"School gardens can be the single most important tool to reconnect kids to their food."

Childhood obesity in America "is something we can change," a Baltimore schools chef told a congressional panel Thursday, describing a school garden where students "plant a seed, pick a tomato ... and taste the flavor explode in their mouth."

The experience "forever changes the way a kid looks at food," said chef Anthony Geraci.

As Congress prepares to overhaul school nutrition programs, it is drawing on food guru Alice Waters' radical school-garden experiment in Berkeley in 1995 that has caught fire nationwide. The aim is to change the relationship between children and food to help blunt a public health catastrophe.

The federal government feeds breakfasts and lunches to 32 million schoolchildren at a cost of about $14 billion a year. At the same time, obesity and the chronic diseases that accompany it cost nearly $150 billion a year in added health care spending and kill more than 100,000 Americans each year.

Epidemic childhood obesity has public health officials in a state of near panic. About one-fourth of all children from 2 to 5 years old are overweight or obese before they enter kindergarten.

California standards

California led the nation with a law that took effect in 2007 to raise nutrition standards in schools, but most of the effort has focused on getting rid of unhealthy food rather than introducing fresh food, said Juliet Sims, program director at the Prevention Institute, which addresses health and social issues, in Oakland.

Children get anywhere from a third to half their calories at school, Sims said, and rewriting the major school food laws provides "a real opportunity to lay groundwork for getting kids to practice good nutrition."

In renewing the National School Lunch Act and the Child Nutrition Act, House Education and Labor Committee chairman George Miller, D-Martinez, wants to expand school food programs while increasing use of fresh produce, including farm-to-school programs. The National Institutes of Medicine this month will recommend new school nutrition requirements for the first time in 15 years.

Read the entire article by Carolyn Lochhead in the October 9, 2009 edition of the San Francisco Chronicle by clicking here.