No more Tater Tots for tots…?

Today's New York Times Magazine has a feature story about efforts to get American kids to eat healthier lunches in their school cafeterias — one program in Florida is the brainchild of the South Beach Diet's physician-tycoon— and whether it's doing the little fatties any good. It encapsulates the ongoing debate about what constitutes healthy food and how to get more of whatever that is to poor people in this country ... then convince them to eat it.

First of all, I had no idea how school cafeterias worked, despite my sister-in-law being in charge of one. So the contradictions of the School Lunch Act, which basically put the government in the school-food supply business and put schools in the restaurant business, were news to me. Twenty percent of school foods are filled by USDA commodities — everything the federal government buys a lot of and needs to pass along. For example: flour and sugar (white, and white) to fruits and vegetables (this category includes salsa, sweetened with corn syrup).

The Act also requires that lunchrooms must at least break even. Which means that calculations like these go into every menu: a white hamburger bun costs 7 cents vs. 11 cents for a whole-wheat one; breaded chicken strips are 18 cents per serving, while grilled chicken strips are 65 cents. How to get healthy choices, let alone tasty things, out of this equation is a big challenge.

The result of these tradeoffs, writer Lisa Belkin points out, is that most school lunches around the country depend on reassembling and reheating premade food, or serving things like Smuckers' Uncrustables — premade peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches with the crust already removed (now with transfat-free peanut butter! whoo!).

Some of the healthier-lunch people don't see a problem with that. “Things can be nutritious and come from a package,” argues the pilot project's creator. “It depends what’s in the package, not the fact that there is a package.”

In Berkeley, of course, that's considered heresy. “We just don’t need an organic Twinkie. We don’t!” cries the chef in charge of overhauling the Berkeley school district's lunches, whose six-figure salary is being paid by the Chez Panisse Foundation. Sounds like she's earning her money: the district went from serving 95% processed food to 90% fresh food, cooked from scratch.

Yeah yeah, you say, that's in California, where we have fresh produce popping up 24/7 just begging to be picked and served with some seared, pepper-crusted ahi tuna. Kids elsewhere in the country can't be expected to trade their HFCS-spiked Uncrustables for black-bean wraps without a fight. But it turns out that the real obstacle in Florida and the rest of America is the adults — the administrators who turn up their own noses at whole-wheat rolls, the parents who sell Chick Fil-A sandwiches in the parking lot to raise funds, the gift certificates to McDonald's that reward kids who make the honor roll.

It's about education vs. advertising. Billions of dollars are spent every year persuading us that we're too busy to cook, that an Uncrustables without transfats is now a healthy choice, that sugary cereal with Vitamin C added is just as good as eating an apple. Junk food is now more American than Mom's apple pie — when's the last time mom made the crust, or even the pie? Kindergarten is an excellent place to begin reprogramming appetites, but what we really need is a fruit and vegetable lobby in Washington that's at least as well funded as the beef one — $80 million per year thanks to a mandatory $1-per-head-of-cattle "contribution" from all ranchers — let alone Kellogg's.

OK. I don't have kids and I myself wouldn't have been caught dead eating broccoli (or anything even slightly green, for that matter) before the age of 15. How do you parents out there block the advertising and get your kids to eat healthily? Do you think such habits can be taught by schools if they're not followed at home? What's the solution?

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