School lunches: working to provide healthful alternatives

From the first day of kindergarten to the last day of high school, parents place an inordinate amount of faith and trust in the school system to nourish their children in mind and body. Gary Hirshberg's faith in the system was tarnished one afternoon when he innocently asked his teenage son: "What did you have for lunch?" The answer: "Skittles, pizza ... and chocolate milk."

Hirshberg, champion of good health and president and CEO of the New Hampshire-based Stonyfield Farm yogurt company, had already taken on monumental issues such as the National Organic Standards and bovine growth hormones in milk. So when the issue of school lunches hit close to home, he used the same passion to create a program called Menu for Change, a grassroots effort to get healthful food choices in school lunch programs.

Uphill Battle

Taking on the American school lunch system is no small feat. Every day, more than 27 million children line up in school cafeterias to be served lunch that might include cheeseburgers and fries, pizza sticks with marinara sauce, pigs in a blanket or perhaps triangle-shaped fish. In high schools with open campuses where students are allowed to leave the grounds for lunch, school cafeterias compete with fast food restaurants. And for time-crunched students, there are always in-school vending machines loaded with potato chips, candy bars and Hirshberg's son's favorite, Skittles.

Changing the contents of those vending machines was Hirshberg's first target, but he couldn't do it alone. He garnered the help of his peers and Dorothy Hebert, executive director of Kids First, a Rhode Island training institute for healthy cafeterias and health education in schools, Hebert developed a set of nutritional guidelines and found three pilot schools willing to participate. When Hirshberg had more than a dozen products that fit Hebert's profile and had a distributor, United Natural Foods, a prototype vending machine was born.

To make the program really work, three obstacles had to be overcome: The food had to be affordable, the vending machines had to provide some revenue for the schools, and most of all, the food had to taste good, says Cathleen Toomey, vice president of Communications for Stonyfield. "Organic and natural [foods] carry a price," Toomey said, but everyone involved agreed to drop margins, keeping most items under a dollar, never exceeding $1.50. In addition, profits were shared between the schools and the contractors that fill the machines. Students solved the third hurdle by taste testing and deciding what to put in the machines. Students even came up with their own marketing and sampling program to get other kids interested in the program.

Pilot program vending machines have been placed in select California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and New York schools. And Stonyfield Farm is currently sponsoring a contest for a free healthy vending machine (see www.stonyfield.com for details).

School Lunch Report Card

Ask any parent and they'll tell you getting junk food out of schools is the first step to repairing a broken system. A Time/ABC poll showed that 64 percent of respondents believed that high calorie snacks and sweets in schools are equally responsible for childhood obesity as fast food restaurants. Research from Children's Hospital Boston links the rising rates of childhood obesity in part to soft drinks in school vending machines, citing statistics that a typical teenager gets 10 percent to 15 percent of daily calories from soft drinks, thus raising a child's risk of developing obesity by 60 percent.

"Soda machines are an easy way to distract kids away from eating healthy meals," says Michael Leidig, RD, LDN clinical research coordinator at Children's Hospital Boston.

In his practice, Leidig says that once kids are. educated and have both good-tasting and healthful foods available, they often make the right choice. Leidig's and his colleague's research challenges the notion that vending machines are in schools because junk food is all that kids will eat. The more likely reason that vending machines are so prevalent is the money they make. Toomey calls the relationship between junk food vendors and schools "a dance with the devil" because of the thousands of dollars they add to already low school coffers. For this reason, the healthful vending program doesn't demand that schools get rid of the usual junk food fare, just offer a choice--although five case studies analyzed by the Center for Science in the Public Interest show that schools that offer only healthful vending machines report double sales figures and reduced disciplinary actions.

Who Is Responsible?

If both students and parents want healthier foods in schools, then what's the holdup? An outdated system say school lunch activists. The United States Department of Agriculture's National School Lunch Program was designed in the 1940s to prevent childhood malnutrition due to a lack of available healthful foods following World War II.