Patrick Kerkstra: Kids learning Eatiquette

The room goes quiet as chef Quintel Coles walks out from the kitchen to tell his customers what's for lunch. Today, he tells them, they will be dining on a primavera pasta with a sauce made of roasted and pureed sweet potatoes. The shaved vegetable salad is dressed in a strawberry-infused balsamic vinaigrette.

And to drink? Nonfat milk (or water). As always.

This is the lunch menu on an average Friday at Cristo Rey High School in North Philadelphia, one of five regional Catholic schools that has adopted an entirely new approach to school lunch called Eatiquette, pioneered by famed chef and restaurateur Marc Vetri and his Vetri Foundation for Children.

His concept is simultaneously simple and traditional, yet revolutionary. And from what I saw, it works exceptionally well.

Vetri and the participating schools begin with fresh and healthy ingredients. You'll find no processed food in an Eatiquette kitchen. Lunches are made from scratch daily, by people like Coles (whose background is in restaurants, not cafeteria cooking). The food they make is tasty, and straddles the fine line between being accessible to children and high schoolers while simultaneously introducing many of them to a healthy diet.

What sets Eatiquette apart from the growing number of other healthy school lunch programs is the way students and faculty dine.

There is no bleak line of mass-produced food sitting atop warming pans. There are no long tables, with the cool kids at the middle and the ostracized ones at the edges.

Instead, food is eaten family style, around circular tables that seat eight to 10 students. Student table captains - donning a jacket of chef's whites - fetch platters of food from the kitchen and bring it back to their tables, where students take what they want before passing it on.

The small tables and sharing of food break down cliques, teachers and students said, while the quality food helps prevent afternoon crashing.

"I feel a lot more energized. I'm not even kidding. And - this is a little bit embarrassing - but I used to not be able to do a pull-up. Now I can," said Cristo Rey freshman James Putz.

That may have more to do with getting older than shaved vegetable salad, but the link between healthy diets and improved school performance is well-established. And while childhood obesity rates have dipped a bit in Philadelphia in recent years, they remain higher than the national average, at about one in five children. Vetri is convinced that healthier school lunches - particularly if they lead to healthier eating habits generally - can reduce that figure.

He wants to see Eatiquette in hundreds of schools, public, charter, and parochial. And he's designed the program in such a way that it's actually plausible to roll it out on a large scale.

Participant schools are buying their ingredients from typical food service vendors, only the chefs there are placing orders for mushrooms, black beans, and tomatoes instead of sodium-laden processed foods.

"We're not looking to only use local farm produce and only wild, sustainable fish," said Vetri, who had stopped by Cristo Rey to eat lunch with the students. "We're just looking to make things healthy, and serve them in an environment that is conducive to learning, instead of just the usual free-for-all."

Don't make the mistake of assuming Eatiquette is a program for well-to-do kids. Quite the opposite. The Philadelphia branch of Cristo Rey, for instance, serves exclusively low- and moderate-income families.

"This is the demographic that needs a program like this the most," he said, rejecting as elitist the notion that strawberry-infused balsamic is wasted on a bunch of low-income high school kids. "Everybody appreciates good food. You don't have to have a lot of money to like good food."

Eatiquette does cost a bit more, Vetri said. The food expenses are in line with traditional cafeterias. But making food from scratch requires some cooks in the kitchen. This seems like an easy investment, considering the potential payoff: healthier kids who are better able to pay attention in class and more likely to get along with their peers.

Vetri said the foundation was in discussions with the School District of Philadelphia to pilot the program in a public school setting. The district is, obviously, a financial wreck. And it's easy in such situations to dismiss any new spending, however modest, as needless luxury. I'd urge the district to visit Cristo Rey before saying no. This isn't luxury. Instead, it's about paying a little more attention to the most basic needs all of us (students included) have: sustenance and companionship.