School efforts stress healthier appetites
EDUCATION: Fresh produce at lunch and lessons on nutritious snacks get the word out.
10:00 PM PST on Saturday, January 13, 2007

By SHIRIN PARSAVAND
The Press-Enterprise

Some Inland schools are making inroads toward healthier eating.

Children at six Riverside elementary schools are choosing food from salad bars that feature locally grown lettuce, carrots, broccoli and kiwi. Elementary school students in San Bernardino are spending class time trying new fruits and vegetables and making snacks such as yogurt fruit parfaits and baked sweet-potato chips.

Among the most ambitious efforts in the Inland area to change how schools feed children is the Riverside Unified School District’s Farm to School program, one of 30 in California and 950 around the country.

Rodney Taylor, the district’s nutrition services director, began one of the nation’s first Farm to School programs when he worked for the Santa Monica-Malibu district. In 1997, he replaced wilted lettuce and filmy carrots with fresh produce from a local farmer’s market.

Taylor started Riverside’s first Farm to School salad bar in 2005 at Jefferson Elementary School. So far, he has focused on schools in low-income neighborhoods, where more children tend to be overweight, but the new Mark Twain Elementary School, which opened last August in a more affluent neighborhood, also has a salad bar.

Two San Bernardino County farms — one in Bloomington and the other in San Timoteo Canyon — truck in produce for the salad bars.
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Anthony Gonzalez, 6, examines a kiwi during lunch at Riverside’s Jefferson Elementary School. Riverside Unified is one of 30 districts in California and 950 nationwide taking part in the Farm to School effort.

On average, one-fourth of the children choose the salad bar each day instead of a hot lunch.

Alongside the fruit and vegetables there are hard-boiled eggs, cheeses, tuna, pepperoni or other meats. Children say they like being able to choose what they eat, but sometimes workers have to prod them to make the best choices.

“I don’t see any greens,” Taylor told one girl while helping on the lunch line recently at Jefferson. The girl had carrots, rotini pasta and pepperoni on her plate. “You should really get some broccoli or lettuce. Go back and get a little for me.”

By 2009, Taylor plans to have Farm to School salad bars in all 30 of the district’s elementary schools.
Davidson Elementary School in San Bernardino holds monthly lessons to introduce children to unfamiliar fruits and vegetables and to teach them to prepare healthy snacks.

San Bernardino County Health Department nutritionists recently visited to show children how to assemble a snack of banana, pears, granola and vanilla yogurt and to teach them how to recognize the amount of sugar in foods.

Some parents used to regularly bring their children McDonald’s and Taco Bell lunches, said Ira K. Gray, assistant principal at Davidson.

Now, the school allows that only on birthdays or special occasions.

No Inland campuses have gone as far as the Berkeley Unified School District. It won national attention when chef Ann Cooper began revamping its lunch program. Cooper tossed out prepackaged burritos, began serving hamburgers and hot dogs made from grass-fed animals, introduced pizza with whole-grain crust and put salad bars in every school.

She faced initial resistance from the children, some of whom signed a petition to get rid of the veggie pizza. Once she started grinding the vegetables into the sauce, it gained acceptance.

Cooper, who wrote of her experiences in “Lunch Lessons,” said adults must teach children to like healthy food.

“If kids don’t like math, do we say, ‘We have to rethink having math?’ Or do we say, ‘We as adults know the kids have to learn math and English?’

“Why food and nutrition would be dealt with differently is beyond me,” she said.

Reach Shirin Parsavand at 951-893-2109 or sparsavand@PE.com