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One drizzly Tuesday in San Francisco's Mission district, 20 second-graders squirm happily in anticipation of making "funny-faced sandwiches" with nutrition coordinator Meghan Elliott. Pitas present themselves for decoration; Elliott doles out hummus, cheddar cheese, apple slices, raw spinach, and raisins. "Hummus is kind of like healthy mayonnaise," she explains, as her mostly Latino students eye the mystery spread. "It's made from beans so it's really creamy and full of protein, so it's good for your…" Half of the class immediately responds: "Muscles!" Soon students get to work on their sandwich designs. "This is aaawesome," a round-faced kid in the back exclaims as he dunks a plastic knife into the smooth spread. I approach a table of three girls and ask to take a seat. "We haven't tasted hummus before today, it's brand new to us," says a girl named Paulina, delicately adding spinach bangs to a pita face.
"If presented with a new food multiple times, there's been a lot of research that shows that kids will try it. Especially when they're around their peers, when they're in the classroom," Elliott tells me later, nibbling on posole (Mexican hominy stew) and a pomegranate-speckled salad in her office at Leonard Flynn Elementary School. Personally, I'm convinced she can get kids to try anything. Once, while working in Flynn's after school program, I watched her get my entire class of third graders to rave about raw kale.
Nutrition Coordinator Meghan Elliott: Photo by Chris Black
Getting any kid to like raw kale is hard enough; Elliott's job at Flynn comes with challenges of its own. The school district categorizes 73 percent of the school's families as "socioeconomically disadvantaged," and the lure of cheap, fast food is real. The child obesity rate for San Francisco's low-income kids stands at 16 percent. And that's for kids in preschool. So while today's sandwich-decorating lesson may seem fun and light-hearted, it also aims to prevent serious chronic health issues later in life for these kids—diabetes and heart disease, for instance.
Through classes like today's, nutrition coordinators like Elliott spend the school year revealing new realms of affordable snacking possibility to students at low-income schools like Flynn. Elliott's employer, the San Francisco Nutrition Education Project, began in 2002 with funding from the USDA's Food Stamp Program and typically educates students who qualify for free or reduced lunch, many of them Latino and African-American. "Mortality rates are not highest among white, rich kids," Elliott tells me when I ask about the program's demographics. "A lot of the work we are doing is prevention for kids who need it, and schools that have families with fewer resources."
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