The Appeal Democrat - Kiwis get nod over cookies

By Ryan McCarthy/Appeal-Democrat

Organic kiwis, 6-foot-long salad bars and Mandarin oranges are in, while vending machines, chocolate chip cookies and Gatorade are out at schools in the Marysville Joint Unified School District, winner of a $34,637 state wellness grant.

The district has eliminated what its grant application calls competitive "foods of minimal nutritional value" and gone healthy in a big way.

"That is our greatest accomplishment," Ken Llewellyn, the district's director of nutrition services, said of ending sales of sugar-rich sodas and cookies to students. "Our district has made the choice that we're not going to let that happen."

Students in January will get kiwis, part of the school district's Harvest of the Month program that brought unseasoned sweet potatoes in November to schools, including Arboga and Covillaud elementary schools and McKenney Intermediate in Marysville.

The school district has two refrigerated delivery trucks to pick up produce from local growers.

Quinco Corp. in Linda started supplying organic plums and pluots – a hybrid fruit that is part plum, part apricot – to district schools in August.

"This makes a lot of sense," Mike Noland, president of Quinco and a 1973 graduate of Yuba City High School, said of students being able to eat fruits fresh from local farms. The arrangement helps cut fuel and transportation costs as well, he said.

Carol Ann Hiort-Lorenzen, a consultant to child nutrition programs in California who began her work in 1959, praised the Marysville district's approach.

"You need to offer food that looks good and tastes good," Hiort-Lorenzen said.

She said when she began her work decades ago that, "you very rarely saw a child who was overweight."

"They looked like they needed food," the nutritional consultant said of students in an earlier era.

The successful grant application by the Marysville school district states that Yuba County has a 26 percent obesity rate and that 8 percent of residents have diabetes.

"These statistics show that that youth of the area are in a desperate need of intervention to help remediate the health woes," the document notes.

Ending sales of non-nutritional food by student groups involved in fundraising ran into some resistance at the start of the school year, Llewellyn said.

"Initially it was somewhat of a rocky road," he said. But he added, "this is the way we need to go for the benefit of the kids."

The student store at Marysville High School now sells clothing rather than food to raise funds for student activities, Llewellyn noted.

State law requires that high schools sell no carbonated beverages from vending machines after July 2009 and set a July 2007 deadline for elementary and middle schools to comply, Llewellyn said.

But high schools in the Marysville district have already stopped the sale of sodas from vending machines during the school day, Llewellyn said.

"We're not waiting until someone makes us," he said.