Dueling Elementary Students Lobby for Milk vs. Cider

New Hampshire’s State Drink as Yet Undecided

Steve Taylor
New England Correspondent

CONCORD, N.H. — Legislators trooped back to the State House this week to begin another session dealing with dozens of familiar topics ranging from the budget deficit to gun rights to wetlands regulation, perennial issues that will set off fiery rhetoric and help keep lobbyists raking in the fees over the next six months.

This time around they’ll also wrestle with an unusual brand of controversial issue, and the advocates lining up to try to sway their votes are different, too.

Lawmakers will have to decide if New Hampshire needs an official state drink, and then, if they do, whether it will be apple cider or milk. And they can expect to be lobbied hard on the subject by school kids rather than the usual smooth-talking suits who prowl the halls of the State House and the Legislative Office Building across the street during the legislative session.

A group of third graders at the Jaffrey Elementary School in the fall proposed the idea of establishing apple cider as the state drink and they convinced their hometown lawmaker, Rep. Bonnie Mitchell, to file a bill to make it official. The legislation is now in the hopper and is expected to be referred to the House Committee on Environment and Agriculture for a hearing later this month.

But a fourth grader in the Gilford Elementary School while on a class field trip to the State House got wind of the Jaffrey kids’ initiative and has set about to sidetrack cider and instead make milk the official beverage of the Granite State.

Jeremy LaChance says he thinks the state drink should be something that’s part of his everyday diet. “I don’t like apple cider, that’s for one thing,” he told a reporter.

A sidekick, Cole Winklemann, added: “We thought, ‘It shouldn’t be apple cider, it should be milk.’ Every day for school lunch we have milk.”

Since it’s too late to file stand-alone legislation to make milk the official state drink, they’ll have to convince lawmakers to amend the cider bill by striking out cider and inserting in its place wording to put milk on top. Thus the House committee faces the prospect of dueling groups of young students trying to prevail on just what New Hampshire’s state beverage shall be.

Jeremy LaChance is dead serious about his quest. He’s sent letters to all the state lawmakers in his area urging them to get on board for milk, and he’s written to all of New Hampshire’s commercial dairy producers seeking their backing, too. One impressed farmer mailed him a $25 check to help with his postage expenses.

For State House veterans this cider-versus-milk issue sounds a lot like a replay of a 2006 battle over designation of a New Hampshire state fruit. That time it was the apple pitted against the pumpkin, and it also involved groups of students taking sides; eventually the pumpkin won out.

And as happened four years ago, commentators and bloggers divide down the middle, with one side saying the Legislature has better and more important things to worry about than a state drink, and the other praising the pluck of the youngsters trying to influence the political system.

State agriculture commissioner Lorraine Merrill is doing her best to stay neutral and avoid offending two of her major constituencies, the fruit growers and the dairy producers.

“It’s a good thing to see attention coming to two of our most important commodities, and any time we have public interest focused on the things our farmers produce, agriculture wins.

“It’s also a good thing we have these youngsters getting involved and learning about how the legislative process works,” Merrill said, cautiously.