Free milk hasn’t worked
Anastasia De Waal, 9 August 2010
Fairly extraordinarily, the white stuff at the top of the contentious topics list has proven to be milk. Barely out of the ‘breast is/isn’t best’ debate reignited by a militant supermodel, and we’re onto the next milk row: free milk for under-fives.
Until children stop thinking that milk’s disgusting, Ms. Milton was right to call for a scrap.
As a child I vividly remember playtime plagued by the prospect of plastic cups filled with gently curdling lukewarm milk, garnished with a hair or two. I wished that I too was ‘allergic’. Suspiciously defying the laws of probability, around half my year-group allegedly suffered from lactose intolerance, and therefore got glistening orange squash instead.
Fast forward twenty years and, as a primary school teacher, milk was still on the menu. Presentation, however, was much improved. Each afternoon packages of neat cartons emblazoned with colourful cartoons and accompanied by vibrant straws would be delivered to our classroom. They were actually for Nursery and Reception, but neither could garner any takers so it was a case of pass the parcel. Yet, despite there being not a fluff flotilla in sight, no one in my class would drink it either. And so the parcel was passed until eventually by 3.30pm it got to the big bins. Un-drunk free milk was a problem not just in our infant classes, but reportedly in the majority of others in the area. Perhaps we were a local authority of particularly poor milk salesmanship, but similar accounts from colleagues in other areas implied not.
The principle of free milk is a laudable one, and the health benefits of milk clearly huge – when drunk. But when there’s so worryingly little money to go around in the schools’ budget, the principle of cutting waste – even when waste’s not wanted – must come out trumps. So unless the Coalition government is going to legislate for force-feeding (maybe Gisele Bundchen has some policy proposals), saving something that is all too often binned is a politically, rather than pragmatically, motivated mistake. Basically, Cameron doesn’t want to be Milk Snatcher II.
Ultimately, what we really need is for kids to want milk. And that needs some good PR. One way to up milk’s appeal, evidence suggests, is illegalising it; a more practical strategy, however, would be to put celebrities on the case. (If they can get us into Uggs, they can get us into milk.) Becoming a part of the famous US ‘Got Milk’ campaign, in which celebrities sport a milk moustache and extol its benefits, comes close, aspiration-wise, to getting a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. We’ve seen a start to this type of campaign over here, but perhaps the cast of Hollyoaks is not quite seductive enough to detract from milk’s ‘disgustingness’. Let’s try upping the ante with a few milk ‘tached A-listers and see what happens.