I don’t have a big problem with chocolate milk, but, I prefer to make it at home, with a certain kind of chocolate…no HFCS and not sooooo much chocolate. The prepackaged ones are really just too sweet and only perpetrate a child’s sweet tooth. Milk is over-rated. There are other ways of getting calcium, people. My kid is not going to eat any food doled out by the school cafeteria, anyway. We’ll brown bag it, thank you very much.

I think we need to get over the notion that everything for children needs to be “fun.” I’m not saying lunch should be something that needs to be endured, but the last I checked, most kids like white milk just fine (so it’s not akin to drowning vegetables in cheese sauce or ranch dressing to make them more appealing to picky eaters), and if that’s the only option (as it was for probably 90% of us reading this), they’ll happily drink it.

School is the only place my kids drink milk, and they drink it because it’s chocolate. I’m glad they’re getting vitamin D and calcium – even if they are getting extra sugar and calories with 1 meal a day. It means that my picky eaters get some dairy goodness 5 days a week, which supplements the nutritious foods I serve at home. Let’s pick our battles moms and dads. Take on HFCS, prevalence of fried foods – but let’s not make lunches a chore for our kids.

I’d have traded with ‘em.

Add me to the anti-chocolate milk crowd. Actually, I have no problem with treats, but by providing chocolate milk with the meal it is no longer dessert, it is an actual part of the meal. (Maybe it’s a weird cultural thing, but I never understood having something sweet with your meal, as opposed to dessert.)

I guess I’m bringing the previous post about HFCS, but in Berkeley the parents recently made a big deal about getting rid of chocolate milk with HFCS and replacing it with chocolate milk with sugar in their public schools. They spent a lot of time patting themselves on the back, but I wondered why they didn’t spend that time getting chocolate milk out of the schools, period.

I’m fine with this as long as the school offers some kind of alternative beverage. When I was in school (admittedly quite a while ago), you either drank the little milk carton (unless you had a note from the nurse that you were allergic) or you had no drink with snack/lunch. I don’t remember the reasoning, but I do remember that juice boxes and thermoses had to stay in the coatroom until after school.

I am annoyed by all the flavored milks at my kids’ school. My kids, and I daresay most other kids at the school, don’t need flavor to drink their milk. I don’t know anyone, even among the parents who are fairly lax with nutrition, who allows their children to turn their noses up at plain milk and drink only flavored milk, not even the neighbor whose kids go through a box-and-a-half of Pop Tarts a day. I guarantee that if you don’t have a coke machine in the school, so the choices are plain milk or water, the kids will still mostly drink the plain milk…and if a few of them choose water, I won’t cry a river; the school lunches seem to feature enough cheese and other dairy products and other programs put dairy in the homes of indigent kids, so I don’t think we’re really going to head right into rickets and bad teeth, here. It’s not that chocolate (and strawberry and vanilla) milk is bad altogether, but even once a day is bit much—unless that’s it for sweets, and I doubt it is. And Stacie is right that it just continues the notion that kids’ food should be “fun” all the time. There’s a time for kids’ food to be indulgent, just like there if for adults. And every day at lunchtime (and breakfast—do not get me started on how a kid can start the school day with Cocoa Krispies drenched in chocolate milk five days a week) is not it.

For the mom above with kids that won’t drink milk except chocolate milk at school, why insist on chocolate milk at school — where it is sure to make my kids develop the same bad habits as yours. You can give them chocolate milk at home with dinner and they’ll still get their one serving of milk per day.

I’m not sure why, but we went through a period where we would allow our son to have chocolate or strawberry milk in the a.m. only (plain milk for lunch and dinner). He enjoyed that for a while (we used Nestle Quik) and he drank lots of milk, but eventually we ran out of the mix and he stopped caring, so I don’t know – I think if you use a little chocolate milk to get your kids to drink more milk, it is not going to ruin them forever, I think it is funny when people get some dramatic about it.

I really think we should be less concerned about the chocolate milk our kids drink and more about the quality of the food they are eating. I don’t know about you’re school districts, but here in sunny San Diego, our kids food is “packaged” at some central location and shipped to the schools. Everything is so processed it would probably fossilize before it would rot. We have exactly 1 cafeteria lady who turns on the microwaves, and rings the kids up. Most of the kids who eat there regularly wouldn’t know real food if it bit them.

So we will rid every campus of chocolate milk and then tackle the next big issue right? Parents meet at 8 in the school gym. Use the door next to the vending machines.

Locally in Michigan, a gallon of chocolate milk is $1.99 and is cheaper than pop, energy drinks, or gasoline for that matter. A lot of nutrition in a delightful beverage for a modest cost. Sounds like a winner to me.