The Hartford Courant’s Capitol Watch reports that Gov. Dannel Malloy, announced today that he will veto legislation that would have inadvertently banned chocolate milk from Connecticut school cafeterias, stating that he likes chocolate milk.
The Capitol Watch reported that the bill that passed the General Assembly by wide margins last month included a provision to stop the sale of school cafeteria drinks that contain “added sodium.” What no one apparently realized at the time was that small amounts of salt are also added to chocolate milk sold in schools.
State and local education officials didn’t want Malloy to have to veto the bill because there were other sections dealing with things like student internship programs and professional development for teachers.
Malloy’s staff and state Department of Education officials spent a lot of time in the last few weeks trying to find an administrative route around the new legislation that would allow chocolate milk sales to continue in schools without having to veto the bill. But it looks like they simply couldn’t come up with a viable alternative.
National Milk Producers Federation President and CEO Jim Mulhern praised the veto in a press release, stating: “It’s encouraging to see reason and common sense returning to the debate over chocolate milk in schools. As a recent university study made clear, schools that remove chocolate milk from the cafeteria are simply throwing the nutritional baby out with the bathwater. They deprive kids of calcium, protein and other needed nutrients while they increase waste and boost costs. Certainly, obesity is a serious problem among today’s youth. But the answer isn’t to ban chocolate milk. Connecticut is not required to pass this legislation to keep its federal school meals funding. Federal nutrition standards specifically allow schools to serve fat-free chocolate milk as part of reimbursable meals and in cafeteria a la carte lines. Governor Malloy is to be congratulated for thinking this through, and not opting for the quick, easy but wrong solution.”