When most adults talk about unhealthy behaviors among children, they often speak with a sense of removal and helplessness. Through a veil of nostalgia and carefully edited memories, they perceive the youngest generation as a perverse alien species, with values, interests and desires that they never experienced while growing up. In the case of childhood obesity, adults throw up their hands at a generation that would rather play Halo than tag or basketball, and that would rather starve than eat a green vegetable. This focus on how kids and their environments differ from past generations allows adults to deflect responsibility for an epidemic that is entirely of their own making.
Two separate events got me thinking about adult accountability for childhood obesity in the last several weeks. The first was the premier of "Food Revolution," a new show on ABC hosted by British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, who travels to the "unhealthiest city in America" hoping to help residents improve their eating habits. The second was the coalition of Chicago public school high school students that protested in front of the Chicago Board of Education about the prevalence of junk food in their cafeterias. A look at these stories reveals a depressing picture of adults who have allowed a reliance on cheap, convenient, prepackaged food to spiral out of control.
Jamie Oliver's misadventures at an elementary school in West Virginia vividly reveal the powerful, and adult-led, forces that the American kids are up against ignorance, misguided federal nutrition regulations, budgetary shortfalls, a preference for the status quo and myths about what kids will and won't eat. He encounters students who couldn't pick potatoes out of a lineup, but gleefully identify the French fries he presents. Administrators inform him that federal regulations count the pizza being served for lunch as a serving of grain and a serving of vegetables. Again and again Oliver is reminded that current cafeteria food is cheap, easy to prepare and popular with students as if these are valid justifications for serving children food that threatens their health and wellbeing.
The Chicago students originally engaged in the topic of cafeteria food through a school project. Reading their informed comments about healthy eating, though, it was clear that the project had become more than just another mandatory assignment. Learning about the content of their cafeteria food had truly disgusted them, and they believed in the importance of better nutrition.
One student, Courtney Caesar, connected his actions to concerns for his younger relatives in an interview with the Chicago Tribune: "We are seeing a lot of health problems in younger people today, and I don't want my nieces and nephews to have to deal with the same problems." Caesar and his peers firmly repudiate the oft-repeated claim that children simply won't eat healthier foods. The truth is that, empowered with information and provided with appealing, fresh options that are also healthy, young adults can and will make smart food choices
When schools turned to outside vendors to provide cafeteria food in the 1980s, they sacrificed their children's health for budget savings and expediency. Thirty years ago, the full effects of this surge in sugary, calorie-and-additive-laden food were not fully understood. Today, we know the dangers of such products, and yet efforts to remove them from the nation's lunchrooms have been unacceptably slow. Administrators are reluctant to direct more of their already scarce resources towards improving cafeteria food, and it is easy to hide behind claims that children won't eat healthier foods, as the administrators that Oliver encounters do.
If the goal of education is to provide students with the groundwork for a successful future, then this reluctance to overthrow the lunchroom status quo does students a grave disservice. Researchers have shown that future eating habits are highly affected by childhood diets, and health complications that result from long-term obesity can have a devastating impact on quality of life. Any calculation of success is meaningless unless it considers quality of life. Healthier meals aren't cheap, but when the stakes are so high, schools cannot afford to skimp. Adults who would rather blame lazy, vegetable-loathing kids for the obesity epidemic than find money for nutritional education and healthy cafeteria fare are condemning their children to an unhealthy and unhappy future.