NYTimes -- Eat Your Vegetables? Only at a Few Schools

Where hundreds of students were eating lunch, only five children took a green vegetable with the main course. Faced with bad-tasting canned green beans provided free by the federal government, children in New York City and Montgomery County opted out.

In his report on obesity in 2001, Dr. David Satcher, who was then the surgeon general, pinpointed school meals as one of the eight major areas where Americans should begin to battle fat. The report also discussed the disappearance of daily exercise from school programs — another culprit in the battle.

School principals have been cutting physical education classes and recesses to make time for academic courses. As a result, high school students taking daily physical education classes dropped to 29 percent in 1999 from 46 percent in 1991.

Eric Bost, the under secretary of agriculture for food and nutrition, defended the federal school lunch program in an interview and said that exercise was often the forgotten part of a health program.

"For me," Mr. Bost said, "the solution is threefold: increase the overall consumption of fruits and vegetables, increase physical activity and reduce consumption of other foods."

While Mr. Bost said too many soft drinks and cookies spoiled a balanced diet, he said he doubted that he would ask for a ban on soda vending machines in schools. Instead, he said, he may ask Congress to require that the machines include milk and flavored water.
The federal government could actually improve children's eating habits because the 4.7 billion school lunches served every year are prepared under federal nutritional guidelines.

Advocacy groups for children and the poor have asked Congress to add $1 billion to the school meals budget, a figure that could help wean schools from vending machines and invest in simple equipment to prepare fresh produce. But the Bush administration will ask for little or no increase in financing, said Mr. Bost, who added that he hoped to find additional money by weeding out students who officials say are ineligible for free or subsidized school meals. He said he did not know the number of those students but intended to look into the concerns.

This was going to go into my journal as a backup to complaining about the bad school lunches when I read further.