The big food story across the blogosphere today is the Los Angeles Times' report that students are panning newly-introduced, healthy school lunches, leading the program's director to dub the debut "a disaster." The story has plenty of quotes from high school kids snubbing the "nasty," "soggy," "watery" fare, but the numbers of kids dropping out of the school lunch program doesn't paint nearly so drastic a picture. Is it time to bring back the hamburgers, or is there a better way to entice kids to eat the meals?

The new lunches were introduced earlier this year in an effort to combat childhood obesity, diabetes, and high sodium intake. Rather than filling their trays with pizza and curly fries, students were now presented with quinoa, pad Thai, vegetarian tamales, and salads. In taste tests over the summer, students responded positively to the changes, but the L.A. Times says that changed this school year.

According to principals interviewed by the Times, students are wasting "massive" quantities of food, and some report limp salads and moldy noodles. While moldy or past-date food is certainly a concern, the article doesn't mention whether there are higher incidents of this since switching from a traditional school lunch. In my memory, school lunches of chicken nuggets and pizza squares were never the height of freshness to begin with.

After the anecdotal interviews with displeased students and school administrators, the article has only one piece of numeric data to back up its claim that students are rejecting the meals "en masse." Participation in the school lunch program (as opposed to packing one's own lunch) declined about 13% since the switch; adjusting for some policy changes, the director says participation is down about 5 to 6%. Six percent hardly seems like an "en masse" rejection of the healthier options. Of course, if students are throwing away tons of food, that's another question, and one that the article fails to address in terms of statistics.

Still, a few percentage points of students choosing to bring lunches is not a huge catastrophe if it means that the low-income students who rely on the school lunch program are now consuming more nutritious options instead of cheesesteaks. Also likely is that some of those kids who aren't enrolled in the program are now forgoing lunch, which is a grave concern to principals. Now, those adminsitrators are re-tooling the program, returning hamburgers to the menu each day and swapping out some of the "exotic" dishes like vegetable curry and beef jambalaya.

But is this the answer? If 5% of students stopped eating school lunches because of quality or unfamiliarity with the dishes, those are issues that can be addressed without bringing back the calories, sodium, and sugar that characterized school lunches before. Perhaps schools could institute tougher guidelines on the freshness of foods, or conduct classroom cooking demonstrations that introduce students to ingredients like pad Thai and lentils. High school students aren't five-year-olds; the success of the summer taste tests prove that they're willing to embrace more nutritious foods. This is a case when adminsitrators need to give students' taste buds the credit they deserve.