Hungry Preschoolers

One recent February morning, twenty preschoolers set about their task with uncharacteristic focus and voraciousness: they had come to eat their lunch. The children gobbled down the day’s menu of roast turkey with gravy, corn and white bread. Most plates were left empty, and others showed speckles of yellow from uneaten corn. Juice and spittle dribbled down chins.

Yet the simple operation of feeding a classroom full of three-, four- and five-year-olds can be as complex as preparing a six-course meal. But you don’t have to tell Peter Metralexis, health coordinator at the Educational Alliance community center in the Lower East Side. His unenviable task: appeasing the mouths while fighting the fat for the building of 200 children – a group of pre-preschool, preschool and day care kids from low-income families, most in the national Head Start program. In 2005 Head Start, which provides educational and nutritional services to economically disadvantaged preschoolers, enrolled over 900,000 children, with 49,000 in New York, the third most in the country, according to the Office of Head Start. Unlike many of his counterparts though, Metralexis gets a lot more Chinese immigrants, along with some African American and Latino.

Food guide pyramids may simplify our diets to easy-to-read categories like grains, fruit, and meat and fish – and Metralexis has just enough desk space for a plastic pyramid filled with pseudo-food, each on its own floor – but there is no exact science to cooking for kids, especially now. America is getting fatter, and even the very young have been slouching toward plus-sizes. So how does Metralexis keep to government nutrition standards but still create an inviting menu?

Like Moses in the desert, Metralexis must satisfy the capricious masses but also get them to the promised land of eating healthy. The dishes are generally under-seasoned to fit more palettes, and the crowd loves rice and bread. Luckily some foods run across cultural lines: kids gobble up the macaroni and cheese. Not all experiments work, though, with familiarity key. The kids turned up their tiny noses at the “potatoes with ham and a white sauce.” The white sauce and potatoes combination proved too foreign to their taste buds. White-colored foods in general – besides rice, that is – seem to be a turn off. Cheese and crackers, yes. Cottage cheese, not so much.

“White is just a very strange color for food,” Metralexis said acceptingly.

He has also learned the hard way that when it comes to food, children are not creative. His do-it-yourself burrito – a selection of refried beans, pita bread, and cheddar slices – flopped at this theater. The children were stumped.

“It didn’t make sense to the children because they had to compose the food,” Metralexis said.

But the children’s food fetishes are the least of Metralexis’s problems. Healthy eating tops the agenda. The number of overweight young children ages of two to five has doubled since the 1970s, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The center’s six-month height and weight evaluation reveals signs that some of the children are overweight.

This wouldn’t be odd – what with the porkification of the U.S. – except many of the children are recent immigrants, largely from China. Apparently, Uncle Sam likes them fat. Metralexis believes the children have been “picking up America’s bad eating habits.”

The purging of sugar, salt and fats from meals has begun: no sweets and limited juices. Banished is syrup with the morning pancakes and waffles, replaced with cinnamon applesauce, peach slices or bananas. Meanwhile, cole slaw and vegetable sticks have clawed their way onto the menu.

Yet sugar still lurks in classrooms. Teachers and parents bring in cookies and candy. But the greater menace has been the birthday party, that insidious institution with its ritualistic exaltation of the cake. These fetes have a cultish following among the children, who clamber for the chance to indulge in precious cake and juice. That’s exactly what Metralexis fears most. Dessert becomes an “object of focus” he cautioned, and more Chinese families have picked up on party giving, complete with two layer cakes swirling in fluffy frosting. How will the food pyramid compete?

Metralexis intends to fight back, fire with fire, or actually glorified treat against idealized sweet. He hopes the children will give up sugary cakes for freshly made pizzas, which the kids could help make in class. But as the parties continue, anticipated by the children and condoned by teachers, stacked boxes of Toastmaster convection ovens lay unopened and waiting in Metralexis’s office.