Goodbye Candy, Hello Soy Bars

There should be a sign on the front of Edison Middle School. A big red circle, filled with stacks of candy bars and bags of chips, slashed with a big red line, the universal sign for “Don’t Even Think About It.”

Well in advance of last week’s decision to ban soda sales on campuses of the Los Angeles Unified School District, starting in 2004, plans were laid at Edison to ban not only sodas, but the junkiest of junk foods from campus.

Potato chips, 15 fat grams per serving, were pulled from the student-run store. Candy bars, with as many calories as a Lean Cuisine dinner and triple the fat, banished. Big bottles of soda, 20 ounces of empty calories, vanished.

Empty soda machines stand silent in the playground of this South-Central campus, the first but not the last among L.A. public schools to expel sodas and a good share of junk food. Students returning to Venice High School on Tuesday will find neither sodas nor high-fat snacks in the vending machines. Monroe High School in the San Fernando Valley is moving in the same direction.

“They took away our candy, our chips, our favorites,” Blanca Machuca, 12, says as she nibbles on a chocolate chip cookie, allowed at Edison because the snack has half the fat calories of her favorite chocolate candy.

“They” are the principal, Faye Banton, teachers and parents. They exorcised the high-fat goodies in January in the hope that students will turn to more nutritious varieties and vitamin-rich fruit drinks, nonfat milk or water.

When the LAUSD board voted last week to give middle and high schools two years to quit selling carbonated soft drinks to students during school hours, the motion didn’t include kicking out junk food.

At Edison, science and health teacher Lilra Brown needs no instruction from downtown. “Thirty percent of our children are overweight,” Brown says. She also worries about the connection between bad grades, low test scores and poor nutrition.

She coordinates a grant from the Linking Education Activity and Food, or LEAF, state program, designed to help fund nutrition and fitness education for kids. In the L.A. district, Venice and Monroe were also awarded LEAF grants. Combined, the three grants total $750,000.

LEAF coordinators at all three schools want students to eat healthier. They know students won’t give up snacking at school, so they are focusing on making healthier choices available.

When the bell rings at Edison signaling the morning nutrition break, many of the 1,600 students sprint to the school store on the edge of the playground. Pulling dollars out of pockets, they line up for T.G.I. Friday’s potato-skin snack chips with cheddar and bacon. No respectable health food store would offer them, but they’re on the shelves because they contain less fat, less sugar, less salt and fewer calories, though not by much, than the popular Flamin’ Hot Cheetos they replaced.

The students also favor the intensely hot Poore Brothers habanero potato chips, which got the nod because they are low in saturated fat. Grandma’s cookies, in oatmeal and raisin, peanut butter, and chocolate chip are all for sale--again, not classic health food, but with some redeeming ingredients. Instead of candy bars, students can choose Rice Krispies Treats or Chewy granola bars or trail mix--though few do.

“I’m not used to this stuff,” says Christopher Thompkins, 13. The eighth-grader was unhappy when the junk food disappeared, especially Doritos. He eats the healthier chips because, “There’s no other choice. I’ve got to get used to it.”

Amber Patterson, 12, dives into the baked chips, citing a goal popular with many girls: “I’m trying to lose some weight.”

Since the change, sales have dropped from $1,000 a day to about $500, according to Aura Barrera, the school’s financial manager, reducing the profits that pay for band instruments, dance costumes and other student activities. That money will have to be made up somehow, but the middle school won’t take the hit that some L.A. high schools will--some take in as much as $80,000 per year from the sale of sodas and junk food to pay for pep rallies, dances and other events.

At Edison, school administrators say there is a healthy consequence from the change. More students eat the lunch offered by the school. The meal count has risen from 555 a day to about 800, according to cafeteria manager Addie Sandville, suggesting that some children deprived of their favorite snacks will choose to eat whatever is available. In a couple of weeks, sales representatives for vendors will be on the Edison campus to offer a menu of healthy snacks. Students will pick the tastiest ones for sale in the school store.

At Venice High School, sodas should be missing from the 22 vending machines by the time students arrive for class Tuesday. This purge has been a long time coming.

It started with a request for juice. Three years ago, a frustrated student approached his health teacher, Jacqueline Domac. Could the vending machines stock “pure” fruit juice? The teacher followed up with the school’s financial manager. No way. Switching from soda to juice would have violated the school’s exclusive contract with Coca-Cola. Domac says the soda company gave the school $3,000 a year for that guarantee, which worked out to $1 per student.

Undeterred, her students circulated a petition two years ago. Finally, Coke added two juice products: Minute Maid orange and apple juices. Victory. Or so the kids thought until filmmakers from Paris, working on a documentary about commercialism, visited the campus last spring. While escorting the French filmmakers, the students came to an unsettling realization: the juice was in short supply.

Out of nearly 200 slots, there were 100% juice drinks in only four, Domac says. “Always at the bottom.”

And, the student-activities fund lost money every time a student chose juice instead of soda. The school received 15 cents on each juice sale; 36 cents on each soda sale.

Recently, the school came to an agreement with a new vendor. The vending machines will be stocked with water, juice and sports drinks--as they will be at all LAUSD secondary schools by 2004.

Domac, who coordinates the LEAF grant for her campus, said she’s determined to see better quality snacks in the vending machines.

Beginning this fall, none of the snacks sold on campus can have more than 35% fat or 10% saturated fat per serving. The sugar content also must be less than 35% of the total weight of the item.

What will 3,000 hungry kids munch on?

“We’ll fill the vending machine with tons of things,” Domac says “We are looking at Nutrigrain cereal bars, Nature Valley bars and Genisoy bars. Popcorn and certain cookies also qualify.” So will dried fruits and nuts, granola, a veggie alternative to cheese puffs, various energy bars and some other organic and soy products.

Over at Monroe High School in North Hills, the vending machines are still stocked as usual, but negotiations are underway to change that. “We’re giving Coke the benefit of the doubt,” says Lisa Jones, the school’s LEAF coordinator. “We’re meeting again on Sept. 12, and we want the vending machines changed completely from soda to water and juices.”

“We see kids eating Doritos, a Coke and a Snickers bar for lunch,” she says. Breaking that habit while those snacks are sold on campus is a losing proposition, so Jones is working on introducing better choices. She served soy chips, protein bars, vegan chocolate chip cookies, veggie burgers and juice at a health fair last year.

She also tried an experiment to convince students that what they eat matters.

“We fed them a nutritious breakfast before they took the standardized tests. We served string cheese, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, juice and milk to send the message that what you put in your body really does matter in what you can do.”

The school’s test scores rose. And, while many things contributed to that success, Jones wants a healthy breakfast to get some of the credit.