Will Kyle Eat The Chicken?

Michelle Obama’s ambassador hit New Haven with a pitch for more healthful school lunches. She encountered a tough customer or two.

The ambassador — Audrey Rowe, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s administrator for special nutrition programs — showed up at Barnard School with New Haven U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro Monday just in time for lunch.

Rowe (pictured above singing the praises of baked chicken to Barnard fifth-grader Nicole Celone) is touring the country pushing First Lady Michelle Obama’s healthful-food campaign to tackle child obesity.

Monday’s New Haven stop was a return visit for Rowe. In the 1990s she served as social services chief for New Haven’s first black mayor, John Daniels. She then went on to a state commissionership and a top spot at the National Urban League before taking her current position with the country’s first black president.

Rowe and DeLauro used the Barnard photo-op to argue for a reauthorized federal Child Nutrition Act that adds more whole grains, fruits and vegetables, and low-fat dairy products to school lunches; trains school food workers to make more healthful meals; steers more local farmers’ produce to school meals; and cuts the paperwork involved in adding poor children to free school-meal programs.

They chose the pre-K‑8 Barnard Environmental Studies Interdistrict Magnet School because it and other New Haven schools already do what the Obama administration wants other schools to do: Serve lower-fat, lower-salt meals with more vegetables; and grow its own veggies in its own student-planted garden.

Rowe said that even when the more healthful food stares them in the face, the kids need encouragement to try it. Again and again. With some help, in the form of tasty recipes.

Rowe called elementary and middle schools ​“a good place to begin. [The students are] willing to try things.” The hope is that once exposed to broccoli and pears and baked rather than fried foods, the students will keep eating it, and convince their parents to also.

On a visit to a Michigan school the other day, Rowe said, she came across a schoolkid who has decided he likes eating the broccoli at school — as long as it has ranch dressing on it. In Rhode Island, she saw kids take to radishes. For real.

At Barnard Monday, the menu featured roasted chicken, salad, and Spanish rice and beans.

She urged fifth-grader Kyle Williams (pictured) to try the chicken.

Too dry, Kyle protested.

Put some of that lettuce on it, Rowe suggested. That’ll make it more moist.

He wasn’t budging. Finally he agreed to try it — but pronounced it still too-dry before he even put it in his mouth. (Later, when the grown-ups were elsewhere and not looking, Kyle tore into an apple.)

A table away, fifth-grader Nicole Celone had better news for Rowe. She gave the roasted chicken a thumbs-up. ​“It has a lot of taste to it,” she reported. And it was moist, she said. The beans and rice were a different story. ​“It’s kind of like, dry,” Nicole said. ​“They don’t put flavors in it. It tastes kinda blah.”

At the next table, the fifth-graders were more interested in grilling Rowe about the White House than in being grilled about chicken.

“You came all the way from Washington, D.C. to see this?” asked Mikahl Glass (at left in photo). ​“you work inside the Obama White House?”

Well, Rowe said, she works for Barack Obama, but in a different building.

“Will he travel here?”

“We’ll have to invite him,” Rowe responded.

“How do we do that?”

“You all get together and put together a letter about all the good food you have here,” she suggested. She was careful not to make any promises she couldn’t keep.

Outside the event, under a blue sky on a comfortable spring afternoon, Barnard’s two rows of bike racks stood empty, a reminder that it takes more than putting a program in place to get kids to adopt healthful routines.

As chair of the House of Representatives’ Agriculture Subcommittee, DeLauro (pictured at left with Rowe) will have a hand in crafting the Child Nutrition Act’s reauthorization and pushing for Obama/Rowe’s suggested changes.

Connecticut leaves $8.4 million worth of federally subsidized school meals a year unclaimed because eligible kids don’t get signed up. She and Rowe would like to see children already on government programs like Medicaid or TANF be automatically enrolled on subsidized breakfast and lunch rosters.

DeLauro said the proposed changes to the law have to do with fighting child hunger as well as obesity and other health problems. ​“If that isn’t a priority and a necessity,” she said, ​“I don’t know what our values are.”