Retooling School Lunch

Sunday, Jun. 11, 2006 By AMANDA BOWER

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It's lunch hour on a luminous spring day at Berkeley High School's open campus--the perfect time to stroll to Extreme Pizza on nearby Shattuck Avenue, grab a Coke, order some pizza heaped with sausage and sit in the California sun. But in Berkeley High's lunchroom, lines of students are waiting patiently for--get this--cafeteria food. The longest line--now get this--is for salad. "This is only my second time eating school lunch," says junior Fennis Brown, 17. "I've always been put off by cafeteria food. But when I saw a friend eating it, I thought, That looks like it could come from any good restaurant. And it's cheaper and easier than eating off campus." Such words herald a small battle won in the big food fight erupting over U.S. lunchrooms. With childhood-obesity rates zooming--more than a three-fold increase in 30 years--schools are under pressure from parents, health officials and legislators to serve something more wholesome than greasy burgers and Tater Tots. Across the U.S., administrators are banning deep-fat fryers from cafeteria kitchens. Sodamakers agreed last month to stop selling their sugary, fizzy products in schools.

But bans are easy compared with changing how kids eat. How do you eliminate junk yet create meals that stay within tight budgets and satisfy fickle tastes? To find out, TIME went behind the lunchroom counter in two communities: Berkeley, Calif., where a well-funded program is converting students like Brown; and Shawnee, Okla., where financial and cultural pressures mean that change will come more slowly.

The Cafeteria Crusader When Ann Cooper, Berkeley schools' director of nutrition services, sees the long lines in Berkeley High's cafeteria, she races behind a counter, grabs a pair of tongs and starts mixing made-to-order, all-organic salads. Only after the rush does she let herself gloat. "Yes!" she shouts, pounding her palm with her fist. "We had to have four people making salads, and there was no one waiting for pizza! This happened organically. I couldn't take their pizza away from them, but now they're doing it themselves."

It didn't really happen organically. Over the past decade, Berkeley has become a paragon of school-lunch reform, thanks to the woman who helped hire Cooper--California cuisine pioneer Alice Waters. "We have to go into the public-school system and educate children when they're very young," says Waters, whose famed Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse, features seasonal meals made from local produce. Waters started educating children 10 years ago, creating the Edible Schoolyard at Berkeley's Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School. There, kids spend 90 minutes a week planting and harvesting produce and cooking their own healthy food.

Even with such initiatives in place, school food was far from the Chez Panisse ideal before Cooper came to town last October. The bread was white, the fruit canned, the meat highly processed. Now Cooper has inked deals with local suppliers for whole-wheat rolls, fresh produce, even grass-fed beef. Her staff of 53, accustomed to reheating food from outside vendors for the 4,000 lunches, 1,500 breakfasts and 1,500 snacks served each day, is learning to make meals from scratch.