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About five years ago Eric Weaver, a Berkeley parent volunteering at his son’s school, discovered kids stealing the teachers’ snacks.  

“I asked them if they were eating breakfast and they weren’t,” said Weaver. So he began to bring Noah’s Bagels every morning for the kids to eat. 

For the rest of this school year all students at Oxford Elementary can have a free luxury breakfast of hot oatmeal, organic yogurt, and other fresh toppings including organic kiwis and satsuma oranges from local farmers. The elementary school is part of a study by Harvard Psychologist Michael J. Murphy documenting the effects of a healthy whole grain breakfast on students’ lives. 

Researchers will administer surveys to parents, teachers and food servers and test students to determine the impact of the breakfast on kids’ academic performance and social behavior. Previous studies have shown that when breakfast is provided children come to school more often, come earlier, and are better able to focus, said Janet Brown, program officer for the Food Systems Project at Berkeley’s Center  

for Ecoliteracy, one of the agencies involved. “The number one goal is that no child will be hungry in school,”  

said Brown. “The unifying principle recognizes the links between nutrition and cognition.”  

She said this policy takes a stand that nutrition is an essential component of learning, “at a time when there’s so much talk about tests, achievement, and accountability.” 

Melissa Agent, a senior at UC Berkeley, is the core researcher for the project. She said the choice of whole grains was to provide a food both healthy and filling, and said the students seem pleased with the choice. “One kid this morning said he didn’t think he’d ever really like oatmeal, but he does,” she said. 

This year the oatmeal is donated by Quaker Oats and labor costs are provided by grants and donations. 

Oxford principle Kathleen Lewis said that the program will continue once the subsidies are gone. 

An important part of the program is making healthy food a sustainable business, said Jared Lawson, program coordinator for the Food Systems Project. 

Brown said, “The big premise is when the quality goes up in the food that’s being served, participation goes up in the program. There are kids who have money who don’t take advantage of the program in very large numbers right now. If the food were great they would.”  

Previous pilot programs combining food quality and choice support her hopes. A salad bar at Malcolm X Elementary School increased food purchases by 46 percent. 

A combination of serious interest and good luck made Oxford School the site for the new study. “We were chosen because we’ve been really involved in improving the nutritional quality of the food served. We fought hard to get a breakfast program,” said Lewis, recalling Weaver’s trips to the bagel shop to get breakfast for students prior to the beginning of a breakfast program. 

Dr. Murphy, who is affiliated with Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School is studying school nutrition programs all over the United States. The Oxford breakfast bar is part of a larger health awareness program envisioned by the Food Service Project. The Center for Ecoliteracy will coordinate a curriculum that takes students to farms and orchards to show them where the fruit they put on their oatmeal comes from. Murphy will test whether students performance improves, and the Center for Ecoliteracy will learn, said Brown, whether “their IQ about the environment goes up.” 

“We want children to thoroughly understand that the food on their plate comes from a place in the earth, and be able to understand some of the greater implications of what that means. How we feed ourselves is one of, if not the greatest, threat to the landscape, and the single greatest threat to ecological communities,” she said. “How we feed ourselves has to do with, in the long run, if we’ll be able to feed ourselves.”