How can parents create this type of change in their own schools?

Jamie: Go to the Food Revolution website and download the tool kit and get involved with your local community. We’ve got Facebook groups springing up all over the country connecting like-minded parents who want to make change. Get angry and start stirring things up.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Jamie! I’d also add that people might want to follow Jamie on Twitter. (I do.) This post is how I am participating this week in Real Food Wednesdays and Fight Back Fridays — two awesome campaigns to get people eating real food again.

“My question is what poor excuse for a parent can’t rustle up a bowl of cereal and a banana? I just don’t get why millions of school children qualify for school breakfasts unless we have a major wide spread problem with child neglect. If that many parents are incapable of pulling together a bowl of cereal and a banana, then we have problems that are way bigger than [that]– that problem can’t be solved with a school breakfast because we have parents who are just criminally … criminally negligent with respect to raising children. And yet that’s the kind of program that has bi-partisan support.”

Wow, and WOW. The sad part is that we have pages and pages of research that shows well-fed children learn better, and when kids learn better they have a better chance of pulling themselves out of poverty, stopping the cycle, and becoming tax-paying Americans.

My family would have qualified for free breakfast and lunch when I was little. My mom never signed us up because she was too proud. I wish she had. We often left for school with empty stomachs. She left before 8 a.m. to go to work. We got ourselves ready in the morning including fixing our own breakfasts. I can tell you with 100 percent certainty that my mother was NOT criminally negligent. She was a working mom who did everything in her power for us, but she wasn’t making a lot of money, and sometimes that meant we struggled. Since when is being poor a criminal offense?

I have written about this before, but I can remember weeks where on Tuesday we would run out of milk knowing we had to wait until Friday to get some. (Supermarkets didn’t take credit cards in the late 70s and early 80s.) So we went without milk. How nice it would have been to go to school and have a little carton of milk and a packet of cereal waiting for me. And today I know for a fact that there are plenty of kids living what I went through.

As Raw Story points out, in September the U.S. Census Bureau released the latest poverty numbers. Last year, 14.3 percent of the population was living below the poverty line, a 15-year high. That means in 2009 43.6 million people were living in poverty, up from 39.8 million in 2008. “The third consecutive annual increase in the number of people in poverty,” according to the Census Bureau’s report.

Some of those folks were laid off. Some of them are uneducated. Some are sick. Some desperately want to work, but can’t find a job. Some have seen their unemployment benefits run out. Some have been foreclosed upon. I know there are plenty of people who think that people should take care of themselves, and if they can’t, screw ‘em. I am not one of them. I think, especially in this season of giving, that we should always be looking to take care of those less fortunate than others. Because you never know what life is going to throw you. And so I say to Ms. O’Beirne: The only criminal here is YOU. Only a criminal could display such depraved indifference for human life, especially the tiniest and most helpless of our society: our children. You should be ashamed of yourself. I know I am ashamed for you.

What’s your take on this issue? I’d like to know. BTW: You can listen to the discussion here. Listen to around the 54 minute mark.

• Plastic wrap: It’s gotten safer over the past decade. Prior to 2006, plastic wrap contained phthalates. They don’t anymore, according to the American Chemical Council. And it doesn’t contain BPA — at least well-known plastic wrap doesn’t. But it is, as the Glad folks say, made from polyethylene, which is not recyclable.

• Wax paper: According to the UK Food Standards Agency, which is like our FDA, 42 out of 64 samples of wax paper tested contained mineral hydrocarbons that included white mineral oils, paraffin waxes, microcrystalline waxes and petroleum. The study found that even though those waxes did tend to leach into foods, they were within acceptable limits. Harumph. I don’t like that idea — acceptable limits.
• Aluminum foil: Take your pick. Aluminum has been linked to a host of diseases including Alzheimer’s. I didn’t realize how dangerous it can be — especially for children — until I started researching this blog post. According to our own U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, high levels of aluminum may be linked to brain and bone diseases. Newborn animals exposed to the metal “appeared weaker and less active…[and] some movements appeared less coordinated when their mothers were exposed to large amounts of aluminum during pregnancy and while nursing.” (Yes, according to the same source, aluminum can find its way into breast milk.)

So what did I do? I went with the unbleached wax paper bags that I bought at Whole Foods last week. It wasn’t a perfect choice, but definitely the lesser of all evils.