Food fight.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Comment - Healthy foods for children - Column

My kids' school is awash in fresh fruits and vegetables this year. We're lucky. The school is just one of a handful in our community that received a federal Fresh Fruits and Vegetables grant. These are available through the USDA for schools with mainly low-income students. We spend Sunday mornings buying produce at the local farmers' market, a few blocks from our school. On Monday nights, parents get together at a church across the street from the school to wash and chop the produce. Then we load it in the school fridge so the fourth and fifth graders can pass it out three mornings a week.

As labor intensive as this whole process is, it is intensely rewarding. Watching the kids gobble up watermelon on the playground or try cherry tomatoes for the first time in class--and hearing them say, "Cool, green beans!"--is a big lift.

Many of the kids who are getting this snack are not familiar with raw fruits and vegetables. Some have never seen a flesh tomato before, let alone some of the more exotic veggies we are trying this year, such as jicama and kohlrabi.

Certainly they are not getting that sort of thing at lunch in school.

For years, parents in our school district and around the nation have been complaining about the deep fried French toast sticks, hot dogs, and chicken nuggets.

School lunch programs everywhere in the United States are under tight budgetary pressures. "The big issue is money," Frank Kelly, the director of the Madison Metropolitan School District's food services department, told the Wisconsin State Journal recently. "You can't serve gourmet food for $3 a lunch. We're squabbling over pennies for meals."

But there is another issue, too, and that is a cultural and ideological one.

For Kelly and a lot of other people who manage our school lunch programs, there is a real sense of antagonism toward what they perceive as a bunch of high-income, helicopter moms with too much time on their hands--that is, the folks who want the lunches to be healthier. As Kelly sees it, these people just don't understand kids.

"We have two customers--parents and kids--and they want totally different things," Kelly told the Wisconsin State Journal . "Parents want us to serve big chunks of vegetables, but kids won't eat that."

In this view, especially for kids on free and reduced hot lunch, eating something is too important to be fussy.

"We have to offer things kids will actually eat," Kelly says.

Any parent who has gotten caught in the trap of cooking...