School Puts Healthy Eating Lesson on the Menu

As parents and educators nationwide grapple with how to combat childhood obesity and improve children's nutrition, a private West Hollywood elementary school has been experimenting with an unusual, upscale solution:

Hot lunches from Whole Foods Market.

Think baked chicken simmered with Kalamata olives and roasted red peppers. Freshly prepared lasagna layered with organic, turkey-studded marinara sauce. Jewel-toned zucchini steamed until fork-tender.

Even the school turtle, Chuck, dines on day-old vegetables and fruit from Whole Foods.

"Everybody ends up picking up on that talk [about obesity] and how Americans need to eat healthier," said Andrew Rakos, general manager of Fountain Day School, where tuition runs $850 per month.

"By helping children have a taste for whole foods and natural things instead of being soaked in salts and butters," Rakos said, "we're creating healthy bodies, healthy minds, healthy tastes."

Childhood obesity rates have been climbing for years, mimicking the expanding bulge of adults' waistlines. In 1980, the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention counted as overweight -- its most serious categorization for children -- 7% of those ages 6 to 11. By 2004, that figure had more than doubled to 18.8%.

School districts around the country have responded by axing lucrative soda contracts, booting junk food from campus vending machines and revamping their lunch menus. Some schools, notably the Berkeley middle school adopted by food guru Alice Waters, have begun planting campus gardens and using the harvest in school lunches.

That impulse has taken root locally, too. In the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District, for example, campuses feature farmers market produce in their salads. Los Angeles Leadership Academy, a charter school in Koreatown, boasts a scratch kitchen from which sugar, refined flour and red meat are exiled.

A collaborative of California growers keeps salad bars at public schools from Ventura to Compton stocked with fresh fruit and vegetables. And students at Normandie Avenue Elementary in South Los Angeles hope to use the yield from the vegetable beds and fruit trees they planted in the same way.

But education and health experts, who have warned for years that obesity increases the risk of conditions such as Type 2 diabetes, say few schools have taken the tack adopted by Fountain Day.