Let Them Eat Kale: Schools Get Serious about Nutrition

The kids at Louisa May Alcott School were more into Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and nachos than frisée and couscous. That is, until Greg Christian got to them.

Exactly three years ago, the chef known as Chicago’s conscious caterer decided to share his gastronomic talents with the city’s low-income children. So he took his pilot program straight to the source: the cafeterias of the Chicago Public Schools.

Photograph by Thomas Heinser

Just as he was about to give up, Alcott’s principal, David Domovic, called to deliver a resounding yes. And for the next few months, the chef and a couple of his staffers whipped up delicious meals, including baked penne with Italian chicken sausage, ratatouille, and rosemary-roasted potatoes.

Domovic’s hunch that Christian was onto something big proved correct. He and others around the country are part of a growing movement to revamp the nation’s school lunch program. Their goal? To combat childhood obesity by making sure kids make informed choices about what ends up on their plates.

Indeed, Domovic’s risk taking is turning into a major project. As soon as he gets the green light, Christian plans to expand his program to Helen J. McCorkle Elementary and Charles G. Hammond Elementary, where he’ll not only feed more than 1,000 mainly minority children in economically depressed neighborhoods, but also oversee a healthy food curriculum, and work with a team of researchers and doctors to evaluate his program.

Luckily, many people now recognize the benefits of what Christian and others like him are doing. Since 2004, the federal government has required that every school district participating in the national school lunch and breakfast program develop a wellness plan to help children eat healthier foods. And schools are trying to satisfy growing demands to squeeze more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains onto lunch trays. Connecticut schools prohibit the sale of soda and other sugary drinks, and deep fryers are disappearing from school cafeterias nationwide. Many schools have already banned junk food in vending machines, and even the formerly sacrosanct classroom birthday party—complete with cupcakes slathered in buttercream frosting—is under attack.

But critics say that’s not enough. Although school lunches have improved over the years, there’s still very little fresh food available. A cheeseburger, fries, and canned fruit cocktail, for example, may meet all of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) nutritional requirements for lunch, but they’re highly processed and packed with sodium, sugar, and fat.

The reasons for overhauling school meals are compelling. Advocates of reform say that if kids continue to consume refined carbohydrates, artery-clogging trans fats, and food laden with pesticides, dire health consequences will abound. And there’s real cause for concern. Approximately 25 million children are already obese or overweight, making today’s kids possibly the first generation to live shorter, less healthy lives than their parents, says “F as in Fat: How Obesity Policies Are Failing in America,” a report by the nonprofit organization Trust for America’s Health.

And the outlook for minority kids is grimmer. Citing stats from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, of the children born in 2000, half of all African-American and Hispanic kids and one-third of Caucasian kids will have diabetes in their lifetime, many before they graduate high school, says Ann Cooper, the self-proclaimed renegade lunch lady who was hired nearly three years ago as director of nutrition services by the Berkeley Unified School District in California.

Evidence also shows that homegrown foods have a positive impact on everything from test scores to attendance. Most recently, the “Children’s Lifestyle and School-Performance Study,” which appeared in the April issue of the Journal of School Health, found that children—regardless of their socioeconomic status—performed better in school if they increased their fruit and vegetable intake and decreased their caloric intake from fat.

With facts like these, it’s not surprising that schools from the affluent Meadow Pond Elementary School in South Salem, NY, to the Hurricane Katrina–devastated Samuel J. Green Charter School in New Orleans are determined to serve healthier options and offer schoolwide nutrition curricula, complete with on-site gardens, so kids can learn about food sources and their connection to health.

Is there a place for organic foods in the high-volume, cash-strapped world of the national school lunch program? Absolutely, says Vanessa Ruddy, a mother from Olympia, WA, who, in 2002, spearheaded efforts to create an organic school lunch program at Lincoln Elementary, when her 14-year-old son Grant was a second grader. “There is a degree of being fed up with junk food in this country,” she says. “Compromising with food is compromising on children’s health.”

Although Lincoln was deemed an alternative school with a garden, wetlands, and a pesticide-free lawn, it wasn’t living up to its reputation in terms of its lunchroom offerings. “I was floored that the typical school lunch consisted of tater tots and chicken nuggets,” Ruddy says. “And the mystery meat glowed with an iridescent green and orange.”

Ruddy made it her mission to change the status quo and quickly gained backing from Principal Cheryl Petra. Within months of placing a phone call to Paul Flock, the Olympia School District child nutrition supervisor, Lincoln’s cafeteria rolled out a six-foot-long organic salad and fruit bar, which was offered as a complete meal option. Students can now choose from a colorful array of fruits and vegetables, whole grain breads, vegetarian meat alternatives, salmon, tuna, hard-boiled eggs, cottage cheese, sunflower seeds, soy and kidney beans, as well as organic soymilk to supplement the low-fat milk and juices. The program was such a hit that all but one of Olympia’s elementary schools have joined the organic farm-to-school movement.

Why organic? Many local food producers tend to be committed to organic practices, which are also built upon a respect and understanding for basic principles of nature, says Christian. “By stressing organic, I hope [we] might just raise awareness and help create a stronger connection with the foods we eat.” Also, organic foods—which are produced without pesticides, growth hormones, or other additives—have higher nutritional content than commercially produced foods. A recent study by the University of Washington found that children who eat conventionally grown produce have six times the concentration of organophosphorus (OP) pesticide metabolites in their urine compared to children who eat organic produce. OP is a commonly used insecticide in U.S. agriculture that can harm a developing nervous system.

It does take some thinking outside the lunchbox, however, when scrounging for extra money to pay for organic food. In Lincoln’s case, the school gave up desserts–though it was initially unpopular with students—and allocated the money toward organics. And Christian fed Alcott’s 500 K–8 kids on $45,000 with some of his own money and by subsidizing the bulk of it with donations from healthy food companies such as Whole Foods, Nature’s Path, and Annie’s.

Luckily, the USDA’s Small Farms/School Meals initiative—launched in 1997—has helped connect local farmers with school districts in several states, including Kentucky, Iowa, Nevada, Florida, New York, New Jersey, Vermont, and California. And one of the more successful programs is Wisconsin Homegrown Lunch, which started in 2002 by providing three elementary schools in poor urban areas of Madison with breakfast and lunch made from fresh, nutritious, local, and sustainably grown food, says Doug Wubben, the program’s project coordinator and a former farmer. As a result, kids are now more likely to snack on carrot-and-sweet-potato muffins or raw kohlrabi, the little Sputnik-shaped vegetable, than on Cheetos and soda, Wubben adds.

The Wisconsin project attributes its success to an integrated program that includes field trips to farms, classroom visits by farmers, frequent food tastings, lunchroom composting and recycling, school gardening, and art projects that focus on food and community—all efforts to promote healthy eating habits and link the land to the lunchroom. And in spring 2006, middle school students got an extra treat: local gourmet chefs Tory Miller and Eva Ringstrom of the esteemed L’Etoile restaurant helped engage kids in the pleasures of local food and seasonally driven cooking through an ongoing program called CHOW (Cooking Healthy Options in Wisconsin).

There’s no doubt that eating new foods requires a period of adjustment for most kids. “On the first day, they said, 'Yuck, the peas are green!’ and on the second day, they said 'Gross, the fruit is crunchy!’” Christian says. “I had to tell them that peas were supposed to be green, and fruit was supposed to be crunchy.”

When the Katonah-Lewisboro School District in New York decided to embark on its healthy food program, the change was a hard sell for the system’s students, concedes Denise Martabano, the district’s half-time health, wellness, and sustainability coach, who says kids have now adapted to whole wheat pizza and fresh fruit for dessert instead of the chicken nuggets and ice cream offered under the former food regime.

Studies have shown that it sometimes takes 15 to 20 tries before finicky kids will accept new flavors and textures. At the Meadow Pond cafeteria in Salem, NY, panko-crusted fish was a resounding flop and was removed summarily from the menu. But Andrea Martin, the school’s Culinary Institute of America–trained chef, contends that even exotic dishes like this might win acceptance if they’re given enough time to catch on.

Cooper, who promotes healthy eating on her Lunchlessons.org Web site and authored the book Bitter Harvest: A Chef’s Perspective on the Hidden Dangers in the Foods We Eat and What You Can Do about It (Routledge, 2000), agrees that people hate change and don’t like being told what to eat. So she likes to prepare seasonal and ethnically appropriate dishes like teriyaki chicken or vegetable-and-cheese tamales for her audience of about 9,000 kids in 16 schools. “We’re not trying to make something that kids don’t understand or get,” she explains. “We’re trying to cook food that kids will eat.”

But getting healthier food into schools isn’t as easy as it sounds. Alice Waters, founder of Chez Panisse in Berkeley and one of the country’s most influential chefs, first introduced the modern school lunch movement in the mid-1990s by launching the Edible Schoolyard. The program, at Martin Luther King Junior Middle School in Berkeley, integrates organic gardening and fresh seasonal cooking into the school’s curriculum and lunchroom. And although a growing number of schools are following that path, it’s still an uphill battle. First, there’s the money issue. School cafeterias get up to $2.47 a student from the U.S. government to serve lunch. In most places, two-thirds of that goes to labor, transportation, and overhead, which leaves schools with just about $1 to put food on a tray, says Cooper, who was hired by Berkeley Unified courtesy of a grant from Waters’s Chez Panisse Foundation, which was created in 1996 to support educational food programs.

It’s also extremely difficult to change the federal program that has managed school lunches for the last 62 years. There’s no one-size-fits-all formula to ensure good, fresh food gets delivered to every school. District sizes and storage capacities vary, some have central kitchens while others have satellite kitchens, and there’s not enough staff to research and develop distribution methods, says “Eat Smart—Farm Fresh!” the USDA’s guide to buying and serving locally grown produce in schools.

Then, of course, there’s the arduous task of getting schools to buy into the plan. Christian, for instance, packed up his saucepans last year and terminated his agreement with the Chicago Public Schools after they balked at his plan to extend his program to more schools. The news made headlines in the Chicago Tribune, and then last November, Waters met with Mayor Richard Daley to pitch a Chicago version of her Edible Schoolyard. It took all that media attention for Christian to finally get the support he was looking for from the mayor’s office and the Chicago Board of Ed.

With key decision makers now sharing his vision, Christian is making sure his message is heard loud and clear: poor kids have limited access to healthy food, so getting them to eat well starts at school, not at home. “These kids come from economically depressed neighborhoods with no grocery stores,” he says. “How is a single mom without a car going to get fresh produce or fresh meat for her kids?”

Christian has a valid point. Numerous poor areas of this country have no or distant grocery stores. What these neighborhoods do have is an abundance of fast-food restaurants and other outlets offering unhealthy food, says the report “Examining the Impact of Food Deserts on Public Health in Chicago” by the research and consulting group Mari Gallagher.

But Waters doesn’t see the issue as rich versus poor. “I’m concerned about every child right now because even the kids who have money don’t eat with their family,” she says. “They’re eating fast food and contributing to the [childhood obesity crisis].”

She’s also not surprised that her edible education initiative has been slow to catch on—even after all these years. “We as a nation haven’t ever paid attention to what we’re eating,” she adds.

What will it take to shake up the system? A lot more than a select group of enlightened principals, a few talented cooks, and a bunch of farmers who are willing to go the extra mile. It will take educating parents, teachers, and the entire school district staff. Most importantly, it will take action by key legislators and other decision makers, Waters emphasizes. “I don’t see it taking off unless there’s a federal mandate,” she says. “That’s the reason I’m putting all my eggs in the basket of the next president of the United States.”