Crying over spilt (chocolate) milk

Moral preening in the Golden State

IT seems the Golden State never gets tired of Nanny State legislation and patronizing mandates. Fortunately, most of what happens in California stays in California, to appropriate the famous Las Vegas slogan. But that doesn’t make it any less ridiculous.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported this week that the city’s school district earlier this month enacted a ban on chocolate milk in its cafeterias. The dairy drink will be eliminated from elementary and middle schools this fall, and will vanish from high school lunchrooms in the spring.

The Chronicle’s Jill Tucker wrote that officials tested the idea in five schools over the past school year and found that in two, there was no decrease in the number of milk cartons kids put on their trays, and there was only a slight dip in the other three.

Or, to translate, when there was literally no other option for milk, there was little to no decrease in the number of milk cartons put on students’ trays.

Left unsaid: How much of that milk went unconsumed, in the name of more Nanny State preening? Just because a carton reaches a tray doesn’t mean kids drink it. But rather than risk a modest extra amount of sugar, the San Francisco district decided chocolate milk was worse than no milk at all.

This mandate was a solution in search of a problem, as noted by the California Dairy Council on its website:

“Flavored milk has all of the major nutrients found in unflavored milk — calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, potassium, protein, riboflavin, niacin and vitamins A, B12 and D — and contributes only 3 percent of added sugars in the diets of children 2-18 years,” the trade group pointed out. “In addition, children who drink milk — either flavored or white — have better nutrient intakes and similar body weights as non-milk drinkers.”

Why throw out all those benefits for growing kids who need such nutrition, for an almost immeasurable gain, if any at all? And “throw out” is the operative term here, proven by a similar mandate in 2011 in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Ms. Tucker reported that in 2016, the L.A. district conducted a pilot study at 21 schools to see if offering chocolate milk again would increase milk consumption and reduce waste. The results were hardly shocking: district officials found an increase of 12.5 million cartons consumed — not put on trays, but actually consumed — rather than wasted each year, marking a 23 percent increase in milk consumption. District officials put chocolate milk back in all the district’s schools this spring.

There are surely more critical matters to student success in San Francisco than one nominally sweet offering on the school lunch menu. District leaders should deal with those matters and stop crying over chocolate milk.

The views expressed above are those of the Las Vegas Review-journal. All other opinions expressed on the Opinion and Commentary pages are those of the individual artist or author indicated.