Has Jamie Oliver Slain the Flavored Milk Beast?

on April 29, 2011 at 2:11 PM

choco milk Jamie Oliver may be having a heckuva time getting into a Los Angeles school on this season's Food Revolution, but his relentless campaigning seems to be leading to another victory: getting sweetened, flavored milk out of schools.

This is one of the problems Jamie has focused on early in the second season -- the way schools load students with a heaping dose of sugar every day through those cartons of flavored milk. He built a campaign demanding that LAUSD -- and other schools around the country -- dump the sugary milk from school cafeterias.

Lo and behold, Jamie finally got to meet Superintendent John Deasy, on Jimmy Kimmel Live, no less. And Deasy announced that he would recommend to the board that the second-largest school district in the country stop serving flavored milk starting in July.

Now defenders of flavored milk say kids won't drink milk unless it's flavored. And maybe they won't if that's all they've ever known. (Many nutritionists will tell you there are other ways to get calcium and vitamins. And for the record, my own kid loves unflavored milk with the kind of passion that makes me suspect he's a covert lobbyist for the dairy industry.) But does it really make sense to feed kids something harmful in your attempt to feed them something healthful? Why not lace the carrots with Four Loko while you're at it? What's next? "My kids won't eat spinach unless I serve it in a giant glass of Coke" -- ???

In the middle of a diabetes outbreak and health care crisis, I just don't think we should spend our tax dollars to mainline sugar into children. Call me crazy, but if our health care system is going broke and kids are getting sick, maybe, just maybe, we should stop going out of our way to pump kids full of sugar every day at school. Goodness knows they're getting plenty of the stuff elsewhere.

It didn't look like many people cared when Jamie filled a school bus full of sugar to demonstrate how much sugar school kids consume. Only a handful of parents showed up for that televised stunt. But Jamie kept at it, organizing parents, cajoling them into handing out healthy lunches while wearing veggie costumes, and sending out an online petition that seemed to pop up on my Facebook page or Twitter stream pretty much every day for weeks.

Maybe the LAUSD was already considering getting rid of flavored milk. Maybe this was just an "easy" win to bolster the Food Revolution. Regardless, I'm impressed. While Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution is, ultimately, a form of entertainment that manufactures a lot of drama for the ratings, you have to admit -- it's actually making some significant change happen.

Image via Jamie's Pics/Flickr

About the author Adriana Velez

is a staff writer who dabbles in food, parenting, news, entertainment, molecular biology, and anything else that that pops into her head. She lives with her husband and elementary school-aged son in Brooklyn, land of urban farms and artisan everything.

Filed Under: celebrity, elementary school, high school, in the news, kid health, kids nutrition

Comments (30)

GlowWorm889

on Apr 29, 2011 at 2:39 PM

As a child, I could not stand the taste of unflavored milk. In fact, as an adult, I still hate it. With a passion; it tastes disgusting to me. The only way I would drink it was with flavoring in it, usually chocolate. My family decided to cut their losses after years of battles--in the end, they didn't care what I put in it so long as I would drink it. Considering I also hated cheese, yogurt, and most green vegetables, it was down to flavored milk or ice cream for calcium. Lesser of two evils was the flavored milk.

For the record, pretty much all flavored milk served in schools is low-fat milk, as opposed to the whole milk they serve unflavored. I'd rather my kid drink the low-fat flavored stuff than unflavored milk with more milkfat. There is more sugar in the juice they serve and the sports drinks they sell at the schools than in flavored milk. I think Jamie Oliver's position is a little ridiculous.

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mommyme2440

on Apr 29, 2011 at 2:52 PM

I also will not drink plain milk unless I have a peanut butter sandwich.My 2 daughters are split on this, one complains if she is given chocolate milk at school, the other cries if given plain milk. I'm glad our school has flavored milk as an option. Everything thing else is very healthy, plenty of fruits and veggies for kids to pick from and all whole grains, even on pizza day.

PonyChaser

on Apr 29, 2011 at 4:38 PM

On one hand, I agree with the "flavor it if that's the way to get them to drink it," but on the other hand... we gripe and gripe and gripe about the Govt telling us that WE have to change our eating habits while they're serving crap to our kids in the schools. And then when they make the choice to cut out some of the sugar those kids get, we gripe that they're hurting the kids because 'it's the only way they'll drink the milk'. Well, you can't have it both ways.

Honestly, one 8 oz little container of milk at school isn't a big deal either way. IF the rest of the meal is balanced, I have no problem with the chocolate milk. But if they choose to eliminate the chocolate and go with white, either the kids will drink it, or they'll drink water. And then they can drink all the chocolate milk they want when they get home.

So good on Jamie Oliver for this one. I haven't seen his show, but I sure support what he's doing.