“Invest in children” is not an empty slogan but an economic imperative: Quality preschool has been shown to yield a whopping 16 percent return on investment. The fact that it’s increasingly available only to affluent children isn’t merely an injustice; it’s a threat to societal prosperity. We can develop our “human capital” now, or we can spend exponentially more incarcerating people 20 years down the road.

Even for a family of relative privilege – a two-parent household with a stable income – early childhood and family education is a godsend. The ECFE program was a sanity-saver and perhaps, at times, even a life-saver for Steve and me; it truly helped keep us healthy and functional as a family, and certainly helped prepare our children to enjoy and excel in school. For families on the edge, programming like this is even more critical.

We can ignore the growing and compelling body of research demonstrating the importance of early childhood education, and the costs may not be felt for several years. But once they are, they’ll be measurable, and significant.

***

Last fall, I attended the first evening of a two-day school food conference: a gathering of food service directors and other “stakeholders,” convened by a Minnesota-based nutrition foundation. Among my souvenirs from the evening was a fact sheet on Solae Chicken Shreds: “A tasty, whole-muscle-like product featuring a blend of chicken and SUPRO® MAX structured vegetable protein product.” If that doesn’t whet your appetite, I don’t know what will.

The workshop’s attendees included about 20 school food service professionals, several nutrition researchers, an award-winning organic restaurateur, two interested parents (I came with a friend, another freelance writer) — and 10 or 12 representatives of corporate agribusiness, energetically hawking their employers’ latest feats of engineering. Clearly, industrial ag is concerned as ever about the health and well-being of America’s schoolchildren.

The impetus for the conference was a preliminary set of recommendations from the Institute of Medicine (IOM) for updating nutrition standards in school meals; one of the IOM’s recommendations was that at least half — or 51 percent — of grains in school lunches be from “whole grain-rich foods.” At the conference I picked up a Superkids Wholegrain Sampling Program directory, touting a host of ConAgra products — from pretzels to cookie dough to macaroni noodles — now containing exactly 51 percent whole grain.

My family is fortunate in that my husband and I are able to buy nutritious, sustainably produced food — and have the time to pack healthy home lunches for our kids. But, of course, they’d rather eat the sugary breakfast cereals, chocolate milk and nachos that many of their classmates get at school. In any case, it strikes me as unjust that millions of American kids simply don’t have access to wholesome meals. So it was with great interest that this angry mom watched Amy Kalafa and Susan Rubin’s new documentary, Two Angry Moms, a film examining “big food profits vs. children’s health.” Noting that the obesity epidemic is just one symptom of declining children’s health in the U.S., Kalafa sets to explain “what parents need to know and do to get better food in schools.”

The film opens with the image of potato strips being dunked in a deep fryer, and a barrage of alarming statistics on childhood obesity, Type II diabetes, allergies, heart disease, decreasing life expectancy and more. After addressing head-on the myth that school lunch reformers are dour, humorless “food police,” determined to take cupcakes out of children’s birthdays (Rubin is even shown savoring a cupcake — a real cupcake, made with butter and sugar and flour — outside a bakery), the filmmakers quickly move to the root of the problem.

As author, researcher and New York University nutrition professor Marion Nestle points out, the USDA, whose primary purpose is to “promote American agriculture,” has a fundamental conflict of interest in its secondary charge to feed America’s schoolchildren healthful, wholesome, balanced meals. After all, “American agriculture” is dominated by large agribusiness firms that are in business to maximize profits, and that means selling as much product as possible, regardless of its nutritional value. Chips, snack cakes, hot dogs and soft drinks: That’s what kids want to eat, big food companies tell us; we’re just meeting consumer demand. School lunch directors, constrained both by tight budgets and picky customers with deeply ingrained habits, feel pressure to offer lucrative, packaged “a la carte” items — “competitive food” that will reliably sell.

In short, this is what you call an uphill battle. But it is winnable — and worth fighting. The filmmakers exhort parents to organize, to band together; to learn about the challenges school administrators, board members, and food service directors are up against; and to take charge of writing meaningful, community-authored wellness policies that firmly articulate the school district’s needs. Widespread parent support and community buy-in are essential, they emphasize.

There are allies out there—school-food pioneers, models for improvement—and the film introduces us to some of them: Chez Panisse founder Alice Waters and rebel lunch lady Ann Cooper, who revolutionized the Berkeley United School District’s lunch program; food service director Rodney Taylor of Riverside, Cal., who brought local farmers’ bounty to urban public school salad bars; school lunch chef Tony Geraci of New Hampshire, whose own battle with diabetes prompted him to create a “prevention model” that includes healthy, kid-designed meals for students in his district. Their experiences show that American children will in fact eat wholesome, nutrient-rich meals — especially if they’re involved in growing, cooking, preparing and composting the food.

The film is informative and encouraging, but pretty coastal-centric. Real and important progress is being made here in the Midwest, too. Farm-to-school programs are connecting a growing number of school districts with food from local farms (and providing new and exciting opportunities for nutrition education). The Saint Paul, Minn., district, for instance, has attracted national attention for its farm-to-school effort; in the first six weeks of the academic year, the district purchased 110,000 pounds of locally grown produce for school lunches. The Farm to School Minnesota Toolkit for Food Service (www.mn-farmtoschool.umn.edu), which is based on materials developed in the Willmar, Minn., school district, provides guidelines for getting healthy, local foods into cafeterias.

These are not easy changes to implement; such efforts need vocal, sustained public support. “This is politics, and it’s the ugliest kind of politics, being fought over our kids’ health,” Nestle says. “If there aren’t angry moms pushing [reform], it’s not going to happen.”

It’s a good thing I don’t do press relations for the Episcopal Church. Because my response would be, Take them. They’re all yours. Please, take the petulant, put-upon misogynists and homophobes who pine for the good old days of exclusion. (That’s really what Jesus was about, isn’t it? excluding people, maintaining the power structure, etc.) They’ll fit in much better with you.

(And as my friend Casey, also a Catholic-turned-Episcopalian, suggests, “How about our own outreach campaign to all those Catholics who just can’t take it anymore? Strike while the iron is hot!”)

As the days passed, my postpartum anxiety grew, and our country prepared to go to war in Afghanistan, I read a column in the newspaper by a mother writing about her son’s need to physically defend himself against the schoolyard bully. “Sometimes, violence IS the answer” was the title of her piece. I saw things differently and was moved to respond in a letter to the editor:

Like Rebecca Anderson Fly (Sept. 26 Counterpoint, “Sometimes, violence is the answer”), I am a mother. My second child was born two days after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. The sweet, utter helplessness of a newborn has never seemed more poignant to me. The joy of his arrival and the hope it represents is, for me, mingled with an overwhelming sadness about the children who died in the attacks, and about those whose parents were killed. And I’m worried about what the future holds for my baby and his brother.

I’m also consumed by the fear that we’re about to compound this tragedy. Fly’s story about teaching her son to defend himself against the school bully isn’t precisely analogous to the world events unfolding: The schoolyard brawl will not claim innocent bystanders. But despite our government’s promise to try to minimize them, a military response to the Sept. 11 attacks is almost certain to involve civilian casualties. As we try to decide what “seeking justice” means, are we willing to accept responsibility for the inadvertent death of even one innocent child in Afghanistan? This mother isn’t so sure.

- Susan Maas, Minneapolis.

As Charlie turns 8, in a new and hopeful era with a president we — Charlie included! — helped to elect, my prayer for him is the same as it was in 2001: that my baby will grow up to be, above all, a peacemaker.

Another summer whipping by at breakneck speed. This month we enjoyed a wonderful weeklong visit from the Aunties, Sara and Laura, and a nostalgic Hayward camping weekend with Brad, Dana and kids, and now we’re a mere six days from our cross-country odyssey. In the meantime, Lee and I are hosting a performance by Open Eye Figure Theater on the lawn at St. James tomorrow night — hope the weather cooperates.

I decided to explore this concept of “light summer reading” after getting halfway through The Book of Margery Kempe and The Confessions of St. Augustine. I’m now reading Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, which seems way more appropriate for July.

School ended last week, and we took our first camping trip of the summer – to Frontenac State Park on Lake Pepin with Krista, Todd, Ellis and Evan. We shared a pretty, semi-wooded cart-in site (the park filled up quickly) that was fairly secluded. The food, as always, was terrific: grilled veggies, two kinds of pasta salad, brats, potatoes with garlic and onion, bean salad, fruit, mozzarella hobo pies and s’mores plus the usual truckload of chips, nuts and popcorn.

Of course the company was great, too. We took a couple of nice hikes, played Frisbee and catch, read ghost stories around the campfire and found a lovely beach, Sand Point, that can only be accessed by boat or via a mile-long boardwalk through a boggy hardwood forest. The kids had a blast riding log “submarines” and looking for crayfish.

Our big trip this summer – the longest since our honeymoon 15 years ago, in fact – will be our cross-country rampage in late July and the first half of August. The destination is Paul and Susi’s wedding in Mendocino, and on the way out we’ll drive through Iowa and Nebraska, camp for several days in Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, then visit Arches and Canyonlands in Utah, then spend a day or two on Lake Tahoe. The wedding itself will be in a house on the Pacific; we’ll be there for four days before leaving for Idaho and Wyoming. We’ll spend a few days in the Tetons again, then camp somewhere in the Bighorns before wending our way back to Minnesota (with, possibly, a night or two at Blue Mounds State Park). I’m extremely excited and a little nervous – both about the old Volvo actually making it all that way, and about the possibility of us killing each other with all that intense, concentrated family time – but last summer’s Canada & Vermont expedition went unbelievably well, so there’s reason for optimism.