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Back to School: Healthy Foods For School Kids Gaining Traction, But Very Slowly

By Susan Moran

Updated on: August 25, 2010 / 9:30 AM EDT / MoneyWatch

[This is a guest post by Susan Moran.]
The nascent school-lunch reform movement -- an uphill battle to replace the frozen, processed food served to students across the U.S. with fresh meals cooked from scratch -- may feature a growing roster of prominent advocates, but its progress to date has been painfully slow. Not only can it be a major challenge to shift the eating habits of kids, it's especially hard to do so on a shoestring budget when your goal is essentially to cut big processed-food makers out of the lucrative school-lunch market.

(If you're among the several million people who happened to catch Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution on ABC back in the spring, of course, you already know this.)

To get a better sense of the challenge involved, I had lunch today at Whittier International, an elementary school in Boulder, Colo., where healthy-food advocate Ann Cooper now directs nutrition services for the Boulder Valley school district. And, as you probably suspect, her program remains a work in progress.

Most kids wandered over and at least glanced at the bodacious salad bar -- chock full of mixed lettuce, sliced red peppers, shaved carrots, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, garbanzo beans and other goodies, including plump fresh peaches. Some then bypassed it altogether, while others scooped up a couple of tomatoes or cucumber slices. Still others served themselves a full-on salad. Fewer cleaned their plates, though -- except, that is, those who opted for the pizza served as the main entree.

Cooper, a chef who transformed public-school lunches in Berkeley, Calif., and is known nationwide as the "Renegade Lunch Lady," isn't one to sugarcoat the movement's progress so far. "Nationwide, we haven't changed anything," she told me in her office after greeting many of the kids at Whittier. "Many districts are doing well, with more kids eating healthy foods, but we have a long way to go."

Cooper, of course, has it relatively easy in liberal hotbeds like Berkeley and Boulder, where promoting healthy eating is effectively preaching to the choir. The lunch-reform movement has faced much tougher sledding in the rest of the country, even if Michelle Obama did call to end obesity in America in a generation (to applause from the food industry, as it turns out, which loves big, vague goals so long as it can keep its calories-laden products on the shelves and in TV ads.

Among the biggest hurdles to rolling out healthier menus -- no, not the "nutrient-based" menus riddled with vitamin-laced donuts, but real food-based menus serving fresh fruits and vegetables -- is money, since fresher and healthier food generally costs more than the mass-produced "processed crap" -- as Jamie Oliver terms it -- and takes more time and effort to prepare as well.

There's also the fact that benefits from healthier diets are being offset these day by continued cutbacks in PE programs at schools across the nation. from cash-strapped schools. Furthermore, serving fresh veggies and fruit to kids is one thing; as my experience at Whittier showed, getting kids to actually eat them instead of, well, pizza, is another entirely.

Cooper's latest campaign is the Salad Bar Project, which aims to get schools around the country to serve offer salad bars filled with fresh veggies. Through Whole Foods, the campaign raised $180,000 in the first week. Whole Foods also donated about $700,000 to an organization called The Lunchbox Project, which Cooper formed this year to help schools serve up more nutritious lunches for kids.

But many campaigns targeting school districts are piecemeal, and often toothless. The federal government needs to apply the muscle, money, authority and sense of urgency that it exerted in successfully enforcing seat belts in cars and in getting people to stop smoking. Of course, even the feds are divided; Cooper, for instance, dismisses the Department of Agriculture as "a big marketing arm of Big Business. You can't be the marketing arm for Big Business and get kids to stop eating crap."

Meanwhile, some reforms are percolating in Congress, albeit slowly. The main one is included in the reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act, which passed the Senate in August and would increase funding to schools that serve healthier foods. It doesn't go far enough, but it's a step in the right direction.

School lunch image via Flickr user SpecialKGB, CC 2.0
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