BY RYAN WILK

Jared, a plump 7-year-old with a curly mop of brown hair atop a round face, likes football and NASCAR. Sipping bottled water at a cafeteria lunch table, he tells me he loves cheese, too.

But he hates broccoli and anything else on his plate that smacks of wholesomeness.

As lunch rolls on, I learn Jared isn’t alone. Kids pick the lettuce from their hoagies and offer crudités – sliced peppers, cucumbers and carrots – as barter bait, though these items are the equivalent of toxic assets in the school-lunch marketplace.

Across the table, another 7-year-old even refuses to drink his low-fat chocolate milk. Luckily, consolation comes from across the table, from his older brother, an instructor at this weeklong summer sports camp I visited in June.

“We’ll go to Wendy’s on the way home,” he told his sibling.

We’ve got to change this mentality. With Congress close to passing the biggest health-care overhaul since the 1960s, this seems like a great time to start.

School lunch, or in Jared’s case, summer camp lunch, is the perfect arena to jump-start the transformation.

It’s no secret that fast-food joints have long been on pace to supplant the home kitchen as our meal providers of choice.

It’s also no secret where this trend has led us, as evidenced by our ever-expanding waistlines.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, about 17 percent of 6- to 19-year-olds are obese, compared with about 6 percent in the late 1970s.

The reach of these restaurants extends far beyond the colorful play sets that sit outside their walls.

Consider a few of the meals I saw in the few weeks I observed kids in their natural, parent-free environment: An incredibly dry cheeseburger joined on a Styrofoam tray by tater tots and the obligatory apple.

Fried chicken finger wrap, mozzarella sticks, canned ravioli in high-fructose corn- syrup laden sauce, the aforementioned hoagie – these meals could easily have come from a fast-food menu.

In other words, the very place that’s responsible for socializing kids for much of their childhood reinforces the marketing of the fast-food industry.

The result?

The daunted task of getting kids to eat their vegetables and other real, unprocessed foods gets even tougher.

What they eat at school looks a lot like the stuff at Wendy’s, or any of its ilk, and serving such food at school gives it a veneer of legitimacy.

What if, instead of serving fast-food facsimiles, schools were required to serve and engage students in the creation of real meals?

A number of schools, including those in California where the Legislature passed a healthy-lunch initiative in 2003, have already moved in this direction, planting gardens or switching to local purveyors of fresh produce.

We need to follow suit with a nationwide initiative.

Instead of perpetuating the view of food as something that comes from the freezer aisle or a Sysco truck, these efforts launch kids on a path to becoming curious and thoughtful eaters – the first step to a smarter, healthier food culture.

Once we’ve connected kids with the sources of their food, we’ve got to give them the tools to turn that food into something actually worth eating. And that something shouldn’t have to follow a strict set of nutritional guidelines, ones so arbitrary that in my cafeteria visit I saw a piece of American cheese slapped on top of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, ostensibly to meet a dairy quota.

Social studies classes could teach kids about global food cultures. Health teachers could incorporate brief cooking skills courses into their lessons. When the weather warms, gym could double as garden class, providing much-needed exercise and helping to put food on the lunch table.

Selling such wholesale changes to our food system in Congress or in state legislatures won’t come easy, especially since the battle pits small-scale farmers against the agribusiness behemoths who write much of the nation’s farm policy and reward their congressional allies handsomely come campaign time.

We shouldn’t let this stop us from trying.

In fact, the element essential to change, i.e. money, is there.

Just think what could be done if the $243 million Washington currently spends annually in direct or implicit subsidies to high-fructose corn-syrup producers went instead to small famers, community garden projects and school lunch programs focused on real food, as opposed to the highly processed food-like substances currently dominating menus.

The lunch table marketplace would be thrown into disarray, in a good way.



Ryan Wilk of Bedford is a 2009 Penn State graduate with a journalism degree and an occasional sports stringer for The Tribune-Democrat.