Of Carrots And Kids: Healthy School Lunches That Don't Get Tossed [NPR.org]

You can lead a child to vegetables, but can you make her eat them?

A child, for instance, like Salem Tesfaye, a first-grader at Walker-Jones Educational Campus in Washington, D.C. Tesfaye picked up a lunch today that's full of nutrition: chicken in a whole-wheat wrap, chopped tomatoes and lettuce from local farms, a slice of cantaloupe and milk.

But, she confesses, sometimes she throws her lunch out. I ask her what she did today. "I threw all of it away," she says softly.

This is "plate waste," a big reason for the political battle over school lunch standards. Public health advocates — and the White House — are promoting school lunch standards that require lots of whole grains, fruits and vegetables. Some school lunch providers, meanwhile, say that these rules are wasting money and time, because more food is going into the trash.

Indeed, in the lead-up to Thanksgiving, schoolkids flooded Twitter with unappetizing photos of lunches they were being served, using the sarcastic hashtag #ThanksMichelleObama — a reference to the first lady, who has championed healthier school lunch standards.

[For more of this story, written by Dan Charles, go to http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesa...that-dont-get-tossed]