August 24, 2018 by Chris

First Straws, Now Soda

California legislators are evaluating a bill that would require restaurants to make water or milk the default drink choice for children.

I will leave it to others to condemn the legislation as a gross overreach of governmental authority. I write only to highlight just how deeply entrenched milk – and by proxy, the dairy industry – is in America.

Let’s be frank.  Milk is wonderful with cereal. Dessert and drinks too.  But milk with almost anything else is disgusting, and that is equally true in a school cafeteria or a local restaurant.  Imagine a California taqueria offering a child a glass of cold 2% milk with tacos al pastor. Unpleasant, but still better than those poor souls in a Thai or Chinese restaurant, who may not even stock cow’s milk as it is not part of the regional cuisine.

If milk was not such a fixture of the American food scene for the past century, and logic were allowed to prevail, the legislation would call for water, or fresh juice, or ice tea, or kombucha, or anything else not loaded with corn syrup, as an allowable default.

But in the end, even the forward-minded California progressives have accepted an outmoded paradigm from the past.