Let's lay down the ground rules: Your child's school meal can be healthful if you make it healthful.

By Joyce Gemperlein
For The Inquirer

It is both a badge of honor and a scourge when children come home from school decrying cafeteria food.

On one hand, parents can take pleasure in the notion that they have cultivated their precious little ones' taste buds so well that processed, heat-and-serve chicken nuggets, tater tots and pizza are offensive. If your children reject such meals it implies that they are being brought up right in a world where, as writer Erma Bombeck once observed, most kids won't eat any food that "hasn't danced on TV."

Of course, there is also the lesser and embarrassing possibility that a child who refuses to buy lunch is balking at participating in a slow revolution - taking place in some of the more enlightened school cafeterias - that aims to substitute fruits, vegetables and whole-grain food for processed entrees, desserts, and salty or sweet junk food.

No matter the reason, schoolchildren who turn up their noses at the lunches that schools provide will have to carry one there.

Realizing this, my friend Sharon, who must be at a job at 8:30 a.m. and dreads the idea of thinking up and executing meals at any time, spent the months before her son, Alex, entered kindergarten muttering:
"Pleasepleaseplease like the school's lunch. Pleasepleaseplease like the school's lunch."

For the many Sharons of the world, packing lunch competes with sex, drugs, the Internet, and endlessly asking "Where did you last see your retainer?"
as the most trying aspects of child-rearing.

Fortunately or unfortunately, there is a healthful-lunch bandwagon ready for the boarding. Although the issue of school lunches with a "yuck" factor has been around for decades, more and more school districts are resolving to do something about their healthiness problem.

As they do this difficult work, people like Ann Cooper are reminding parents that healthful eating has to happen in a lunch box, too.

In her new book, Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children (Collins), Cooper, an accomplished chef who has assumed control of the Berkeley, Calif., Unified School District's central kitchen, points out that a growing revolution to reform school cafeterias nationwide can't work without parental involvement.

Parents must pressure the federal government to spend much more than $2 for each lunch and end a reliance on processed food from huge corporations. In addition, parents must begin reforming the food that is prepared in their own homes. This includes take-to-school lunches.

Cooper and her colleagues know that, as bad as some cafeteria lunches are - full of processed food - many homemade lunches are worse, often consisting of sugary "health" bars, candy and potato chips.
Nutritionists say children's eating habits begin at or before birth.

American children, for the most part, have narrow palates - and it is in large part the fault of parents who are either too timid to try new foods or have ceded the control of meals to stubborn children. In countries throughout the world, though, children eat jalapenos, dried fish, curry, kimchee, radishes, and lots of different fruits and vegetables almost from birth.

Jeannine Moloo, a registered dietitian and spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association, says children can be notoriously fussy about food if they are not exposed to a wide variety of tastes when they are young. It is best, she says, to begin introducing new food, especially ethnic tastes unfamiliar to your own heritage, well before they are 8 or 9 years old.

And giving a child a Fluffernutter sandwich in a lunch box every day because "it's all that he will eat" is the sort of attitude that gets Cooper going.

"Whose fault is that?" she asks. "Who are the parents here? Why have we abdicated long-term healthiness to our children?"

Every school day Cooper and her staff make 90 percent of the district's 4,000 lunches, 2,000 breakfasts and 1,500 snacks from scratch. No or low preservatives and trans fats. They monitor sugar and sodium content. Yes, at first many children protested the absence of the processed foods that are familiar to them and balked at food - in many cases, vegetables - that they had never been served at home. Gradually, that is changing.

Cooper believes every parent can do the same to broaden tiny palates. She points out in Lunch Lessons that research has shown that children over age 6 months "can eat just about anything as long as foods are introduced one at a time to rule out potential allergies.... It's increasingly clear that eating habits are formed very early in life - perhaps even earlier than previously recognized, and keeping children on a diet of bland, simple foods may cause them to seek less variety in their diets as they grow older, which can ultimately lead to problems with obesity."

If parents begin serving vegetables and putting them into lunch boxes as a matter of course, children will gradually view them as ordinary, not as challenges from an episode of Fear Factor.

And if you are thinking you'll sneak a Twinkie or cup of chocolate pudding into your child's lunch box to assuage him? Don't get Cooper started.

"There should be no dessert" at school lunches or in a lunch box, she says.
"Fresh fruit should always be available. It is ridiculous to believe that a child needs dessert at lunch every day. Period."

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