Sometime while I was in elementary school our school decided to switch the way it served milk with lunch. Instead of giving us the traditional milk cartons, we were served milk in bags. The bags were made of clear plastic, and they were recyclable. One day in class a man from the milk company came in and we had a lesson on how to use the bags. It was a little complicated because to drink from them, you had to jab a pointed straw into the bag. They made a big deal of remembering to keep your thumb on the end of the straw when you jabbed it in, or else milk would spew out the end. (Obviously this man had never worked with elementary school children before... warning us of this only served to show us how to spew milk out, namely at other kids in the lunchroom).
The milk bags had pros and cons. The pros: first, a milk bag with a straw stuck in it was a powerful spraying weapon. Second, the bags were recyclable, so we were saving a lot of landfill space. The cons: they switched from serving 2% white milk and chocolate milk to serving 0.5% white milk and 1.5% chocolate milk. This may seem like a small difference to you, dear reader, but to elementary school kids, a change in the percent milk fat is dire. For the rest of elementary school, I never knew if the bad taste of the milk was due to the plastic bags the milk was stored in, or the changed percent milk fat.
Our janitor always stood by the trash can, and if you came with your milk unfinished, he made you stand there and drink it all before you could put it in the recycle bin. If you tried to trash a half full milk, you had to drink it all and put it in the recycle, along with getting yelled at. I resorted to many techniques to get out of drinking the yucky milk: squirting it into any bowls or plates, hiding the bag under a napkin to throw it away, pawning it off on my friends.
It got worse when awhile into the plastic bags deal a big gray trash bag was hung up in our school lobby with a sign saying something like, "Your recycled milk bags made this trash bag!" I was mad. If we were going through all this trouble to recycle, why the heck should we hang the finished product in our school lobby? That seemed utterly pointless. Why wasn't the product made of our recyclables being USED?
I took some comfort in the idea that soon all school kids around the country would be drinking out of milk bags like ours. Sadly, I later found out that not even one other school in our district used the milk bags, and I have yet to meet anyone else subject to the nasty tasting milk. Alas.
Question to you, reader, that I can't decide my own answer to: would you rather have slightly nasty milk with recyclable packaging, or tasty milk in non-recyclable packaging?
5 comments:
Couldn't milk cartons be recycled? It sounds like your school district was conned.
This blog makes me feel old. Now that I'm all grown up, I would like to have soy milk. It comes in many forms, but I'm not sure if I've seen it in a bag. Did the "Milk Man" explain how they got the milk in the bags in the first place, or did you even think to ask? As an elementary school kid, that would have been my first question.
The first time I saw milk bags was in China. They also had drinkable yogurt bags too. Some of the kids would bring them to school and the only problem was sometimes they would poke the straw through the whole milk bag and it would leak. I started drinking the yogurt and it was quite fun. Also, when I taught in Corpus Christi, they had one trash can that had been converted into a "Milk Can". There was a hole cut in the lid of the trash can with a wire mesh strainer covering it so the kids would dump their undrunk milk into it. Which is worse? The janitor who forced you to drink the milk or kids dumping usually the entire content of their milk carton?
GROSS! The very idea of drinking milk now seems so yucky to me! And to think that I only drank whole until I married David! A little bit of cream in my coffee is one thing, but a tall cold frothy glass now seems pretty disgusting. I've heard of "squirt yogurt" and even sickening "squirt Power bars", but not sacked yogurt. This was a fascinating post Valerie. I hope you had a fun time while you were here. Sorry for any boredom or parasite related whining I may have perpetrated on you. Love!!!
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