General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Do Kids Really Need Milk with their Meal ? [View all]LWolf
(46,179 posts)Human babies are made for consuming human milk. When necessary, other milk can be substituted. Once they are weaned, though, they don't really need dairy. Generations of parents have been conditioned by the milk industry's advertisements. It's all about increasing consumption, and therefore profits.
There are plenty of foods that have calcium, not just milk products. Commercial dairy products come from cow's milk, which, when not organic, as most is not, contain hormones and anti-biotics that are harmful to children. It also contains casein, which reacts negatively with the human brain.
We, and our children, simply don't need dairy in our diet. And school meals not only offer milk, but chocolate milk and yogurt with sugar; sugar is, in many ways, worse than milk.
Which is why "flavored water" shouldn't be there, either. The whole point of the "flavoring" is to make sure that kids grow up thinking what they drink is supposed to be sweet, helping out the soft-drink industry. Good clean plain water...better than anything else.
School breakfast and lunch programs depend on food subsidies which are not about nutrition, but about the need to dispose of farm production deemed surplus under commodity price support programs. Again, it's all about the money.