The Heavy (16 page)

Along with everyone else in the country, New York City’s public schools are aware of the obesity epidemic and are responding to it. Education programs have debuted, gardening and planting projects have sprouted, and the cafeterias are instituting changes to make their offerings more healthful. Whole-wheat buns have replaced white, vegetarian chili has replaced beef, fresh fruits are available, a salad bar stands at the ready. It’s a step in the right direction. And for the $1.50 I’m asked to pay, it’s an unbeatable bargain.

I don’t criticize the changes, because they may well improve the eating habits of some normal-weight children. While I couldn’t imagine that Bea was going to be able to navigate the choices and stay within her limit of 300 calories for lunch (excluding fruits and vegetables), I wanted to at least investigate the options in the hope that one day they
could
be options for her. Even if the full meal being served totaled 700 calories, maybe I could advise her to have a half portion of the main dish and no sides, or a salad and a side dish but no main dish. I wanted her to have the chance to eat
school lunch on occasion if it would help her feel “normal.” I went online to see what the cafeteria was serving.

The New York City Department of Education’s SchoolFood program provides calorie information to parents who are willing to go through the arcane recesses of the department’s website to find it. I found the school lunch page via Google, selected the month and the borough I live in, and that month’s menu downloaded to my computer. Granted, it was in a cryptic .ashx format with no further instructions on how to open it, but luckily I am a little bit computer-savvy, so I took a stab at changing the suffix to .pdf, and indeed, I was able to read the file.

The menu does not list calories, only the foods being served each day. To get the calories, I had to go back to the website, dig further to find the “menu nutrition information” link, and download that document. Once I’d opened it, I toggled back and forth between the two, looking up each item in that day’s lunch menu and calculating the total calories.

It’s worth noting that some of the items found on the lunch menu are missing entirely from the nutrition information index. And it would probably make lots of interested parents’ lives easier if these numbers were printed on the menu itself. Just a suggestion.

My findings were not surprising, but not encouraging, either. A typical offering was Italian meatballs with tomato sauce, whole-grain pasta, toasted garlic rolls, and “Capri vegetables.” If you leave out the available milk and other extras offered by the cafeteria, the nutrition info suggests that this totals about 450 calories. Another day, they offered mozzarella sticks with tomato sauce and a “Normandy vegetable blend vinaigrette,” also coming out to about 450 calories. It turns out that most of the meals offered,
from the hamburger deluxe to the chicken tenders, end up in the 350-to-450-calorie range, if you exclude the add-ons that bring the total to the USDA-mandated minimums.

Those are reasonable amounts for a normal-weight child to have for his lunch, given the recommended daily allowance of 1,600 calories for moderately active kids. But they were definitely too much for Bea. However, there was a new, seemingly better option on the horizon that offered hope that Bea could actually get back on the cafeteria line once in a while.

That year, Bea’s and David’s schools participated in a healthy lunch program under which the most nutritionally bereft ingredients provided by the DOE’s SchoolFood program were jettisoned, and the rest were used to make more healthful meals. I knew they would be subject to the same USDA minimums as SchoolFood was, but I expected the individual dishes would be lower-calorie than their original versions. Maybe this new food would enable Bea to selectively construct a meal that stayed within her limitations.

The program’s website boldly displays obesity factoids in a large font size (“We spend $147 billion annually on obesity related illnesses in the United States”; “In NYC, 1 in 5 kindergarteners is obese”) and states that it seeks to “combat childhood obesity and to promote healthy eating.”

The healthier lunches were already being served at Bea’s school when David’s school decided to introduce them. While often not available to attend PTA meetings because of work or family obligations, I made time to sit in at the one where the program was going to be presented. I was eager to get more info, since my thorough search of their website had provided loads of information but absolutely nothing in the way of calorie counts.

Let me be clear: I’ve never been That Mom. I don’t show up at PTA meetings with a personal agenda. I am fortunate that my children attend excellent public schools with involved parent communities and effective administrations. I think the PTA does a great job, and while I suppose I’d speak up if I disagreed strenuously with something it was doing, I have thus far been content to stay out of it and let the PTA, the school administration, and the teachers do their jobs.

On the occasions on which I am able to attend a meeting, I’m usually both amused and annoyed by the parents who get up and rant about some aspect of what the PTA is doing, from how indoor recess is conducted on inclement-weather days to how much of the PTA’s operating budget is being allocated to the chess program. These parents’ issues generally have such a single-minded focus on the particular interests of their child that their digression is mostly a waste of everyone else’s time.

But as I sat down for the meeting, I realized I
was
That Mom. And I understood her a little better. I felt a certain compassion for the parents in our mix who feel they must advocate for their kids’ issues, even if no one else shares them—especially if no one else shares them. If they don’t, who will? Sure, sometimes the particular flag they’re waving seems marginal or even ridiculous. But it’s true that a big-city school system isn’t always set up to accommodate the needs of some minorities—such as overweight kids—and it falls to those kids’ parents to stick up for them. Like with the Grinch, my small heart grew a few sizes that day in sympathy with overzealous moms at PTA meetings everywhere.

The healthy-lunch program representative stood up before the crowd of parents—none of whom, to my knowledge, actually struggled with an overweight child—and presented a bunch of
grim New York City childhood obesity statistics before explaining how much better and more healthful the new program’s food was.

When she was finished, I raised my hand, and she called on me.

I stood up. “What you’re doing is great,” I said. And I meant it. “My child actually has a weight problem, so I’d love for her to be able to eat this food. But I can’t let her unless I know how many calories are in it. Can you provide that information?”

The lady was really nice, and so I felt a little bad, because I’d searched exhaustively for the information myself and was pretty sure that she wouldn’t have the answer to my question. But at the same time, I was getting tired of people who didn’t have overweight children telling me how to fight my child’s obesity. So many pronouncements on how the problem should be addressed come from healthy-weight people with healthy-weight children. They tell us to make time to have dinner every night with our kids, to engage in regular physical activity as a family, to prepare healthful meals instead of relying on processed foods. As though these decisions were the reasons their children were healthy.

I didn’t feel as if healthy food advocates were intentionally hiding anything about the contents of their meals—it just seemed like they felt the food was so unassailably wholesome and organic that it hadn’t occurred to them that anyone would care how many calories were in it.

That’s fine for the non-overweight kids. I accept that my child has special nutritional needs and doesn’t have to be accounted for in every food initiative. But when you start invoking obesity statistics, you’re talking about
my
child. You’re giving me hope that you have a solution. So I’m going to need some evidence that what you’re offering can actually help my kid.

If my child were diabetic, I wouldn’t expect Department of Education
food to adapt to his needs. But if a group preparing food for my child’s school came in and told of the growing number of diabetic children in New York City schools and said they were there to serve that population, I’d be thrilled, and then want to see documentation of the actual sugar content of their meals. By the same token, if an organization is claiming to be fighting obesity, it seemed fair to ask them to back up that statement, not only with facts showing how bad things are, which are all too easy to come by, but also with data showing how they’re addressing the problem.

The woman couldn’t provide nutrition information for the food or tell me how to find it. Her reaction seemed to indicate that no one had ever asked this question before. She said she’d look into it. I never heard anything about it again.

With that one query, I outed myself to many total strangers in my community as the mother of an obese child. I felt it gave me special accreditation to speak on the topic. Like a black person opining about affirmative action or a lesbian speaking out about gay marriage. I was in it. My opinion should matter! So I became the mom with an agenda, an issue that was so specific to her child that discussing it seemed like a waste of everyone else’s time. And I learned how little I mattered.

At Bea’s school, healthy food offerings weren’t limited to lunchtime. I started receiving emails explaining that chefs would be working with the kids to create healthful meals during class time. There was a day when they were going to make flatbread pizza, another when they’d cook vegetarian chili. Of course, the emails assured me, there would be no nut products, so nut-allergic kids could safely participate.

Parents of nut-allergic kids have a tremendous and stressful cross to bear, and I do not begrudge them any of the cautions they
are afforded. A severely allergic child can indeed die from a nut. Many schools, including David’s, do not make special accommodations for kids with nut allergies. Most restaurants, bakeries, food carts, and concession stands don’t, either. It’s up to the parents to protect their children as best they can when they aren’t able to be there when the child is eating.

But there are a lot of other kids dealing with complicated dietary restrictions—kids with hypertension, vegetarians, kids who eat halal or kosher food, those who are gluten or lactose intolerant, and the overweight, to name just a few—whose parents also need to exercise vigilance to safeguard their children when they’re inside school walls. Of course, an obese child’s life is not immediately threatened by the presence of fattening, caloric food. However, obesity brings with it very real health problems—including mortality.

After receiving a few of the announcements about the in-class cooking series from the director of Bea’s school, I replied to one of her emails. I asked her if the school could provide nutrition information for whatever it was the kids were making. I mentioned that it would also be helpful to know how many calories were in the new lunches served in the cafeteria, since this information had not been made available. I explained that there were many special days in which kids were invited to sample new menu items, and that I always had to ask Bea to sit out these occasions and stick to her bagged lunch from home. If I knew what was in the meals, I could maybe let her try them, like other kids could.

The director wrote back quickly. She assured me that she had forwarded my inquiry to the correct person, and an answer would be forthcoming.

That was the last I heard about it. So I tried a different tactic. I wrote to one of the parents on the committee overhauling the
school food and nutrition programs. She was very nice and immediately responsive. She felt that the information I was seeking was probably of interest to many other parents, too, and she wrote to someone within the hierarchy of the healthy lunch program, seeking answers. No information came back.

Making my way through the bureaucracy of the school food system, I followed up directly with people from the organization coming into the schools to make the food. They said that nutrition information for the school lunches they prepared from the DOE’s SchoolFood ingredients had to come from the SchoolFood program, and the DOE was unwilling or unable to provide it.

After several months and a dozen emails, I was finally deterred. I couldn’t identify anyone who was responsible for providing nutritional information. So I gave up on working the system and took matters into my own hands, looking up nutrition information for everything on their menu using online calorie databases. Comparing those results with the original DOE’s SchoolFood menu revealed that while the new program’s food is way more health-conscious (less frying, more whole grains, etc.), it provides no caloric improvement at all over the usual public school fare.

Take this tempting offering: “Chicken Sabroso, Spanish rice, baked ripe plantains, black bean and corn salad, salad bar, and assorted milk.” First of all, we need to contend with what “Chicken Sabroso” really is. I love Mexican food and live in a culinary melting pot, and I’ve never heard of it. I trust it’s delicious and nutritious, but I don’t know what’s in it, so I’m unable to guess at the calories.

Let’s be generous and assume it’s three ounces of totally plain grilled chicken. Not very
sabroso
, I know. Let’s also assume that each meal includes a quarter cup of rice, a quarter of a baked plantain, and three ounces of black bean and corn salad. Tasty and
healthful, and a definite nutritional improvement over regular school lunch. But it’s over 400 calories, excluding milk and salad bar and any other extras.

Another day’s offering was Rachael Ray’s Yum-O Cheesy Mac & Trees, which banks over 500 calories per serving (again, information I have only because I found the recipe somewhere else online and added up each ingredient’s calories). All the new-menu lunches I researched, from black bean and cheddar quesadillas to ham and cheese wraps, clock in at the 400- to 500-calorie range.