Classroom Programs Teach Kids Merits of Peas, Carrots

Classroom Programs Teach Kids Merits of Peas, Carrots

EAST HARLEM, N.Y. -- A group of second-graders in Ms. Ulloa's class at P.S. 101 here are using plastic knives to hack away at mounds of fresh red peppers, green onions, mushrooms and carrots.

Today's lesson is vegetable fried rice. Smells of garlic and ginger waft from a pot on a hot plate, as the children pore over workbooks, crafting a story about rice and coloring pictures of rice farmers. "A lot of these vegetables they've seen, but they don't know their names," says Johanna Ulloa, their teacher. "Considering they are from the city, and not from the suburbs or the country, a lot of times they aren't given these foods at home. They aren't exposed to plant foods."

A WEIGHTY ISSUE   Should schools serve McDonald's, Pizza Hut and other fast food as part of their lunch programs? Participate in the Question of the Day1.

In a nation where 26% of adults are obese, the battle to get kids to eat more vegetables has turned into a public health mission. Several grass-roots groups are working inside classrooms to introduce children weaned on french fries and pizza to the taste of lentils and fresh broccoli. This class is CookShop, a cooking and nutrition program funded with grants from the Agriculture Department that the Community Food Resource Center, a nonprofit advocacy group, brings regularly into seven public elementary schools in East Harlem.

No one is suggesting that the average kid will pass up a McDonald's cheeseburger in favor of, say, broccoli rabe. But nutrition specialists say that a child who has picked a tomato, sliced a carrot, stirred a pot of vegetable chili or selected ingredients for his own salad is more likely to put these things in his mouth than one who has some steaming broccoli dumped onto his lunch plate by a cafeteria worker.

In earlier CookShop lessons, students at P.S. 101 learned that cauliflower and broccoli are flowers, and radishes are roots. They wrote letters to regional farmers. They visited an organic farm on Staten Island. Parents get perks for helping out: Each mom or dad who attends 10 or more of the 12 CookShop sessions gets a free half-share in a local farm -- an investment with a face-value of $250 that pays dividends of spinach, potatoes, carrots and other fresh produce over the course of several months.

Soon Ms. Ulloa is passing out plastic bowls of rice and vegetables, forks and chopsticks (for those who dare). The children dig in, and speak out. "Everything tastes good to me!" exclaims eight-year-old Zenia Whyte, a ladylike elf in red leather pants and gold hoop earrings, who puts away one bowl and then another. Not so with classmate Emauja Mitchell, who takes a forkful and runs for the wastebasket to spit out. "That's nasty!" she declares. She sits back down, watches the other kids munching away and soon decides to give her bowl a second chance.

CookShop and several other programs nationwide are demonstrating how food-and-nutrition education could be part of the classroom curriculum, an approach that obesity-prevention experts are increasingly advocating. Making lunch part of schools' educational mission, instead of an ancillary service, could help remove the economic pressures that drive lunch programs to serve pizza and french fries. That would add another drain on the already-beleaguered education budget. But the ounce of education about obesity prevention could be worth pounds of future treatment for obesity-related ills, advocates say.

"Kids will eat foods their parents would swear they'd never touch," says Antonia Demas, a food activist and consultant in Trumansburg, N.Y. Her nutrition curriculum, Food Is Elementary, is currently in use in about 20 schools and combines elements of math, science, nutrition and cooking. In the family, Ms. Demas says, food can be a reward, a punishment, a weapon. But in the classroom, "you can take the emotion away," she says. "It becomes cool to eat the weird stuff."

One key to making fruits and vegetables palatable to the younger palate is to not make them boring, says Lisa Kingery, manager of the CookShop program. "We don't weigh them down with a lot of information about fat and nutrients." One week, the children prepared apple snacks, dipping apple wedges in peanut butter, plain yogurt and chopped nuts. The lesson seemed to stick. "When my mother isn't home and there's nothing to eat, I get the CookShop book and make apple snacks," says Sidiki Diarra, a string bean of a boy who definitely isn't suffering from childhood obesity.

The programs try to demonstrate that eating fresh food is an experience to be savored -- a novel idea to children who, in some schools, get as little as 20 minutes to move through the lunch line and eat. Meredith Taylor, manager of the food-service training portion of the CookShop program, says some schools have six or eight people cooking and serving lunch to 1,000 or more children in the space of two hours.

Alarmed at the sight of so many overweight youngsters, Ms. Demas owns up to another more subversive goal: "I'm trying to get kids to dislike fast foods and processed foods," she says. "If you develop a taste for whole foods then the taste of artificial foods -- the chemicals, salts and fats -- becomes really unpleasant."

Write to Laura Bird at laura.bird@wsj.com²

Updated June 14, 2002 12:44 a.m. EDT