Drink your milk! (or not, more discussion)

@roger,

Right. Meantime, I've not been back to Smith's lately (they are my clinic connected pharmacy), so I only saw the almond milk that one time.

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@ossobuco,

Oh and I was stick thin - through out school including junior high and high school where I drank nothing but chocolate milk....

go figure.

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@Linkat,

You nailed it. Very hard for me not to gag.

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I'll add that I think I am all for gardens taking up playground or parking lot space in city elementary schools. I've not read pros and cons on that, but a work associate has gotten involved in their design in Los Angeles (which I'll admit doesn't have late lasting layers of snow to deal with).

Last time I was out there she took me to one of them and I was very impressed. Interesting, in that as in many things with community interaction, it's a good plan to make it not an idea that you impose but something that belongs to the participants..
she happens to be the best cook I know, so she has much to offer with her expansive knowledge.

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@ossobuco,

I'm not for gardens taking up playground space, as in I think playgrounds/recess are incredibly important.

But I'm very much in favor of gardens at schools as well. That's something we're working on locally.

For this specific question (milk), my thinking is similar to Failures Art's. School lunches are generally incredibly sucky. (Mo's lunches sound much better than most, certainly way better than ours.) I'm for various reforms to try to improve the quality of school lunches. This one seems to be going about it wrong.

Littlek, Izze annoys me too, doesn't make sense. (Sozlet just brings water from home.)

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@sozobe,

Thinking of my kids - they don't provide milk at her school - they usually bring (which is recommeded by the school so kids aren't leaving the schoolrooms to get water) a water bottle and maybe a juice drink box or something like that for their lunch.

When I was pregnant, my doctor knew I didn't like milk - she suggested I have cheese on everything - I love cheese! And she told me I could have ice cream every day if I wanted.

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@sozobe,

My bias is that I lived across the street from an elementary school with just about endless asphalt, more than a long block, little used. Would I could get my hands on some of that at this point for different kinds of garden efforts, school or general community. Given the price of real estate, I'll never be surprised if a lot of that is sold off by the school system.

One of my teachers in landarch taught gardening and some construction at a S. Fernando valley high school. Sharp guy (whose wife made a memorable soup I am still trying to reproduce all these years later).

There are other travails going on with LA school lunches, various skirmishes with Jamie Oliver. I don't know enough to comment on those.

While I whine about my days in the kitchen table milk wars of my teens, I have terrific memories of the lunches available at my chicago area (catholic) elementary school whenever I didn't bring a bagged lunch.

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I can't tolerate milk or ice cream. That's ok because I've totally lost my taste for ice cream.

Cheese is fine though.
I stick with soy milk (I know shewolf, you don't touch soy), or goat milk.
Goat milk has smaller fat molecules, which digest better.
Even then, can't take in too much.

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had no idea what izze was . I had to google it...

and again, I am astounded at what is allowed to be labeled healthy and promoted as 'good for you'

it contains natural flavors ( MSG) and Sodium Citrate in almost all of them. That removes calcium... also is an anti coagulant ...

seriously
thats what is called healthy? Freaking sad.

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I'm all for food gardens at school but kids aren't in school during the prime harvest time so most of the stuff would spoil on the vine. The whole reason our school year is designed the way it is, is so that kids would be home to help with the harvest. Goofy, huh?

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@boomerang,

I'm just about sure this is a problem for the whole idea, if it's tricky in LA and Portland, Oregon. If I were going to play with ideas on it, I'd make the effort broader based than about fixing dinner. I might go to at least some container gardening, and work for reduction of that asphalt heat sink with, gasp, trees. Native trees appropriate to the site, but that's another story and would have to be carefully studied. Well, hey, LA is a semi arid desert and was sans trees.

A prominent volunteer group planted wrongo trees in our tiny parking strips, just as I was having to sell and leave (sob). I was a homeowner who refused, since I knew that tree needed twelve feet of parkway, at the least. I wrote letters on that but was probably taken as a crank. I look at the street ten years later, a bunch of verdant leaners and yes, there is the damned tree in front of my old house, soon to be a sidewalk wrecker, and an overhead line impinger, thus a massacred pruning victim. This has been done throughout the city under city aegis before, but now by volunteers.

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@ossobuco,

I see I'm ranting off of dairy..

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@boomerang,

boomerang wrote:

I'm all for food gardens at school but kids aren't in school during the prime harvest time so most of the stuff would spoil on the vine. The whole reason our school year is designed the way it is, is so that kids would be home to help with the harvest. Goofy, huh?

Not I, schools are already spread way too thin, I think that they need to get back to teaching academics and leave moral indoctrination and the basic life skills to others. Maybe the parents for instance. If people want to learn to grow plants they can get the basics in a half hour on the internet, I shudder to think how much instruction time is lost every year to turning dirt and pulling weeks. I assume that if they actually produce any food that they have to burn another half day cooking and eating too.

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@hawkeye10,

Yeah, botany is a total frickin waste of time.....

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@hawkeye10,

.....oh god I forgot to mention what a time killer cooking is. Why should kids learn how to cook when Kraft mac and cheese and a diet Coke will only set you back a couple of bucks!

Who needs knowledge of plants and of nutrition?

Nobody, that's who.

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@boomerang,

Quote:

With the Edible Schoolyard, and the thousands of similar programs, the idea of a school as a venue in which to advance a social agenda has reached rock bottom. This kind of misuse of instructional time began in the Progressive Era, and it has been employed to cheat kids out of thousands of crucial learning hours over the years, so that they might be indoctrinated in whatever the fashionable idea of the moment or the school district might be. One year it’s hygiene and another it’s anti-Communism; in one city it’s safe-sex “outer-course,” and in another it’s abstinence-only education. (Sixth-graders at King spend an hour and a half each week in the garden or the kitchen—and that doesn’t include the time they spend in the classroom, in efforts effective or not, to apply the experiences of planting and cooking to learning the skills and subjects that the state of California mandates must be mastered.) But with these gardens—and their implication that one of the few important things we as a culture have to teach the next generation is what and how to eat—we’re mocking one of our most ennobling American ideals. Our children don’t get an education because they’re lucky, or because we’ve generously decided to give them one as a special gift. Our children get an education—or should get an education—because they have a right to one. At the very least, shouldn’t we ensure that the person who makes her mark on the curricula we teach be someone other than an extremely talented cook with a highly political agenda?

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/01/cultivating-failure/7819/4/

There are a lot of things worth learning in life, only a faction of them should be learned through formal education.

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@hawkeye10,

I agree. Healthy food is way too fashionable and idea to be good for children.

Frikken socialist botanists and their idiot cousins the nutritionists.

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@boomerang,

Quote:

e. Healthy food is way too fashionable and idea to be good for children.

Kids are eventually going to eat what they want. I personally have never seen very good long term results from the mothers who take a militant policing of their kids diet approach, I think that as soon as these kids can get the food that they have been denied that they go gaga for it. I also have seen studies that show that the anti drug programs such as DARE pushed at kids at great expense do nothing to change long term behavior. The fact that instruction time is lost to these gardening programs is only part of the problem....a bigger part of the problem is the backlash that comes latter to these indoctrination programs, and the credibility the adults lose through them.

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I don't disagree.

Botany and nutrition are science. What do you have against science being taught in school? If you learn it through experience instead of from a book does it not count?

Really, I understand that when kids graduate from high school having taken AP calculus that they get their instant millionaire certificate and that they will never have to prepare a meal for themselves or worry about what they might be putting into their body. I get it. Everybody does calculus every day but nobody eats. Simple.

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@boomerang,

Quote:

Botany and nutrition are science. What do you have against science being taught in school?

Nothing, but have you been paying attention to all the flip flops science has been doing for the last 30 years on the interactions between food and the body? And there has been no slowdown in the demonstrations of ignorance either, the latest great failure is the niacin study which shows that it does indeed raise what is called good cholesterol but for some reason this does nothing good for humans. Is " good" cholesterol really good for us....now the scientists dont know anymore, but the nutritionists have been claiming for about two decades that they did know. OOPS!

Nothing good comes from "teaching" kids the latest food fads, claiming these instruction on what to eat to be truth demonstrated by science , when we know just as sure that we know the sun will come up tomorrow that a great many of these "facts" will be proven to be false in the coming months and years.

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Drink your milk! (or not, more discussion)

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