Chocolate milk was the drink of my childhood. I drank it each Sunday evening at the kitchen table while eating popcorn. But I liked it even more at my grandparents’ wiener roasts. We’d gather—aunts and uncles and grandchildren—in the pasture near the spring behind my grandparents’ house. Before we drank chocolate milk from colorful aluminum tumblers, we’d spear wieners with the point of a stick and roast them, each according to our own style.
“Hold it right above the flame,” a cousin would say. “It gets done faster.”
“No,” an uncle would counter, “go for the red-hot embers. It gets done all the way through.”
Whether charred or lightly steamed, what topped off the wieners was the milk straight from my grandfather’s Jersey cows—rich, creamy and now flavored with chocolate.
There in the pasture with the fire crackling and the crickets chirping and my grandpa telling stories, all was well in my world.
Later, in a city school far from the pasture, I drank chocolate milk again. This time not rich and creamy. This time from a cardboard carton.
I didn’t know then that my mid-morning treat came to me from a national school milk program. I didn’t know that nearly three-quarters of the country’s children were drinking this milk along with me. Or that the program that brought it worked toward two goals at once—to improve nutrition for the country’s children and to make use of the nation’s milk surplus.
I only knew that I found quiet satisfaction in sipping milk through my straw with other kids. There wasn’t a mountain stream gurgling nearby. My grandma wasn’t bustling about handing out the aluminum tumblers that made cold drinks even colder. And there were no curious Jerseys across the fence blinking long eyelashes and lowing as if to ask whether we liked their milk.
Still, there was comfort in those third-pint cartons of milk. School milk breaks might not have come with the big feelings of a wiener roast. But small daily events have a way of becoming memorable. From the first long sip to the final slurp, we were together taking a break. And when we went back to long division, it seemed, somehow, more possible.
Apple to Apple 