[Obesity Discussion]

All this would have to be undone, worked around or tweaked by the Agatston team. It declared that the first year — August 2004 through June 2005 — would be a trial year to see whether healthier food could actually be identified and served. The first step was to ban white bread and Tater Tots, replacing them with whole-wheat bread and sweet-potato fries. Other favorites, like turkey with gravy or pork with gravy, went too. There was “almost a mutiny,” Almon says, when she took away Lucky Charms and Fruit Loops at breakfast, replacing them with Total and Raisin Bran.

At first the children responded as Palmore predicted they would — they threw out their school-supplied food and started to bring lunch from home. For a brief time, the participation rate went down by 50 percent, but it did not stay there long enough to activate the reimbursement clause Palmore put in the contract.

Over the course of the rest of the trial year, Almon and Hollar kept replacing and limiting things. No more ketchup. Lower-fat hot dogs. Unbreaded chicken patties. Some of these changes were made possible through shuffling — changing those orders that could be changed at the last minute and moving cans and boxes of nonreturnable food around. “Since the HOPS schools weren’t allowed the Tater Tots, we sent them to the other schools, who were more than happy to trade them for their commodity cans of sweet potatoes,” says Palmore, who admits to a personal dislike of sweet potatoes.

Some changes were made by spending Agatston foundation money. During the first year, the supplemental costs paid by Agatston were about $2,500 a month, and they reflected facts like these: a white hamburger bun costs 7 cents, while a whole-wheat hamburger bun costs 11 cents; pizza with a white refined-flour crust costs 31 cents a serving, while pizza with a whole-wheat crust costs 35 cents; a white sandwich wrap costs 23 cents, while a whole-wheat sandwich wrap costs 26 cents; breaded chicken strips are a mere 18 cents a serving, while grilled chicken strips are a whopping 65 cents.

In addition to shuffling and spending, there was compromising. Those sweet-potato fries that replaced the Tater Tots? They were commercially cut and frozen, then baked in school ovens, rather than cut fresh from actual potatoes, a step the kitchen staff was simply not set up to do. And the sweet-potato purée that Hollar handed out in the lunchroom? The vanilla was artificial, because “that’s what was stocked on the shelves,” Almon says. And liquid margarine — made with soybean oil — and some sugar were used, because, Almon says, “if they don’t eat it, what have we accomplished?”

In the end, there were also changes that simply weren’t made, particularly during that first year. “We started out not adhering to the dictate of the HOPS programs to the letter,” Palmore says. The most striking (and contentious) example of this compromise was cheese.

Almon modified existing recipes with low-fat cheese. Palmore and her school kitchen managers were adamant that they could not get a low-fat version from any of their usual suppliers. Almon kept insisting and eventually was told that in fact a low-fat product had been found and was being used, though at added cost — the lower-fat version costs 5.6 cents a slice while the higher-fat one is 1.6 cents. But Hollar paid an unannounced visit to the kitchens one day in spring 2005 and found that at least on that occasion the old cheese product — something Almon calls “full fat” and Palmore calls “whole milk” — was being used instead.


An assumption is something you don’t realize you’ve made until someone else states a conflicting one. The HOPS vision of a healthy school lunch is based on an assumption that became clearer as the trial year gave way to the full program. Specifically, it is a vision based on the system as it exists, with large vendors supplying packaged items that are essentially assembled and reheated (rather than created or cooked).

Listening to Almon talk about evolving food products at the yearly School Nutrition Association meeting in Los Angeles this year makes that clear: “The difference between what was available two years ago and what is available this year is a world of difference,” she says. “Everybody is making cookies with whole grains. Pretzels with whole grains. The breakfast burritos, the tortillas, everything is whole grain. Even the French toast.” She and Hollar were particularly pleased that Smuckers, which has long made something called Uncrustables — premade peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches with the crust already removed — now markets a version with transfat-free peanut butter (though Almon wishes it came on whole-wheat bread).

This comfort with premade food products is a legacy of the South Beach Diet, which, though full of recipes that start from scratch, is also not shy about steering dieters to Paul Newman’s Own Lighten Up Italian salad dressing or Kraft’s entire line of South Beach branded snacks. “Things can be nutritious and come from a package,” Almon says. “It depends what’s in the package, not the fact that there is a package.”

Part of the decision to rely on such foods is simply logistical. School lunchrooms are no longer set up to actually cook but rather to reheat — hence the Kissimmee staff’s inability to slice sweet potatoes by hand.

Just as big a reason for this reliance on packaged foods, however, is what Palmore calls “the acceptance question.” In other words, what are children willing to eat? It is no coincidence that school cafeteria menus (and the children’s menus at restaurants, for that matter) are virtually identical. Pasta. Chicken nuggets. Pizza. Hamburger. French fries. The task of tackling those expectations can feel overwhelming at best.

“Children are so conditioned to these items — the hamburgers, the cheeseburgers, the pizza,” Almon says. “To make a healthier version of familiar things makes sense.”

however. Across the country, in Berkeley, the chef Ann Cooper questions the idea of making healthier versions of flawed foods. In her book “Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children,” she asks whether healthy food should simply mirror existing unhealthy patterns and concludes: “We just don’t need an organic Twinkie. We don’t!”

Cooper, who spent years impressively overhauling the menu at the select Ross School in East Hampton, N.Y., began trying to do the same thing at the 16 schools in the Berkeley public school district starting last October. Her six-figure salary is being paid by the Chez Panisse Foundation, which also finances, in Berkeley, Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School’s Edible Schoolyard kitchen garden, a creation of Alice Waters, who all but started the organic food movement in the United States 30 years ago.

It is a common assumption that the existence of programs like the Edible Schoolyard means that Berkeley students already eat well, but when Cooper arrived last fall, the district’s menu looked like menus everywhere with their fried and fatty foods. One item that Cooper makes particularly merciless fun of is the Uncrustables sandwich — the same one that caught Almon’s eye. She thawed one and kept it on display on a desk where, because of its preservatives, “it looked exactly the same months later,” she said while giving a tour of a high-school lunchroom.

In the time since she came aboard, a salad bar has been added to every school, with ingredients that include strawberries, organic chicken or turkey, sunflower seeds, fresh avocado and other eclectic in-season items in addition to the usual lettuce, tomato and cucumber. Ninety-five percent of the food was processed when she arrived, she says, and now 90 percent is fresh and cooked from scratch. And those foods are not what one would expect on a school menu, including choices like chicken cacciatore, organic sushi and organic chicken raised on a nearby farm. The foods she does not make on the premises, foods like fresh tamales and muffins and vegetable calzones, are brought in from small local businesses.

Even here, however, the “acceptance question” arises. When Cooper first removed nachos from the middle-school menu, the percentage of students buying lunch in the cafeteria dropped significantly. Cooper quickly restored the nachos, using transfat-free chips and Cheddar cheese — from an area cheesemaker, not an industrial processor — the equivalent, she concedes, of an organic Twinkie. And she did not even try to change the pizza her first year. “I just can’t take everything away,” she says. “Or they will walk out.

“Change is never easy. And if it’s hard for us, imagine how hard it would be in Oklahoma or Omaha.”


Or Osceola. The Agatston team is fully aware that its goals are less ambitious than those in Berkeley, but that is an inevitable difference between the two districts, Hollar says. Whereas 55 percent of Osceola’s students receive free or reduced-cost lunches, only 41 percent of Berkeley students do. And while Osceola charges $1.50 to those who pay full price at the elementary school, Berkeley charges $2.50. And then there is another, immeasurable but distinct difference — the parents. Children are not the only ones who bring expectations to food, and Almon says, “I just think there is a different culture around eating healthy in California than there is here, and we have to account for that.”

In fact, she and Hollar have come to believe that the greatest resistance to nutritional change comes not from the children but from the grown-ups, starting with the very administrators who invited HOPS in. Palmore, for instance, was ambivalent from the start about much of the suggested change. She told a CBS News reporter, on the air, that she would prefer the whole-wheat rolls if they had gravy. She made a notable “yuck” face in one conversation she and I had about sweet potatoes, and she expected rebellion or worse if they were served to the students. “I was surprised that they were eating the sweet-potato fries,” she said a few months after they appeared in place of Tater Tots on the menu. “That is not a child-friendly food. I was surprised they ate the brown bread.” And she made that same face again.

Many among the rest of the staff (and among the general population, one might add) also seem to have complex relationships with food. To walk through any of the HOPS schools is to be struck by the fact that there are few adult role models when it comes to good nutrition and exercise. Several teachers approached Almon during the year and asked her if she would lead a group that wanted to start on the South Beach Diet. But while many attended the first meeting, far fewer made it to the second or any of the monthly meetings after that.

Nor are staff members the only ones with food issues. Some parents wondered why their children were being put on the South Beach Diet. (“It’s not a diet,” Agatston says of HOPS. “It’s just healthy food.”) Others expressed concern that the new way of eating would be liked too much by their children. After the schoolwide assembly to introduce the full program last September, one frantic parent called to report that her child was refusing to eat anything in the house that was not healthy. “I can’t afford to throw everything away,” the mother said. “Please tell her to eat.”

And even parents who say they enthusiastically endorse better food in schools often play the role of saboteurs. One January afternoon, two girls, both in the fourth grade, sat outside at Kissimmee Charter, each having a McDonald’s hamburger, French fries and a shake. Inside, the rest of the students were eating turkey burgers on whole-wheat buns. The girls had to dine in the garden because junk food is banned from the school. Sitting with them while they ate was the person who supplied the lunch — the mother of one of the girls.