The Obama administration has declared the dire state of our health care system one of our country's most pressing challenges.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have stated that of the children born in the year 2000, 1 out of 3 Caucasians and 2 out of 3 African Americans and Hispanics will contract diabetes in their lifetimes. As a result, that generation will be the first in our country's history to die at a younger age than their parents.

Time magazine reported recently that as a nation we are spending more than $147 billion a year on diet-related illness, much of it attributable to diabetes and much of that preventable.

Together these facts are the health care crisis of our lifetime.

The impending implosion of the health care system could be alleviated through policies that would make the National School Lunch Program a health program. The government is expected to reauthorize the program by early next year. If as a country we could link what we feed our children in school and what we teach them about sustainable food to their lifelong wellness, we might be able to avert this impending disaster.

Schools have five major challenges to overcome if we're going to change the relationship of children (and their families) to food:

Food: We need policies weighted toward fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains and clean protein with a priority on regional procurement and funding for the national Farm to School programs to help make these policies come alive. Our policies have to include both breakfast and lunch and to assure that literally "no child is left behind" - meaning no child is left hungry or undernourished.

We need to ban added trans fats, high-fructose corn syrup, additives, colorings, hormones, antibiotics and other chemicals in school food - they are making our children sick. One way to help kids eat "real food" is to give them good choices - let's put salad bars in every school and ban all "a la carte" offerings.

Finance: We need to make school lunch a priority by allocating at least an additional dollar toward food. Schools now spend about $1 for food for each pupil each day. But the extra money must go for healthy food. We realize that this will mean the cost of the lunches in the National School Lunch program will rise from approximately $8 billion to $13 billion a year; but we're going to either pay now to fix the system or pay later with higher health care costs.

Another issue: We should be feeding every child a healthy and delicious meal at school every day. Not only will a policy of universal meals alleviate all of the paperwork that overwhelms most school food staffs, but it will mean that every child will have the same "fuel" with which to learn and play.

Facilities: If we're going to move from highly processed, unhealthy food to menus made up in large part by fresh fruits, fresh vegetables, whole grains and clean protein, then we need to cook. For decades school fare has been based around reheating the likes of chicken nuggets, Tater Tots, corn dogs and pizza pockets in warming boxes. A system based on "real food" would require cooking as opposed to reheating equipment, which would entail allocating funding to rebuild kitchens in schools across the country.

Human resources: As a nation we have in large part stopped cooking in our homes, and this is no different in our schools. Over the decades that we've been reheating as opposed to cooking, we've lost much of our culinary skills, which means that we need to teach our school food-service workers to cook again. Switching from chicken nuggets and Tater Tots to roast chicken and roast potatoes means that we need culinary "boot camps" to train our cooks and perhaps a National Culinary Corps, based on AmeriCorps, where culinary students can work off their student loans by cooking in schools.

Marketing: The average child watches 10,000 commercials a year for foods of little or no nutrient value. We've raised a generation of children who think chicken nuggets are a food group and that Gatorade is the new water. Our kids are marketed to on a constant basis to eat more and more and more of items like "hot Cheetos," soda, candy and fast food. The result is that we've made our children addicted to a diet high in fat, sugar and sodium; this needs to change.

Research has shown that what children learn in school is taken home and becomes part of the family. This leads us to demand a national marketing campaign that makes school food cool food, that elevates fresh fruits, vegetables and whole grains to the status of Coke and Pepsi and that helps our kids make healthier choices in the same way as we've gotten Americans to stop smoking and wear seat belts. Additionally, we need funding for hands-on experiential learning in cooking and gardening classes to help educate our kids in these subjects.

We believe that this is the social-justice issue of our time and that we as a nation have a moral imperative to enact policies that assure that no child is hungry in school and that the food that they're fed is delicious and nutritious. We know that children can't think or excel when they're malnourished, and we know that both the achievement gap and the life-expectancy gap between rich and poor kids has grown significantly in the past few decades. We know that a disproportionate amount of our country's health care costs are allocated to our most at-risk citizens, and we know that those very same children are the ones who are most in need of healthy food in schools. It truly should be a birthright in our country to be served healthy, delicious food in every school, every day.

In an effort to help make this happen, we are in the process of developing the Lunch Box Project: Tools to Help All Schools. We hope that this Web-based tool kit will be a resource to support policies we're advocating and that with the project's help, all schools will begin to improve the health of an entire generation.

High school/Middle school entreeElementary school entreeSecond entreeSidesSides
Traditional pizza - meat or veggieTraditional pizza - meat or veggieBeef or veggie hot dog on whole-grain rollBaked beansSalad bar, 1% milk, Fresh fruit
Roast chicken or veggie pattie with mashed potatoesn/aMac and cheeseWhole-grain rollSalad bar, 1% milk, Fresh fruit
Chicken or veggie lo meinChicken or veggie lo meinBeef or veggie chili with breadSalad bar, 1% milk, Fresh fruit
Pasta Bolognese or marinaraPasta Bolognese or marinaraBBQ chicken sandwichSalad bar, 1% milk, Fresh fruit
Beef or veggie nachosBeef or veggie nachosTraditional pizza - meat or veggieBeans and riceSalad bar, 1% milk, Fresh fruit

Note: Authors Cooper and Collins, who got their start in the Berkeley schools, are now working in the