I grew up in America, and that view of milk as a children's drink was pretty common in my Scandinavian/Germanic heritage in the US.
When we went to restaurants, children ordered milk to drink, but an adult never would.
Milk was fine to put in your coffee or tea, but not to drink a cup of it. Milk was fine to use with cereal or to cook with, but not to drink plain.
I do not doubt your perspective at all; however, there are definitely at least parts of America where milk is not for adults to drink. My recent ancestors were dairy farmers in the upper midwest. I cannot think of a single time my parents or grandparents drank milk straight up. I won't say it never happened. It could just be my faulty memory. But if beer or coffee or juice was available, pretty much every adult would drink those. Even juice was pretty iffy. Juice for breakfast maybe. Any other time, and it was a child's drink as well.
Obviously, this is just one anecdote. Don't take it for data.
Having also lived in Germany and now Sweden, I will say that I believe milk is not often drunk plain by adults in either of these places.
My experience is the same. Children drank milk with meals, while adults drank coffee, tea, or water and juice at breakfast. I got my first taste of coffee at about 7 while eating lunch with my father in the fields.
Perhaps someone in the restaurant business could say how often adults order milk compared with children.
In the US the only milk my grandparents would drink was buttermilk (they called it "milk") that they made by culturing overnight on the kitchen counter. They called ordinary milk "sweet milk".
You made my point much better than I did. I don't even drink milk or know many people that do, I simply thought it bizarrely elitist to claim it's only for children.
Well, it's not like the healthiness of foods is what guides the average American. With that said, I think it's not particularly relevant if anything is good for your or not, since a lot of what and how we eat is driven by culture, and not rooted into any underlying science or reason - e.g. three meals a day, cereal in the morning, milk for strong bones and so on. So yeah, drinking milk in the US is just a part of culture now, and I am convinced that all countries have similar quirks.
>Well, it's not like the healthiness of foods is what guides the average American.
point me to the national culture that prioritizes food healthiness. Given that 'Americans' are so obviously not prioritizing that (apparently?), i'd like to see the opposite country, one where every individual prioritizes the health consequences of each and every meal.
Extra credit for countries that eat healthy from imported food, and not just coincidentally healthy due to their local crops and harvests enforcing it as the cheaper and plentiful option.
I won't hold my breath.
Lots of anti-American sentiment around here. It's too bad that I seem to be the only one in this thread who thinks that these broad national generalizations of identity are actually hugely bigoted diatribe that has no real connection to the reality that we live in..
Guaranteed if I said something like "Germans all do.." i'd be flagged in minutes. I don't do that because 1) such statements are almost always false and 2) it's disrespectful and outside of what can happen in actual civil discourse.
All I ask : Let's try to keep in mind that these big bad nations are actually full of individuals, all with different ideas and concepts of how to live our lives.
I did say the 'average American', as opposed to 'all Americans, down to the last one'. You can choose to become defensive, but it is empirically true that the Americans are on the heavy side of things. I live in the UK and I could say the same thing about people here, though the US is much worse.
Out of OECD/Western countries, the USA has the highest BMI and obesity rates.
> point me to the national culture that prioritizes food healthiness
You are strawmanning here. I never claimed that there is such a thing as a culture that prioritizes food health, nor did I claim that the US is the opposite of that. But if you want examples at the other end of the spectrum, there are plenty, most notably Japan. There are European countries that are tackling the obesity problem more successfully than others, such at the Netherlands, Denmark, Switzerland, France. For example, the Netherlands has made it illegal for fast food chains to be with a certain distance of schools.
"Out of OECD/Western countries, the USA has the highest BMI and obesity rates."
I think this may be misleading.
If you look at obesity rates, the US is an outlier, and around 38% compared to the UK at around 28% (from 2015, I think).
But if you look at overweight rates, the US is pretty close to average.[1] Germany, Canada, the Netherlands all seem to have a slightly higher frequency of overweight people.
I don't know why this is, but it seems like if the difference is in the number of more extreme individuals, then the cultural explanations don't make obvious sense.
> Americans are so obsessed with milk that the mere thought of not drinking it is seen as abnormal and weird
I don't even drink it, but I'm not sure I can think of a single food that I would say is "for juveniles", especially one that I stopped consuming for that reason. Bizarrely elitist attitude.
