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| Cameron Jones and Ben Vue, Hazel Park Middle School students, during an early lunch period Wednesday at Hazel Park Middle School. Ryan Rodgers/East Side Review |
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| Top, Sonya Navarro, a Hazel Park Middle School student, sips chocolate milk Wednesday afternoon during an early school lunch.
Just above, Terri Bellovich and Tia Williams talk shop behind a grill of warming hamburgers at Harding High School. |
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Special report: Part 1
An apple a day?
School lunch menus have changed with the times. But have our kids?
Scott Nichols & Katy Zillmer
news editor & staff writer
As he munches away at his pizza in the Hazel Park Middle School cafeteria, Cameron Jones stops and ponders the reporter's query.
What would he eat for lunch if he were at home?
"Cereal. Reese's Pieces cereal," he says with a laugh.
Most of the students eating pizza or chicken sandwiches at Jones' table and the one adjacent also take at least a couple bites of the fruit and vegetable options for the day, including a fruit cup and apple and orange sections.
But the story of what they'd be eating if they had the option of going home is nearly all the same.
For Jones and a few others, like Sonya Navarro, cereal would probably be the lunch of choice. Nathan Olinger says he'd probably cook up some ramen noodles. Devon Jackson, with leftovers on his mind, says his choice would be chili. And for Amelia Ramos, it'd be her old after-school standby.
"Probably a peanut butter-jelly sandwich. Or straight peanut butter," Ramos says, then getting into an argument with Jones over whether PBJ would qualify as part of the meat group because of its protein.
Making the right choices
Despite the best efforts of school lunch ladies across the state, a recent University of Minnesota nutrition study by doctoral student Nicole Larson indicates that since 1999 Minnesota teens in transition from middle school to high school have been eating fewer fruits and vegetables as they age.
Looking at data from 944 boys and 1,161 girls who participated in the study in school in 1999 and then five years later through the mail, Larson's Project EAT study found that teens heading from middle school to high school decreased their consumption of fruits and vegetables by almost one whole serving. Between high school and college, or "early adulthood," a similar decrease took place.
According to the study, mid-adolescent girls in 2004 consumed almost one fewer serving per day than girls the same age back in 1999. And mid-adolescent boys' consumption of fruits and veggies dropped by a half-serving over the same period.
Those results should be of concern to not just to students but school officials and parents, too, says Larson.
"Fruit and vegetable intake ... is so important for nutrition during this life stage - as well as through your entire life - to prevent chronic disease," she says.
Dietary guidelines formulated by the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services encourage two cups of fruit and two and a half cups of vegetables each day, based on a standard yardstick of a 2,000-calorie diet.
Pass the peas, please
Although Larson's study doesn't include the reasons behind the teens' decreased fruit and vegetable consumption, she does note that there's a solution to the problem.
"For teens to eat fruits and vegetables, they need to be available and they need to be the easy choices," she says.
St. Paul School's massive Nutrition Services Department, in charge of keeping students in their greens, is trying to offer those choices.
As kids hit middle school, and begin to have the option of controlling their own dietary intake, they also begin to face the added burdens of puberty, says Dawn George, the Nutrition Services manager in charge of the district's 13 middle schools, 11 elementary schools, and 12 alternative learning sites.
As body image becomes more important as children age, it also becomes the dietary engine driving many the food choices of both boys and girls, says George, adding that for girls, that translates into common worries over body fat.
George says that the school lunch choices have improved dramatically since 1981, her first year in Nutrition Services.
"Way back in 1981, kids didn't have a choice" of what to eat, George says. Kids ate the lunch they were given, or they threw it away.
Perhaps not suprisingly, the tons of food thrown out dramatically decreased in the St. Paul Schools once students gained some control over their diet.
"We can't tell you how many servings of fruit and veggies kids eat," admits Nutrition Services head Jean Ronnei.
But since 2001, the district has been keeping track of the number of servings they take, she adds. And those numbers have been going up, at the same time that food waste has decreased.
Ronnei says that in 2001, the district found that students were eating 3.28 servings of fruit and vegetables a day. In 2005, students were eating even better - 3.89 servings a day.
Getting the message
It also doesn't hurt that the district is constantly plotting ever more ways to get kids to eat healthy.
In the past few years, a consultant was brought in to revamp menus in the high schools, even down to the color schemes and fonts of the menus.
And while students might consider grabbing an apple or orange, eating the whole thing in a hurried lunch period is something else entirely.
Nutrition services staff found this out once they had an epiphany: by offering apple or orange slices instead, students ate more and wasted less.
Of course, no matter how much some lunch ladies work, there's only so much responsibility they can shoulder. Some responsibilities begin and end at home with the parents, and how they instruct their children to eat healthily. Or not.
At both tables at Hazel Park, only one student, Mai Y. Her, says she'd probably be eating meat and vegetables for lunch if she went home. And that's only because her family is large enough that a pot of food is almost always at the ready.
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