You can serve a teenager salad in his lunch, but you can't make him eat it.

That's what a bunch of high-school students recently told the school administrators.  Students in Williamstown, West Virginia, wanted to make the point that the school lunches were unsatisfactory, calling them "too small and unappetizing."

Among other things, the kids were protesting the removal of French fries from the lunch menu.

There have been plenty of boycotts in other school districts--but they're on the other side of the coin.  Those boycotts have had the goal of adding more fresh foods, including salads and fruits, to the school lunch menus.

The question remains:  is offering healthy options enough?  Or do the unhealthy lunch options need to be completely removed before kids will consent to choose the healthy ones?  Back in my lunchroom-volunteer days, there was one teenage girl who would spend all her lunch money at the snack table, buying chips, crackers and ice cream instead of the grilled-cheese-sandwich and soup offered on the cafeteria menu.  I started letting her know that I was paying attention to her eating habits, and it became a bit of a joke between us.  But it made a difference to that one child:  she began to come over to where I was working during the lunch period--to show me that she'd brought a sandwich from home and was, in fact, eating it before she arrived at the snack table to purchase potato chips.

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