A typical lunch now consists of grass-fed beef hotdogs, tofu dogs with whole-grain buns, roastedveggie fries, a salad bar, fresh fruit, and milk. Simple on its face, but each item requires creating a new sys t em—locat ing vendors who can provide sufficient quantities of grass-fed beef hotdogs and whole-grain buns; preparing the veggie fries, salad, and fresh fruit; acquiring the milk, which is hormone- free but not organic. (Organic milk would cost an additional $170,000 per year—money the district just doesn’t have.)

Turning every protocol on its head has created a lot of opportunity for things to go wrong, as they did today. "The deliveries didn’t show up," Cooper told me. "One hundred percent of our produce and one hundred percent of our milk was late, missing, or didn’t arrive correctly today."

What kids dig: At Martin Luther King Middle School, children prepare the soil.

"Alice doesn’t talk about the nuts and bolts," Cooper says. "She’s got this huge vision and we’re on the ground trying to juggle the pieces of it. She wants to change the whole system of education. I’m just trying to get food on the table so that no kids are hungry and nobody dies. That’s it. That’s my definition of a good day here at Berkeley Unified. And today was not a good day."

Getting good-tasting food on the table seems challenging enough, but it’s really only half the battle. Trickier still is the task of getting children to eat it. Cooper’s first months on the job were marked by a series of debacles as children revolted against the vegetables, walnuts, and blue cheese that had suddenly colonized the surface of familiar fare such as pizza. She has since toned down the frou-frou factor, but the problem of getting families to sign up for school lunch continues to weigh heavily on her mind. "For the system to really work, more kids have to buy lunch," she says.

An early milestone for the School Lunch Initiative is to increase the number of kids in the district eating school lunch by 20 percent. (Waters, naturally, has even loftier ambitions. "The intention I have is to provide every single child at the school with lunch," she says.) Right now, about 40 percent of Berkeley public schoolchildren are eligible for free and reduced lunch, but not all of the eligible families participate— either because of the stigma of accepting free food, ignorance about eligibility, or a dislike for the food itself. Middle- and upperincome families also have to be persuaded to buy lunch, at a cost of $3.00 for elementary school students, $3.50 for middle schoolers, and $4.00 for high schoolers. (Those eligible for reduced lunch pay 40 cents.)

Given that a highly processed, salt-andsugar- saturated Oscar Meyer Lunchables package ranges from $3.45 for bologna and American cheese to $2.79 for pizza, you would think that parents would leap at the chance to pay between 40 cents and $3.00 for a healthy, fresh alternative. Not necessarily.

"Do you know the community?" Cooper asks irritably when I make the clichéd observation that her menu should be an easy sell in Berkeley. She points out that the average Berkeley public school family doesn’t shop at Whole Foods Market or eat at Chez Panisse—they shop at Safeway and eat at McDonald’s, just like the rest of the country.

Figuring out how to get children to eat healthy food is a question that continues to perplex researchers and parents alike. Every parent has watched foods go in and out of vogue, and there is probably a support group somewhere in Berkeley for all the connoisseurs of endive and wild salmon whose offspring spurn everything but macaroni and cheese. The culprit seems to be partly biological—all humans have a preference for salty and sweet tastes over bitter and sour ones—and partly a cultural result of advertising and our own poor modeling. Peer relationships are another part of the puzzle. Kids learn what foods are "good" from their friends, as any child who has ever brought sardines to school knows. Familiarity is important, too.

"You put bulgur wheat in front of a kid who’s never seen it before, the kid’s going to reject it," explains Dr. Antonia Demas, a New York–based researcher who specializes in food education. "My feeling is, the kid’s just being sensible. We’d have killed ourselves off as a species if we ate anything that was put in front of us."

Children cultivate seedlings

Hence Waters’s insistence that lunch be made part of the school curriculum—an idea that seems ridiculous until you see the results. "They love to eat what they cook themselves," Waters says. "If they grow it, and they cook it, they eat it."

Demas agrees. "Education is the critical piece that many people don’t get," she says. Education is critical for a number of reasons, not least because the modern child is often startlingly ignorant about where food comes from. Cooper recalls discovering that her own nieces thought strawberries grew on trees, while Demas recounts encountering children in rural Vermont who thought maple syrup came from cows.

Demas’s interest in the idea of a food-based curriculum began 36 years ago, when she started volunteering at her local Head Start Center in Vermont. As she invited kids to touch, smell, and taste unfamiliar foods, she found that they were unexpectedly open-minded. "Kids like vegetables if you introduce them in the right way," she says. Take brussels sprouts, a food even adults tend to push to the side of the plate. Demas brings in a big stalk of them and invites kids to examine them, noticing that they look like baby cabbages. Then she peels off the little leaves and uses them as a tiny bowl for a treat of chopped nuts. "I’ve had kids begging for more brussels sprouts and taking them home in their pockets to show their parents," she says.

After two decades of classroom work, Demas decided that the only way to convince other educators of the importance of bringing food into the classroom was to get some credentials, so she went back to school and earned a Ph.D. in education from Cornell University. While there, she brought her food-based curriculum into an elementary school in rural Trumansburg, New York, and carefully measured the results.

What she found was remarkable. The students who had cooked, eaten, and studied the history behind unfamiliar foods such as couscous and collard greens devoured those foods when they were served in the lunchroom, eating up to 20 times more than the students in the control group. "The control kids never touched it, it was a flat line," says Demas. "The intervention kids ate more and more and more."

Even more surprising was what happened next. The children who had learned about the new foods in the classroom took their knowledge home with them and shared it with their families, who then began cooking the foods themselves. Thirty-five percent of the families reported a positive change in their eating habits. Demas calls this the "trickle-up effect," and she has since replicated it in places such as Miami, Florida, and South Bend, Indiana.

"Once you’ve changed their palate and opened their senses," she says, "you’re changing their worldview forever."

The notion of giving children tactile experiences with food is not a new one at King Middle School. Tucked behind the school buildings on the east side of campus is a sprawling one-acre garden teeming with vegetables, flowers, and fruit, and all the warm, busy bits of life that make them grow: bugs, dirt, compost, and straw. This is the Edible Schoolyard, which Waters began in 1995 and which has since become the model for school gardens across the nation and around the world, so famous that in 2005 it was replicated on the Washington Mall as part of the Smithsonian Institution’s annual Folklife Festival, and visited by the Prince of Wales. It is flanked by a large, well-equipped kitchen, where students cook—and eat—the harvest.

I visited the Edible Schoolyard one morning in September, accompanied by program coordinator Marsha Guerrero. Guerrero came to the Chez Panisse Foundation in 2000 after spending 20 years managing various food companies. She has a direct gaze, a full, mobile mouth, and a mane of black-and-gray hair. As we walked through the garden, her fingers absently inventoried its contents, checking a fig for ripeness, stroking the coral-pink cosmos, picking up a handful of dirt to feel whether it was fluffy enough (it was). "There’s a lot going on in the garden right now," she observed.

The garden was giddy with sunflowers, sweet peas, tasseled corn stalks, and tall feathery plumes of fuchsia-colored amaranth, an ancient grain that students harvest, winnow, grind, cook, and eat as part of a lesson on grains that relates nicely to the 6th-grade social science curriculum, which focuses on ancient civilizations. "They learn that it takes a very large amount of ground and a whole lot of work to make a very small amount of grain," Guerrero says with a smile. "It’s a very valuable lesson."

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