The building where Alice Waters wants the 900 students of Martin Luther King Middle School in Berkeley to eat their lunch is currently a construction site, surrounded by chain link fence, a sign that says No Trespassing, and piles of brick and rubble. Lying in the dirt and cement around its rim are remnants of student lunches: a discarded Styrofoam instantnoodles bowl, a paper fast-food wrapper smeared with mustard and ketchup, a potato chip bag, a juice box, a can of Coke, candy bar wrappers, a bottle of Gatorade. These are the kinds of lunches that Waters—co-founder of Chez Panisse and instigator of the "fresh-local-seasonable-sustainable" mantra that has revolutionized American cuisine—would like to see eradicated from the face of the earth, and they were eaten in a way she finds not just troubling but unequivocally wrong—shoveled in while perched on a series of stone steps under a cloudy sky with the din of construction in the background.

That will change in fall 2007 with the opening of the new 15,000-square-foot dining commons. Funded by a $10 million school bond measure and a one-time grant from the Chez Panisse Foundation, the building—now more than a year behind schedule—will be the central kitchen for the district’s middle schools and a showcase for Waters’s ideas about kids and food. There will be a professional teaching kitchen, where children can help prepare the meals they eat. The dining room will be airy and large, with multipaned windows on three sides; a peaked, copper roof like a Swiss chalet; and "reclaimed wooden furnishings," which the students will cover with tablecloths and real cutlery at mealtimes. In other words, it will embody the vision that Alice Waters has for school lunch, not as a meal containing certain proportions of vitamins and minerals, salts and sugars, calories and fat, not as a cause of obesity or as a weapon against it, but as an aesthetic, social, biological, cultural, and culinary experience that the children not only receive but help create.

"It’s about giving [schoolchildren] an authentic experience with food," she explains. "Bringing them to the culture of the table, acquainting them with the rituals of food. So that food isn't an island out there, instead, you're experiencing an everyday pleasure. That's something I think can begin to change habits."

Changing habits is the goal of the School Lunch Initiative, an ambitious collaboration of Waters’s Chez Panisse Foundation, the Center for Ecoliteracy, and the Berkeley Unified School District. Launched in 2004, the Initiative aims to provide healthy, local, seasonal, and sustainable meals to every child in the district, along with "hands-on learning opportunities" in gardens, kitchens, and school lunchrooms. The Initiative would have seemed pretty far-out a few years ago, but the past few years have seen a sudden cultural awakening to Americans’ problem with food, a problem that includes what we serve our increasingly overweight children.

More than 18 percent of the nation’s kids are obese, and here in California, where half of the nation’s fruits, nuts, and vegetables are grown, the number is even higher. More than 32 percent of the state’s children are overweight or at risk of being overweight, three times as many as there were 30 years ago. The potential health impacts of these extra pounds are frightening. Overweight children are more likely to develop asthma, diabetes, and high blood pressure, and—most worrisome of all—they are likely to be obese adults, and thus at risk for a host of diseases ranging from arthritis to cancer.

There are plenty of culprits in the obesity epidemic, and they range from video games to neighborhoods that aren’t safe enough for kids to run around. But there’s no doubt that a hefty portion of the blame rests with the food that kids eat, which is unlikely to be freshly prepared. Almost two-thirds of American couples with children do not have regular family dinners. The top five items served in the nation’s school cafeterias are pizza, cookies, corn, french fries, and chicken nuggets, and less than 20 percent of schoolchildren eat the recommended amount of fruits and vegetables each day.

Researchers and policy-makers have debated endlessly how best to reverse these trends, and the question of "What To Do About School Lunch?" has become the topic du jour. Schools all over the country are banning soda and junk food, and reformulating their meals to include more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. The focus of these initiatives, by and large, is the menu: what can we put on the plate or the tray that will turn overweight, under-fortified children into trim and healthy ones? But Waters argues that the issue is more complex than simply serving kids peas instead of pizza. She argues that if children are going to like peas, they need to learn about peas in the classroom, plant peas in the garden, shell peas in the kitchen, and eat peas at a cloth-covered table with their friends. "I’ve come to believe," she wrote in a February 2006 New York Times op-ed piece, "that lunch should be at the center of every school’s curriculum."

Photographs by Marcus Hanschen

The center of every school’s curriculum? Lunch? The notion seems not just pie-in-thesky, but pie-in-outer-space, particularly at a time when school curriculums already sag under the weight of hundreds of state standards. California students are expected to learn 65 separate skills in 7th-grade English alone, and there are a similar number of benchmarks for social studies, science, and mathematics. Students are tested on these concepts, and those tests, in turn, determine whether school administrators keep their jobs. It probably won’t surprise you to learn that not one of the state standards in any subject area mentions lunch.

State standards aren’t the only obstacle to Waters’s vision for schools. California’s perpupil spending is seventh-lowest in the nation, while its test scores are third-lowest. Its teachers are some of the nation’s most unqualified and underpaid. One out of every three California students is in an overcrowded classroom, and 57 districts are on the verge of bankruptcy. Given these challenges, how in the world does Waters expect schools to absorb a complicated new mandate that requires them not only to serve better food but also to teach about it in the classroom?

"I can’t think about the obstacles," Waters replies. "Because that’s what holds us back. Food is primary. It’s essential. It’s in a category by itself. And it’s immoral to feed children the way we have been."

And so, Waters soldiers forward, resolutely determined to take a distracted, overwhelmed, and underfunded institution, and teach it to sit down and eat its vegetables. She plans to raise $5 million over the next three to five years to support her vision for the Berkeley schools, which she hopes will become a model for the rest of the nation. Carina Wong, executive director of the Chez Panisse Foundation, warns, "Never tell Alice Waters something can’t be done."

Roughly 29 million kids eat school lunch each day, but there’s not much money available for feeding them. The federal government pays $2.40 a head to feed the poorest in a school and a mere 23 cents for the wealthier ones. The State of California chips in another 15 cents. More than two-thirds of the total goes to overhead and payroll. No wonder most schools opt to buy pre-prepared meals that need only be thawed and served.

The School Lunch Initiative made its formal debut in 2005, when the Berkeley Unified School District hired Ann Cooper to be its director of Nutrition Services. Cooper, who calls herself "the renegade lunch lady," is small and sinewy, with sandy brown hair, a determined jaw, and dark circles under her eyes. If Waters is the program’s visionary, Cooper is its implementer, a feisty and foul-mouthed pragmatist charged with breaking the organic omega-3 eggs required to make the school lunch omelet.

In practice, this means Cooper must provide 16 Berkeley schools with 4,000 seasonal, sustainable, nutritious, and delicious lunches each day, along with 2,000 breakfasts and 2,000 snacks. It’s a challenging job in the best of circumstances, but in Cooper’s case she has to do it in kitchens that lack basic equipment such as stoves, and with food service workers who have spent their entire careers opening cans and defrosting frozen food. Since her arrival, she has revamped nearly every aspect of the way the district feeds its students. Ninety-five percent of the processed foods have been eliminated, replaced by salad bars at every school and fresh fruits and vegetables at every meal.

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