Make healthy lunches a priority

Eight weeks after planting our victory garden, we are happily munching the fruits of our labors.

Oh, we're a long way from homesteading. The radishes, for example - planted too many, too late and too close together - have the shape and consistency of a No. 2 pencil.

But we've had our share of successes.

The corn was shoulder high on the Fourth of July, and that eerie stillness you feel is a coming storm of tomatoes. The lettuce was delicious and abundant, and the nightly addition of salad to our dinner plates has done us some good.

But that darn Michelle Obama upstaged me again.

At a recent White House event, kids harvested 73 pounds of lettuce, 12 pounds of peas and one cucumber from her South Lawn garden, the first since Eleanor Roosevelt's victory garden in the 1940s.

Obama said she wants to help those kids, and all of us, understand the connection between our eating habits and our health.

Not to be outdone, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has signed off on weekly summer gardening workshops at the People's Garden outside USDA's Washington headquarters.

But the kitchen garden can be only one strategy in the fight for better eating. Not everyone has the time, space or the inclination to grow vegetables.

That's one reason slow food advocates are ramping up efforts to change the way we feed our kids at school. The Slow Food USA organization is pushing for meaningful changes to the National School Lunch Program, which sets the standards for school lunches eaten by more than 30 million children each school day.

Iowa City slow-food guru Chef Kurt Michael Friese, a member of the Slow Food USA's national board of directors, told me he wants schools to serve fresh, local foods, to get rid of on-site vending machines and go one better than just offering a few healthier choices - serve healthier food across the board.

We teach our kids about nutrition in health class, he said, then march them down to the cafeteria where we feed them cheap meats, over-processed carbohydrates and corn syrup.

He's got a good point.

Naysayers say it would cost too much to serve healthier lunches, but I'm with Friese. It's a matter of priorities.

"If you can think of anything in the world more important for the health of our children, I'll be happy to sit down and listen," he said.

How much is it worth to you to raise a healthier generation of kids?