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After just 11 days, the Greens are beating the Grease at Malcolm X Elementary School. 

The school’s new salad bar is a hit with students, who have decided that a lunch of veggies and fruits really isn’t that bad. In fact, many say it’s better than the bulk-produced cafeteria food that most of us grew up on – or avoided. 

“The hamburgers come in these plastic bags, and when you get them, the bun’s all wet because of the moisture, and it really gets annoying eating soggy hamburgers,” fourth-grader Ciara Sudjian-Carlisle said Thursday afternoon, in between bites of her salad. 

Or as fellow fourth-grader Jaylon Simpson put it, the salad is “better than that nasty food.” 

The salad bar is part of the ongoing improvements in the nutrition program around the Berkeley Unified School District. Last summer, the BUSD attracted national attention for adopting an organic food policy, reputedly the first policy of such breadth and depth for any school district in the country. 

Malcolm X’s program incorporates at least two key elements of that policy: serving meals that are organic to the “maximum extent possible,” and promoting “maximum meal participation.” 

Most of the items on the salad bar are purchased by Suzanne Bernhard, who oversees the fledgling salad bar program, at the twice-weekly Berkeley Farmers’ Market. The school’s new garden is nearly complete, so beginning in the fall, produce grown on-site will augment the supply bought at the Farmers’ Market. So not only will the food be organic, Bernhard notes, but students will have a better understanding of how the food cycle works. 

After just 11 days of operation, the salad bar is helping to increase the number of students eating in the cafeteria, moving the school toward that “maximum meal participation.” On Thursday, the cafeteria served 284 meals – and only 75 of them were grilled cheese sandwiches. Before the salad bar was launched, between 200 and 220 meals were served each day. 

“This just blows away all those myths,” Tom Bates, the former state assemblymember who now heads the Food Systems Project, said while watching students eagerly chow down on their salads. “They say kids won’t eat lettuce, or they won’t eat a healthy lunch, but look - they’re doing it. 

“If we can get kids to eat like this at school, we’re hoping they’ll influence their parents and start eating like this at home, too.” 

So far, the benefits of the fresh salad bar are purely anecdotal, although Bates hopes research can be done to see how the Malcolm X students’ dietary habits affect their academic performance and their behavior. 

Fourth-grade teacher Janice Blumenkrantz admitted that she couldn’t see many changes in behavior yet, but she did support the idea of providing quality lunches for the students so they’re able to perform well in the classroom and in extracurricular activities. 

“I think it’s important that they’re well fed, because they wouldn’t be able to jump through all the hoops if they weren’t,” she said. 

Her comments were echoed by Joaquin Rivera, president of the BUSD School Board. 

“It’s really good that kids enjoy eating this nutritious food,” he said. “For a lot of our kids, this may be the best meal they have all day.” 

The salad bar “team” hopes to expand to three more schools in the fall. Oxford and Rosa Parks (formerly Columbus) elementary schools are likely candidates, and several other campuses are interested. Bates said the goal is to have full salad bars at eight schools by the end of the 2000-2001 school year. Of course, that will require funds, no easy task for the financially strapped BUSD. But Bates said the district is in line for a $1 million state Healthy Network grant that would provide much of the necessary money to expand the program.