Smart Mouths: Some Surprises From Teen-Age America

Microwave meals. Fast food. Dinner in front of the TV set. These are the images that come to mind when we think of kids and their eating habits. And while it’s true that America’s children grow up in a junk-food wasteland, not all of them take to it as automatically as we might at first imagine.

“You have to savor your food,” says 18-year-old Kevin Manlovitz, a senior at West Covina High School. “It might be the last bite you take. . . . The restaurant might close tomorrow or you might get in a fight and have to go to the hospital. I figure if you’re going to eat, you might as well do it right--you might as well like it.”

At the home of 16-year-old Damien Daurio, a student at Long Beach Polytechnic High School, dinner is a part of the family’s daily routine. Almost like the TV families of the ‘50s and ‘60s, Damien is greeted by the smells of his mother’s cooking when he comes home from school. Most nights, he and his parents and his younger brother, Dominic, spend about an hour eating and talking at the dinner table.

“Dinner is basically the only time my Dad has to talk to us,” Damien says. “He gets home later than everyone else and he gets up earlier than everyone else.”

“Our family eats separately,” says 17-year-old Say-Vun Khov, a student at the Downtown Business Magnet High School. “My dad and my brother eat together--my dad cooks. But my Dad has weird taste buds,” she says, laughing. “So my sister and I cook and eat together. We stay away from his cooking.”

For 12-year-old Kizito Ssensalo, food takes a back seat to violin and tennis lessons, swimming practice, his computer and homework. Rarely does he use the lunch period at school for its intended purpose.

“My mom is always trying to get me to take a lunch to school,” he says. “But usually I play tennis with my friend Lee at lunch. We don’t eat. I just get a drink of water or maybe I’ll grab a soda.”

Sitting in his South Los Angeles home, near a mantle filled with trophies from past swim meets, Kizito’s talk is of his computer, the places he’d like to visit, his love of reading, his dream of swimming in the Olympics and then becoming an entrepreneur.

“I like books by black authors,” he says, showing a visitor copies of “Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry” and “Homemade Love.”

When Kizito returns home from school, he might grab some fruit or “whatever I see lying around.” But he doesn’t give much thought to snacking--there’s no time.

“It starts getting dark pretty fast,” he says, “so you want to hurry and do as many things as you can outside before it gets too late.”

Like playing with his remote-control car.

Still, his mother is always around with the simple reminder: eat.

Every night Kizito, his mother and his two sisters sit down at the table together to eat dinner. It’s one of the few times he can’t rush off on his own.

“We have to wait to get up until everybody has eaten,” he says. “My dad’s always emphasized that.”

At the table the girls talk and discuss events and people at school with their mother, but Kizito says he mostly just eats. He especially likes his mother’s crab casserole.

“I’m not that conversational at the dinner table,” he says matter-of-factly. “There’s not that much gossip at my school.”

Like Kizito, Monique Danielle Bright, a 16-year-old freshman at Dorsey High School, keeps a busy schedule. As comfortable in athletic shoes and a baseball cap as she is in a prom dress (she was voted homecoming princess this semester and recently tried out for the softball team), Monique is an avid sports fan and an honor student. She plans to attend law school.

Each morning, before leaving for school, Monique eats a hot breakfast, which tides her over the morning. She rarely eats during the morning nutrition period.

“It’s only 20 minutes so I basically just talk to my friends,” she says. “At lunch I just get a sandwich, or sometimes I go to the candy line and get some chips or a soda.”

After school, Monique works at an audiologist’s office in Inglewood. Sometimes, on the way to work, she stops at a taco stand for a snack, but each night Monique’s mother prepares dinner for her and her younger brother, William. Monique’s favorite meal: steak, potatoes and corn.

“Most of the time my mother and I sit down at the table and eat,” she says. “My brother goes in his room.”

In health class last semester, Monique spent three weeks studying nutrition. The teacher discussed the four food groups, basic nutrients and eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia. But Monique says that neither she nor her friends spend much time worrying about their body sizes or diets.

“It’s not that serious,” she says. “Sometimes I think about being too little, but then I see people who are too big and I say, ‘That’s OK.’ ”

“My parents love to cook,” says Damien Daurio. “I eat things my friends have never heard of or would have to go to a restaurant to try.

“My Mom is Mexican and my Dad is Italian, so I like a lot of Mexican and Italian food.”

Damien knows his family dinners make him different from a lot of the other kids at his school--many of his friends don’t eat with their families. “(Eating together) is something I’ll continue to do when I have a family,” he says. “We talk a lot at dinner. I ask my dad questions about things I learn in class and see if he knows about them.”

Even at lunch time, Damien’s diet is different from that of his peers. Rather than eat in the school cafeteria, he brings his own lunch. His complaints with the cafeteria: The lines are too long and the food is overpriced.

“If you eat at school you just get what they give you,” he says. “But if you bring your own lunch, you can regulate what’s going into it and how balanced it is. It’s more nutritious and it’s a lot cheaper.”

Born in Cambodia, Say-Vun Khov and her family fled fighting there in the late 1970s and arrived in the U.S. in 1981. The dangerous trip through a rain forest packed with land mines is still clear in Say-Vun’s memory.

“If you stepped on one you’d get blown away,” she says. “I remember that.”

Several years after arriving in the U.S., Say-Vun’s parents separated. She moved into a duplex in Glendale with her father and her younger sister and brother.

Since then, her sister Mooney, 15, has assumed primary responsibility for shopping and cooking for herself and Say-Vun.

“She loves to cook,” Say-Vun says of her sister, whose specialty is Chinese and Cambodian dishes. “She wants to be a chef or something.”

To maintain her 4.0 grade-point average, Say-Vun spends several hours each night at a desk in her room, poring over physics and advanced calculus books. Between her homework and extracurricular activities, there is little time for TV, video games, or giggly phone conversations. Each night, Say-Vun and Mooney break away from their studies to cook and share a meal together.

“We make everything from scratch,” Say-Vun says. “We don’t eat junk food and processed food--we’re worried about our acne.”

Even still, the girls are so busy with school work that eating is often the last item on their schedule for the day.

“Sometimes we don’t eat until midnight,” Say-Vun says.

The girls’ late-night meals are based on whatever happens to be in the refrigerator.

“We make our own recipes,” Say-Vun says proudly. “If we only have eggs, we make fried rice with eggs and we eat it with soy sauce.”

Some nights, Say-Vun, who hopes to attend Columbia University next year, eats at her desk, too busy studying to break for a meal. Other nights the girls eat together at the kitchen table.

“We really don’t have a routine,” Say-Vun says.

While the sisters have found a system that works most of the time, there are sometimes arguments over who should cook--and what to cook. On days like these they long for the time when the adults in their lives bore the responsibility of making such decisions.

“Sometimes we wish that,” Say-Vun says.

“I’ve been to just about every restaurant in Covina or West Covina,” says Kevin Manlovitz. “My parents are divorced and my dad doesn’t cook so we go to restaurants when I visit him.”

This might be why Kevin takes his food so seriously. “I don’t play with food,” he says. “My friends like to see me eat. They say I make it an art form.”

Because he works 25 hours a week at a video store, he often isn’t home to eat dinner with his family.

Some nights, he’ll eat at his favorite hangout, a Mexican food stand in West Covina that serves barbecue pork. But, Kevin says, it’s no place to take a date.

“It’s like those old A & W stands where you drive up and sit on a bench and eat,” he says. “Some guys take their girls there, but unless you’ve been together for a long time or she’s your wife, I wouldn’t. You’ve got to go to a nice restaurant or take them to your house to eat.”

Often, Kevin cooks for himself. He learned after the divorce by watching his grandmother and the other women in his family.

“Nobody makes better fried chicken than I do,” he says unabashedly. “I’m the best cook in the house.”