When they started letting soda machines in resturaunt brand pizza options in the lunch rooms, the die was cast. Now most districts, including, if I remember correctly all of Spartanburg county, have their school meals contracted out to commercial vendors, and all the food is mass produced off site. They have to follow federal guidelines for nutrition, yet the quality of the food served our children has suffered.

School districts have to stretch budget dollars further and further every year so it makes fiscal sense to have one entity provide food, especially if the contractor can keep things within certain cost ranges, but we lose something in the bargain. And yeah school food is a huge money maker to contractors and suppliers. It is sad, and why it may be a good idea for parents to go bad to the day of peanut butter or bologna sandwiches and an apple in their child’s backpack.

Instead of a real story with research, context and facts, WSPA gave you a shallow story that only gave the perspective of the dairy industry, who spend an awful lot of money trying to keep that view in the public consciousness. Wouldn’t you have preferred, say, a seven-minute story that explained why this was suddenly a hot topic, and which talked about the alternatives? Or are you just fine with only hearing one side of the story?

Also, the dairy industry makes a mint selling to schools. Depending on which statistics you find credible, schools buy more than 460 million gallons of milk each year, or about 7% of total milk sales. And a little more than half of all chocolate milk on the market is sold in schools. So, we’re talking about billions — maybe tens of billions — of dollars here.

If enough people start complaining loudly enough, and even more stop watching the show because there are better options available, I’d like to think that they’d step up their game a little. I seriously doubt that WSPA is running this kind of stuff because they’re incapable of more — clearly they can do good work when they’re properly motivated — but rather that they have a certain number of stories of a certain length they have to run, and it’s simply not worth their time and money to delve too deeply into this stuff.

I mean, it’s no accident that cops news — literally the easiest kind of news to get, since it all comes in from police reports and over the scanners — is the kind that tends to get the most play in the local media. None of it is very deep, and very little of it is very meaningful to the community as a whole. But it’s easy to report on and titillating enough that people can rubberneck online about car crashes and crimes. It also doesn’t require much in the way of research (the cops have done most of the research for you, and it’s all in the police report), so the stories can be churned out in short order.

I completely understand why they run this kind of stuff, but it’s hard for me not to see it as lazy and not really serving the community. I mean, if WSPA really wanted to, the could cover every City and County Council meeting, upload the full videos online and give an edited synopsis to each on a weekly basis. That would actually empower the community in a real way, but it would require them to actually learn about the issues and find a way to make it interesting to the viewer. That’s much harder than pointing a camera at a car crash or talking about a crime.

So, when this milk (non)story went up, I really couldn’t let it go. I mean, here’s a story that’s not even as marginally interesting as a crime story. No one is even proposing — at least as far as I can tell — that local schools remove chocolate milk. There is a story if you start looking at why this is suddenly becoming a controversial topic (and it’s actually quite interesting, and surprisingly political), but WSPA couldn’t be bothered to even mention that part. So, instead, we have a story that spends almost two minutes giving us information we can’t use about something that’s not even happening locally.

So, I’m doing what I can by griping.

What’s there to do about it, is the question I’m tripping over.