Michelle Obama: Kids will eventually embrace changes in school lunches, nutrition

WASHINGTON — Hunter Lewis: Congratulations on the fifth anniversary of Let’s Move! Is it where you hoped it would be five years in?

Mrs. Obama: We’re really proud of the changes we’ve seen across the country—most proud of the fact that it feels like there’s a new norm in how families think about food and what’s healthy. You see more people planning community gardens. You see the changes in the school lunches, improvements in standards, more veggies and whole grains. You see more schools incorporating physical fitness into the school day. 

So [these are some] things we had hoped to see, because how you make real change is really by starting from the bottom up and giving communities and families and churches and neighborhoods [the tools] to make those changes that are going to have the real impact on the ground.

HL: Take us back to your family table at the apartment on the South Side of Chicago. I’ve read your mom shopped at the supermarket once a week, and she did a rotation of lemon chicken and spaghetti and meatballs.

Mrs. Obama: Absolutely. She was typical of her generation. She knew how to shop and cook on a budget, because we were a working-class family, so budgets were important. And I distinctly remember every weekend my mom making a list of what we would be eating that week, going to the supermarket with her, picking out the menu plan—it was usually something big and fancy like roast beef on Sundays, which would be used for lunches over the Monday or Tuesday.

She was famous for her lemon chicken, and that was a good Sunday dish. There was always the sad and unfortunate liver Wednesdays. That was during the time—my father loved liver, and it just depressed me and my brother to no end when we knew it was liver time.

Weekends were more fun. You do fish on Friday, and maybe once a week we’d do takeout, get pizza. But there was a pattern to what we ate. They were familiar flavors. There was my mom’s lasagna, and we had dinner around the kitchen table. My dad was a shift worker, so there were some dinner times when he was at work, but whenever he was there we would sit around the table with the plastic tablecloth, and that’s when we would catch up and we’d talk about what we were eating, talk about what was going on in the day.

And it’s that tradition that Barack and I really try to incorporate in our lives, even though we’re extremely busy in the White House. We’ve found that we’ve been able to have dinner every—almost every night together, between 6:30 and 7:00.  We have a bigger table and somebody else is doing the cooking, but the conversation and the mood and the tone are still the same. It’s our most important time of the day.

HL: Now, [when you were] a child, obesity was not an epidemic. A couple generations ago, we moved at a slower pace. How did we get to this point now, two generations later, where we need Let’s Move!?

Mrs. Obama: Well, I think it’s not one thing that we can point to that’s caused the challenges that we’re facing. It’s a little bit of everything. Folks don’t cook as much. There’s more processed foods. People are eating out. That was my case when I was a working mother, a lot of takeout.

Kids have too many options for sedentary activity. We have hundreds of television channels, whereas when I was growing up you had seven. On Saturday, kids’ programming stopped at noon, and once that was done you had nothing else to do on a Saturday but go out and play. That’s not the case now; kids can watch cartoons 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

In the schools there have been tremendous changes that have led to some challenges. Recess has been taken away from the school day. PE is becoming less and less of a sort of reality in many schools who are dealing with funding issues.

So this is why the challenges we face require all of us to step up. We have to educate families a bit more about how to think about eating and cooking and shopping and budgeting. But communities have to find ways to incorporate activity into folks’ lives.

We’re pleased with the changes we’re seeing at the school level through Let’s Move Active Schools. We’re seeing thousands of schools that are now finding creative, cost-effective ways to incorporate physical activity into the day, even if they’ve had to eliminate PE or recess. They’re really getting creative about getting kids up and moving for 5- or 10-minute spurts of activity, doing things that can be done in the classroom throughout the day.

It’s going to take a lot of creativity and ingenuity to sort of push past the kind of societal changes that have led us to this place.

HL: Now, you’ve been candid about—there was a point where you realized that you and your husband maybe had gotten off track with the girls. I mean, I’ve got a 3-year-old daughter at home and a 1-year-old daughter, and I’m the family cook, and it’s not easy.

Mrs. Obama: It is not easy. You come home, you’re tired, you’ve been working all day. Unlike my mom, we didn’t learn how to cook. That wasn’t something my mother stressed for me. We came from the generation where my mom wanted me to go to college and law school, and she always said, “You’ll learn how to cook,” but that’s not something she pressed.

So I was in school. I had a career. By the time my kids were born, that’s when I started focusing on, How do I feed them? With those sort of limited skills, sometimes I would use processed food a little bit more. I relied on takeout probably more than I should’ve. And my kids were always active. But our pediatrician—you go to the well-child visits and they do the height, the weight, they measure BMI. Our pediatrician would chart it across a curve. And there was one appointment where he looked at the numbers and he said, “Something is a little off.” And that was the first time I even thought that I might be doing something wrong. I thought I had it all together. But when he said that, I really had to step back and think about, What am I doing on a day-to-day basis?

So we made very simple changes as a result of what our pediatrician told us. I cooked probably one or two more meals, and it was something simple—maybe a baked chicken, couscous, steamed broccoli. I kept it simple but made sure there was always a vegetable and always a good grain on the plate.

But more importantly, we just eliminated all the processed foods, all those packaged lunches, all of the canned juices. We started using fresh-squeezed juice and added more water into their diet. So when the kids were thirsty, we would even mix water in juice just to dilute it so it would get them out of that habit of wanting that sugary taste. And the kids adapted to the changes very quickly. By the time we went back for the next visit, our pediatrician said, “What have you done?” And I was like, “What?” He said, “I haven’t seen these numbers change in such a short period of time in this way in a while.” And that’s when we started having the conversation of just how easy—it’s about information and knowledge. I didn’t know, but once I had the information, it was fairly easy to make the changes.

So that’s one of the reasons why Let’s Move! is so personal to me—because it’s one of those things where I’m thinking, look, if I didn’t figure this out, I’m sure there are millions of families and parents who are getting it wrong, not even knowing it, and not knowing where to begin to try to get their family’s health back on track.