Getting kids to eat their breakfast

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When I get up in the morning, the first thing I do is eat or think about food. I have a routine. The clock tells me what I can do before leaving for work. It’s what most people are doing – going through a routine. For many people young and old it often involves milk. There’s a vague sense that protein is needed to start the day, and that comes from a habit so ingrained that we don’t need to think about it, something like a ‘a corn flakes and milk’ habit.

Kids have very set routines, often involving cereal and milk, which makes it easier to get them to eat something for breakfast. Milk is central to the breakfast habit, which incidentally is great for the milk industry.

My milk, if I use it, comes from soy beans or rice or oats, but traditionally milk comes from cows. Children use milk, as it’s associated with sweet things. It is often sweetened, used with sweet cereal and kids grow up believing milk is essential food ‘given’ willingly, freely and comfortably by cows. That’s all they need to know, vaguely, for an uninhibited milk-habit to form. From parents’ point of view it’s a great food, it’s fresh, it’s cheap (subsidized) and available from any corner shop. Milk is found in every fridge. Children drink lots of it and so do adults. It is an unquestioned food, and yet how it comes to us is a mystery to most people, other than it comes from cows. Most people wouldn’t think that milk involves cruelty and death

Cows get killed for milk, and their calves too. Mum must get pregnant to stimulate her mammary glands to secrete milk. Simple biology. Because humans want the milk, the calf must not drink it. So once it is born, the calf has served its chief purpose and, unless it’s a female destined for the herd, it is usually killed, either for veal whilst still very young or fattened in a beef herd and then killed when fat enough.

If a female calf is produced, she may be put with the dairy herd and milked and impregnated for seven or so years, after which the dairy cow is sent to the abattoir - some 10 years short of her natural life span - because her milk output will, by that time, have dropped below the commercially viable level.

Milk production is something most people don't want to know about in case it forces them to associate it with animal cruelty. If they turn away from milk on ethical grounds they will have to turn away from all the thousands of food items made with milk. And that wouldn’t go down too well with kids, which is why they are never told about cruelty to dairy cows and calves.