Even kids can love the salad bar

Toronto Star - August 27, 2003
by Carol Goar

He'd never tasted chickpeas before. He was sure he wouldn't like them.

"Try one," urged Joanne Porter of FoodShare, putting a single chickpea on the little boy's plate. He looked at it dubiously and went to sit with his classmates.

After a time, he put the unfamiliar vegetable into his mouth gingerly, ready to spit it out. Then his expression changed. He liked it.

Within minutes, other youngsters flocked to the salad bar, asking for chickpeas.

"That's how kids learn to choose healthy alternatives," Porter said.

Last year, she and her colleagues at FoodShare, a community agency dedicated to making nutritious food widely available, launched a pilot project at nine Toronto schools. They brought in a child-sized salad bar stocked with fruits, vegetables, grain products and a daily source of protein so kids could create a healthy lunch.

There were plenty of skeptics at first. What would a generation programmed to salivate at the sight of McDonald's golden arches, want with broccoli and arugula? How could fresh produce compete with hotdogs and chips? Why would kids eat foods they'd never seen at home?

"Initially, they are inclined to say no," Porter acknowledged. "So you let them sample. You make it fun to try new things. You talk about what they liked and what they didn't."

The program turned out to be the surprise hit of the 2002-2003 school year.

Parents came and joined their children for lunch. Volunteers — some who could barely speak English — bonded with their neighbours as they chopped, diced and served. Teachers and students ate together.

Lunchtime at the school became a community event.

This fall, five more schools are getting salad bars. FoodShare hopes to add another 15 schools in 2004.

To Debbie Field, executive director of the organization, the experiment proves three things:

Kids are willing to eat healthy foods, if they are presented appealingly.

Parents want their children to learn about good nutrition.

The battle against childhood obesity, teenage anorexia and classroom hunger is winnable.

"If every child in the city of Toronto had a salad bar lunch, they'd be filling most of their nutritional requirements, linking our schools to local farmers and finding out that eating together is a healthy social experience," Field said.

Money, of course, is the problem. Although FoodShare keeps the price of its salad-bar lunches down to $2 per student by using non-profit bulk produce and volunteer labour, that is still too expensive for Toronto's overstretched school nutrition program. It has $5 million a year to feed 65,000 students in 220 schools.

A national charity, Canadian Feed the Children, is underwriting the salad-bar initiative. But it cannot be expected to subsidize the expansion of the program to hundreds of schools. Nor is Field convinced that teaching healthy eating should be left to private charities.

She dreams of a national student nutrition program, funded by governments and open to every child, regardless of income or family circumstances. She envisages gardens in every school-yard. She would like to see low-cost farmers' markets in every neighbourhood. She believes healthy, affordable food is a basic human right.

But one of the lessons Field has learned, in her years as a social activist, is that big changes often begin with small innovations.

That is why FoodShare launched its salad bar program; why it established an organic garden on the grounds of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health; why it distributes 4,000 "Good Food Boxes" packed with fresh produce every month; and why it turns all its food scraps into rich, pleasant-smelling compost.

"Every experiment we're doing has large social policy implications," Field pointed out. "They just have to be ratcheted up."

There is one kind of government action that Field does not favour. She thinks a ban on junk food in schools (which provincial Liberal leader Dalton McGuinty is proposing) would be a mistake.

For one thing, it would make the prohibited foods more enticing. For another, it would be a case of adults imposing their will on kids, rather than communities coming together to make smart choices.

She and her partners at FoodShare are trying to build a grassroots movement of students, parents and educators to get rid of pop machines and candy dispensers, school by school.

They want to change what's going on in kids' heads, not just what's going into their mouths. That means teaching them to say no when they've had enough and helping them understand the importance of walking and running and playing outside.

Porter still encounters people who dismiss childhood obesity as the latest in a long string of media-fuelled health scares. She keeps hearing that salad bars are just a fad.

She urges the cynics to open their eyes. Kids like good food. They want healthy bodies. With a little encouragement, they'll decide that hummus is yummy and chickpeas are cool.