Nutrition in Disguise

By Deborah Lehmann —

Part of the vision of the School Nutrition Association is nutrition education for all students. So I was a little surprised that a big focus at the association’s Legislative Annual Conference last weekend in Washington, DC was how to get children to eat healthy foods without knowing it.

On Monday, SNA members heard a presentation by Brian Wansink, the director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab and the author of “Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think.” Wansink spoke about how to design lunchrooms that “nudge students to make good decisions without them realizing.”

The logic is that many policies geared at healthy eating generate compensating behaviors. People tend to eat larger portions of foods that have “low-fat” labels, for example. And if a cafeteria outlaws desserts, students may react by bringing their own cookie-filled lunches or filling up on brownies after school when these foods aren’t restricted.

Cafeterias can do a lot to subliminally nudge students in the healthier direction, Wansink said. In one school, the lunch line tended to bottleneck right next to the French fries, so students often made impulse purchases while they were waiting in line. Moving the fries to the back of the line and placing fruit near the cash register nudged students to reach for something healthy instead.

Wansink also encouraged food service supervisors to pay attention to the names of dishes. One school experimented with three different names for the same pasta: “Mediterranean Pasta,” “Fresh Mediterranean Pasta” and “Healthy Mediterranean Pasta.” The “fresh” pasta and the plain Mediterranean pasta sold the same amount, but the “healthy” pasta was not nearly as popular.

“Who wants to eat something that’s healthy,” Wansink said. “If it’s healthy, it can’t possibly be good.”

That seems to be the view in school cafeterias across the country. Children don’t like “healthy” food, so lunchrooms cater to their tastes, disguising whole grains and reformulating the foods they do like to meet the nutrition guidelines. A food service supervisor from New Mexico who was sitting next to me at the conference said children already have strong tastes by the time they enter school, “so we basically have to serve them pseudo-fast-food.”

Indeed, that was one of the suggestions in a pre-conference session on how to stay in the black during tough economic times. Pat McCoy, vice president of field sales for Schwan’s Food Service and a member of the SNA board of directors, told members that students are good at “telling you what they like, what they don’t like, what they accept and what they don’t accept.”

“If you want to get the students into the cafeteria,” he said, “see what they’re doing and imitate it. If you go to the mall and the line for Panda Express is really long, have some curiosity about why that is.”

Erik Peterson, the association’s director of public awareness, said it’s common for SNA members to visit food courts on the weekends and observe what kids are eating so they can replicate those offerings at school — with a boost of nutrition in disguise, of course. The big buzz at the conference was whole-wheat pizza crust, and dozens of conference-goers told me about their success in keeping that little secret from their students.

“The lunch program has always been a reflection of what people are eating in general,” Peterson told me. “Programs are responsible for responding to customers because of the business motivation.”

And the truth of the matter is that school meal programs are self-funding. So while children are students throughout the day, they turn into customers in the lunchroom. So much for the educational component of school meals…