Fat land : how Americans became the fattest people in the world (7 page)

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would destroy quality education, not to mention the vast network of public services that so many Californians had come to take for granted.

In all of this ran a variant of the generational temper tantrum that Earl Butz had encountered only a few years earlier. The folk wanted what they wanted when they wanted it. Proposition 13 passed in a 2-1 landslide. As did its imitators in twenty other states.

Although budget surpluses initially softened many of the budget cuts feared by the measures' opponents, Proposition 13 and its copycats did lead to many important cuts in the schools. Physical education, for one, was gutted (see chapter 4). There were closings and reduced hours at the many public libraries upon which so many schools depended. Perhaps most important, education was no longer considered the great untouchable in discussions of public spending.

In California, where famously well-funded schools had long enjoyed primus inter pares status, school cafeterias felt the first pinch, and the way they reacted to it foreshadowed how school lunch programs nationwide would deal with similar cuts.

In 1981 the California Department of Education ended its successful Food Service Equipment Program. For decades the program had augmented local school budgets by providing millions of dollars for the maintenance and upgrading of school cafeterias. For the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), then experiencing unprecedented growth, the cut "was a huge blow," says Laura Chinnock, now the assistant director of the district's mammoth food services department. "What that did was to force us to make changes in the existing infrastructure instead of expanding. So now we had to feed, say, two thousand kids through the old service windows that were built to service half that. Well, now double that — and keep in mind that the minimum legal amount of time for a child to eat lunch is twenty minutes — and you'll see why now some big schools have kids lining up at ten-thirty in the morning for lunch."

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Try as they might, the period's food service directors could not make a cafeteria that once cooked for five hundred cook for five thousand. As Gene White, one of the state's most respected school nutritionists and a longtime policy hand, says, "If the school cafeteria couldn't cook the meals, the natural alternative was to get rid of a lot of the traditional cafeteria's functions. In the '80s, that meant what you might call outsourcing — cooking the meals someplace else and bringing them in to be reheated, or actually contracting with an outside source to deliver pre-plated meals." However one looked at it, the public school had lost control of many of the ingredients that went into that food. "Those pre-plated meals must meet some standard, but the overall quality is much like a TV dinner," says White. "I'll leave you to decide what that means."

Yet even outsourcing would fail to cure the cafeteria's chronic blues. Food service budgets simply failed to keep pace with growing school populations. Part of the problem was political. Not only did schools now have to compete for money with all other public services — the legacy of Jarvis — they increasingly had to do so without what was once their most politically influential supporter: middle-class parents, who were now defecting in droves to private schools. There was a cultural problem as well. With fast-food joints proliferating faster than ever, students were more and more likely to bypass the cafeteria completely and, when no one was looking, simply bolt from campus to McD's, rules to the contrary or no. Food service departments around the nation bled. Slowly but surely many came to the inevitable conclusion: Food service departments would have to become more entrepreneurial.

Fast-food makers had also come to a similar conclusion, for different reasons, but with very similar ends. For a decade firms like Taco Bell and Pizza Hut had tried — with occasional success — to develop institutional feeding programs. One way to do that was to sell frozen versions of their most popular products to large institutions. But frozen entrees never quite captured the imagina-

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tion, let alone the taste buds, of increasingly sophisticated pizza chompers. Worst, to make the effort really work, fast-food makers would have to spend a great deal of money reformulating their products to meet USDA limits on fats and sugars in school lunch foods. And that conjured even more corporate dyspepsia: What would happen to their overall brand image if those reformulated products didn't taste as good as those plied by the same company's franchisees just down the street? Would that drive down regular sales as well? There had to be a way — but where was it?

The answer came in the early 1990s, when a group of enterprising Pizza Hut salespeople asked: Why not — instead of trying to qualify Pizza Hut pizzas under the school lunch program — find a way to sell the pizzas outside of the federally regulated cafeterias, say, out on the lawn, or on the playground, or even over by the old vending machine areas? The executives took the idea to several large school districts. One of them was Los Angeles Unified. There, as one nutrition director says, "it was as if this huge light bulb went on." Not only could the district get out of the never ending battles with the USDA and Pizza Hut over reformulation, it could also make some money on its own by purchasing the pizzas centrally and then selling them at a markup. And by offering a branded product, they might additionally keep students off the streets and on campus.

As it would evolve, the deal came with a number of other perks as well. Fast-food companies helped underwrite the purchase of zippy new "food carts," to be placed strategically about the campus during lunch and break time — in essence becoming the new food service equipment program. There were added incentives for schools that sold the pizzas at glee club meetings and for those who used them for campus fund-raisers.

But the single most important innovation was the way in which individual schools actually got the pizzas. It worked like this: Every morning the school's cafeteria manager would estimate how many pizzas — or tacos, or burritos — the "non-cafeteria

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eaters" would likely consume that day. The manager would then call a designated local Pizza Hut franchisee and place the order. Just before lunch the franchisee would deliver the piping-hot pies to cafeteria workers, who would load them into the shining Pizza Hut food carts and send them off to the waiting students. In the parlance of management, it was a win-win situation: Schools had found a way to feed kids economically and to keep them on campus; fast-food companies got a toehold in a market that had been unreachable — and without the expense of having to obey the law. The students? They got an opportunity to eat . . . the same food that more and more of them were eating at home. By 1999, 95 percent of 345 California high schools surveyed by the nonprofit Public Health Institute were offering branded fast foods as a la carte entree items for lunch. At 71 percent of those schools, fast food made up a substantial portion of total food sales — up to 70 percent. Seventy-two percent of the same schools permitted fast-food and beverage advertising on campus.

But what really was wrought? Who really was served? Certainly anti-fast-food activists now had a genuine beef with school administration. Not only had "the system" found a way around the well-intended (and very healthy) USDA guidelines, it had also instigated another problem: dietary overconsumption. Portion sizes for pizza were a case in point. The cafeteria dispensed individual pizzas that, by law, corresponded to USDA portion recommendations. In the LAUSD, for example, a typical individual school lunch pizza runs somewhere around 5.5 ounces. A typical food cart, or branded, pizza — sold outside the cafeteria and thus unrestrained by such regulation — weighs in at almost twice that. The school lunch pizza had 375 calories, the branded "personal" pizza more than twice that — almost one-third of the recommended daily calories for a typical American teenager. The schools had lost control of calories.

Among obesity-minded nutritionists, such was clearly cause for concern. But now the school district was hooked. Concerned about the enormous calorie count, Laura Chinnock, the LAUSD

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veteran, went back to Pizza Hut reps and proposed that the food cart pizza be just slightly reformulated — "just use some lower-fat cheese, for example." She was immediately rebuffed. "The concern was that somehow that would affect the taste — and that would somehow taint the overall Pizza Hut product. Kids might not buy so much of it on the way home or for dinner, say." Chinnock repeatedly took the issue up with her superiors at LAUSD, but with the nation's largest and most tumultuous school system in a constant budgetary crisis, anything that might cost money simply did not make it onto the agenda.

But something else had happened as well — something no one, save, likely, the Pizza Hut people, had seen: The food carts — the latter-day successors to the dingy old vending areas — had become "cool." Whatever they purveyed had cachet — it sold and sold and sold and sold. Intrigued by this, Chinnock one day decided to try an experiment. Without telling students, teachers, or Pizza Hut vendors, she substituted USDA-formulated pizzas for the usual branded pizzas. "The response was nil — they gobbled them up just like usual," she recalls. "They were basically eating the brand."

By the mid-1990s school principals had also joined the brand-fest. Faced with continuing shortfalls in funds for sports teams, academic clubs, plant upkeep, and even janitorial services, they were a receptive audience to new overtures from the soft drink industry. This time the inducements came in the form of "pouring contracts." Such contracts typically involved three monetary perks for three contractual promises. For agreeing to sell only, say, Coke, a school would receive commissions and a yearly bonus payment — sometimes as much as $100,000 — to do with as it liked. In return for putting up Coke advertising around the campus, the school would receive free product to sell at fund-raising events. And in return for making the company's carbonated beverages available during all hours, Coke would provide additional "marketing" tools — banners, posters, etc. — to aid still more

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school fund-raising events. In a time of tight funds and rising expectations, such contracts proved enormously popular. In Los Angeles, sports-minded parents became some of the biggest advocates of pouring contracts. It is doubtful, however, that those same parents had any clue about what soft drinks were doing to their children's overall diets, not to mention health.

Between 1989 and 1994 consumption of soft drinks by kids soared. The USDA estimated that the proportion of adolescent boys and girls consuming soft drinks on any given day increased by 74 percent and 65 percent, respectively. In many ways the pattern reflected the adult population, where, between 1989 and 1994, soda consumption jumped from 34.7 to 40.3 gallons a year. But the kids were doing something with the soda that few people initially understood: They were drinking it in place of milk and other important nutrient-rich foods.

Worse, they were not compensating for those extra empty calories when they sat down for regular meals. A joint study by Harvard University and Boston Children's Hospital researchers in February 2001 concluded that such excess liquid calories inhibited the ability of older children to compensate at mealtime, leading to caloric imbalance and, in time, obesity. "Compensation for energy consumed in liquid form, which can be observed in very young children (4-5 years)," reviewers of the study concluded, "is lost rapidly in the following years."

When it came to food — and particularly when it came to setting boundaries on its consumption — family and school were hardly alone as they drifted through the 1980s. That other great arbiter of modern life, the media, was also at sea.

For most of the postwar period, the publishers of American diet books were a somewhat predictable lot. While editors might occasionally publish a celebrity diet or a quirky new fitness regimen, the general approach of diet books to weight loss mirrored what physicians, scientists, and nutritionists had always advised: to maintain weight one had to balance calories in with calories

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out. To lose it, one had to consume fewer and expend more. The lone dissenter was a Cornell University-trained physician named Robert C. Atkins. In 1972 Atkins published a small book that turned conventional wisdom on its head. Instead of counting calories, and always thinking about what one couldn't have, a person who really wanted to lose weight had to find a way to do so pleasantly. And Atkins had found the way.

The way, in fact, was simple — and, as Atkins never failed to note, very scientific. Human beings, he would begin, need three basic nutrients — proteins, fats, and carbohydrates. Once inside the body, proteins were broken down to replenish muscles and tissues, fats were burned or stored for future energy use, and carbohydrates were burned for immediate energy needs. The carbohydrates that didn't get used — and this was key to the Atkins diet — were stored by the liver as glycogen, which was then stored as fat. If the body did not get enough carbohydrates during the day, it would eventually begin to "burn" its fat stores. It was that last bit of information that could make all the difference for the frustrated dieter, Atkins said. If one deprived the body of carbohydrates — sugars — one could "trick" the body into burning its own fat stores. The added bonus of such a system was that one could consume all the fats and proteins one wanted, since the revved-up Atkinized body would either use them for muscle or burn them away.

Not surprisingly, the book, Dr. Atkins'Diet Revolution, went to the top of the charts.

Yet much of mainstream publishing remained wary of Atkins. Some old-time editors and critics knew that such a diet had been proffered, on and off, ever since the mid-nineteenth century, when it was popularized by a retired London undertaker named William Banting. Banting, who lost some fifty pounds on the regimen, had published a pamphlet, On Corpulence, that had eventually caught the eye of late-nineteenth-century Americans. In the intervening century, the Banting "scheme," as it was inevitably called, had popped up with astounding regularity about