Editorial: A step toward healthful lunches? Editorial: A step toward healthful lunches? (September 01, 2004)

But budget-tight Palo Alto schools can only go so far in combating a societal problem fueled by peer culture, family patterns and massive marketing
Even God, as the story goes, had trouble enforcing dietary restrictions -- though Adam and Eve lived in the original organic garden.

So it's no wonder that the Palo Alto Unified School District has been struggling in one form or another since the early 1990s with the issue of how to get children and teens to eat more healthful lunches.

Pushed by a re-energized Healthy School Lunch Committee, the school board Aug. 24 adopted a policy to ban sodas and ice cream from lunch menus of elementary and middle schools. It deferred until next July the trickier issue of the nature and quality of food served at Gunn and Palo Alto high schools.

A new urgency behind the effort comes from recent attention to a national "obesity epidemic" in children -- nearly one of three children are reported as severely overweight. While the severity is lower in Palo Alto, the ratio of excess-weight students still runs close to one in four or five, with an even higher percentage classed as "unfit" in terms of basic physical abilities.

One main local constraint to moving toward better lunches in recent years has been budgetary. District officials struggled to defeat a state plan to appropriate millions from basic-aid districts, including Palo Alto, and still faced plummeting property-tax revenues after the dot-com bust of 2001.

An effort in 2002 to go to organic lunches failed due to problems with suppliers and a price per lunch of $4.50 compared to the usual lunch cost of $2.50. The district's overall food-service provider, Sodexho Marriott Services, received criticism for making promises it couldn't keep.

But there's a big gap between striving for lower-fat, lower-sugar foods and going to full-out organics, even if only a few offerings met that standard -- the phrase "so-o Palo Alto" comes to mind.

It seems a no-brainer that on-campus vending-machine be stocked with water or juices instead of caffeine-laden, high-sugar sodas, and that teachers should act as role models while on campus. Doesn't anyone wonder if there's a link here to the great concern about childhood hyperactivity and attention-deficit-disorder in recent years?

The new policy for the lower-grade schools closely follows state requirements to improve the quality and healthfulness of student lunches, and thus will likely finally result in changes that stick.

Sodexho's contract also is soon to expire, and the district is going out to bid.

One option is for the district to resume doing its own food service -- using as a model several other districts in California who are providing good-tasting, nutritious food and are in the black. One such operation, in the Ventura Unified School District, is financially ahead with high utilization and "our kids are actually eating healthy food -- what a concept," Food Service Director Sandra Vanhouten noted.

Another district with its own operation, Folsom Cordova Unified School District, is in the black on a $4 million per year operation. A decade ago, the district was losing about a quarter million annually on a tranditional food-service operation, Food Service Director Al Schieder reports.

A new committee of students, teachers and administrators -- chaired by Sandra Pearson, who retired last June as principal of Palo Alto High School -- is due to report to the school board in January on the process of hiring a contractor who would be able to adhere to district dietary guidelines.

This, plus continued work by those involved in the Healthy School Lunch Committee and meaningful student involvement, is critical to the success of the near-term policy decision and new vendor -- and will be even more important for the bigger picture.

Yet if the community focuses narrowly on the school-lunch nutrition (as important as that is) it will entirely miss the core question: How can we foster better food and lifestyle choices by children, teens and families?

When President Harry Truman enacted the National School Lunch Program in 1946, he declared: "Nothing is more important in our national life than the welfare of our children, and proper nourishment comes first in attaining this welfare."

His words ring true today. It should not be either/or between education and good lunches, and it's long past time for the district to move ahead in this area -- but with extensive student involvement and a strong element of education.

E-mail a friend a link to this story.