School Days Are Made For Michelob
by Mad Dog

    In the last few years school nutritionists have been working hard to improve the content and quality of the slop—I mean, food—they serve, hoping to make the youth of our country happier and healthier while at the same time taking their job title out of the running as Oxymoron of the Year. But while they focus on the food, they’re ignoring the other important part of lunch—using soda straws to shoot butter wads at the dorks who study hard and blow the grading curve. They’re also ignoring what kids drink.

    It used to be that the only choices were milk, chocolate milk, and choking down that Swiss steak, French fries, and Italian bread dry while hoping no one from the European Union would taste any of it and start an international incident. Then they began serving juice with lunch. Unfortunately in order to be called juice all a drink needs is to spell the word correctly on the label and include more sugar than water. Not long after, soda machines were installed. This wasn’t done because someone convinced schools that Coke and Pepsi lost their EPA classification as paint removers and were actually health foods, but rather because the soda companies started paying them.

    Enter Coke and Pepsi, which offer big bucks for the exclusive right to be sold on school grounds. They don’t do this because they want to brag about being the Official Soft Drink of the Sunnydale Snail Darters. No, they do it because they know that the sooner kids develop a brand allegiance, the better. It’s the same concept the tobacco companies use except Coke and Pepsi are allowed to use a cartoon camel for a mascot if they want.

    Now parents are beginning to worry about whether their children are drinking too much juice and soda. At least they are in Belgium, where a group is trying to help students cut back on their intake of sweetened drinks by getting them to switch to beer. This is true. The altruistic public safety group is De Limburgse Biervrienden, or Limburg Beer Friends, and they’ve been holding taste testings to see if 8-year-old schoolchildren like having beer with lunch or whether they’d prefer a shot of schnapps. Just kidding. About the schnapps anyway.

    The campaign started after a professor announced that children who drink sugary soda and juices run a higher risk of getting breast cancer than those who don’t. While drinking water, unsweetened iced tea, and diet sodas would cut the risk, the researcher recommended beer. He also suggested they eat more waffles, chocolate, and diamonds to help boost the economy. Low-alcohol versions, of course.

    This trend isn’t confined to Belgium. Children are drinking beer in Japan too. Mangus is a low-alcohol beer which is marketed to athletes, expectant mothers, and lightweights. The Tokyo-based manufacturer, German Beverage Consulting, Ltd, is working hard to figure out where their name came from. They’re also trying to cultivate a new generation of beer drinkers, which is why they sell it to schoolchildren. At least they don’t claim to have lofty goals like saving children from breast cancer.

    Experts say it’s good for children to learn to drink moderately and responsibly at an early age. It demystifies it, teaching them that drinking won’t help them date the Swedish Bikini Team, that wining is okay while whining isn’t, and that binge drinking can be Absolut Hell. But the real plus is that, in spite of the low-alcohol content of the beer the kids may be swilling with lunch, anything’s a good thing if it will help dull the senses and taste buds during a school lunch. After all, gray may be a food group but that doesn’t mean it’s a tasty one.

 ©2001 Mad Dog Productions, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
These columns appear in better newspapers across the country. Read them while sipping on that wuss beer.