Veggie lunches are coming to a school near you

HOW DO you get headstrong teenagers to eat healthier, plant-based lunches? Slowly.

"Getting kids to eat food they're not used to requires a lot of feet on the ground," said Amie Hamlin, who should know: Her New York Coalition for Healthy School Food has for years mobilized changes in school districts from Ithaca to New York City. She also was behind one public elementary school's move to all-vegetarian lunches.

With students now returning to school, to the ideological battleground that is the school cafeteria, different "veg" efforts in different cities are coming to fruition. Here in Philly, the Humane League, following up on the City Council resolution for Meatless Monday, touts a new, meatless "Lean and Green Days" program by the school district.

Last November, I noted that while "meatless" is not a good stopping point or goal, it can serve as a doorway for plant-based eating patterns. So I looked forward to seeing how "Lean and Green" would be realized. The full program will roll out by early October.

Looking forward, Amy Virus, a food-services coordinator for the district, said of the upcoming veg entrees, "We wanted to be able to give students as many options as we can."

The Lean and Green campaign is a good way "to promote vegetarian options we already had on the menu."

So far, those once-weekly vegetarian entrees don't include all-plant-based meals, which are both lean and green in a way lacto-ovo options are not. I saw the pasta with marinara as a vegan candidate, but Virus explained that the sauce always contains cheese.

The Humane League's Rachel Atcheson said that the group had supplied the Philly School District with totally plant-based recipes that fit the restrictive USDA guidelines, but added, "We're pretty much focusing on 'meatless' for right now."

Within that focus, the district's staff is certainly doing what can be done, but maybe the focus could be more, you know, focused.

The Coalition for Healthy School Food may offer a more vegan-friendly template for further efforts. After all, the coalition also fits under a "veggie" umbrella in big districts in New York City and Ithaca, working to offer fully plant-based entrees under the moniker "Cool School Food" to give students an option to replace meat- and cheese-based lunches.

The coalition works with food-service staff to get plant-based proteins swapped into a given menu, explaining and sampling the "Cool School Food" offerings. As a result, in the case of the all-vegetarian school, "about half the time those meals are vegan," and the coalition keeps working to extend that number at each fo the schools they work with.

So how, then, do you get students to eat a healthy lunch?

In New York, Hamlin has put "a big effort" into public taste tests of new dishes, allowing the food to make a case for itself with kids. "The bottom line is, we need to show kids will eat it," she said.

As for high-schoolers, they do have set eating habits, but they also have brains, so maybe the solution is - now, stay with me here - education: Teaching the science of nutrition and physiology (psst! no human is a biological carnivore!); letting kids know that health claims in milk-mustache ads have proven dubious; making the point that animal agriculture is now widely acknowledged as one of the biggest threats in a warming world; and pointing out that the egg and dairy industries, as with meat, are anything but "humane."

If they could be truly informed about the food on their plates, how many students might get up from the lunch table and go back for seconds - of kale?