The recent assault on junk food in schools is a necessary response to the problem of childhood obesity, but it has about as much chance of success as the war on drugs.

While removing candy and low-nutrition foods from vending machines and cafeteria lines may reduce students’ calorie intake during the school day, it is difficult to see how this will alter the course of students’ food choices after the final bell rings in the afternoon. That, after all, is the real battle.

Proposals to reform student eating habits, which have been floating around many school districts, including Lawrence’s, have good intentions on their side and make a statement about healthy eating. But without a cultural paradigm shift that makes eating junk food fundamentally uncool, kids and the adults who work in schools are going to keep eating junk food.

I’m thinking here of the sea change in societal attitudes about cigarette smoking during the past 40 years. While universal acknowledgment of the health risks of smoking has not made smoking go away, smoking’s perceived unattractiveness – despite its physically addictive nature – has dramatically reduced the number of regular smokers.

Such radical change in attitudes about eating is difficult to imagine, given the way in which the food industry is organized and its products are marketed. To understand what I mean, take a slow and deliberate trip down the several frozen food aisles of a 21st-century supermarket. Then stroll down what used to be the cereal aisle, where Cap’n Crunch is losing more and more turf to the breakfast bar inventory.

Obviously, for many pupils, it won’t matter what the school vending machine dispenses. Many start their day eating a glorified candy bar. When they go home from school, many eat frozen pizza, frozen burritos, frozen sandwiches, frozen TV dinners and frozen party snack food. And we aren’t even factoring in fast food.

All of it is processed, mass-produced, high-calorie, high-fat, high-carbohydrate food product. In short, it is junk food. It is bad for you, it makes you fat, and it is daily fare in many homes.

This issue of what kids eat in schools gained traction last year when former President Clinton began sounding the alarm about childhood obesity and the General Accounting Office issued a report on the alarming amount of junk food available in the schools. The Coke and Pepsi folks, who had been locking up exclusive contracts with school districts, magnanimously volunteered to pull drinks containing sugar from their school vending machines. Now they have a captive market for diet pop and $1 bottles of water.

This convergence of events made the subject of overweight kids headline news, and that is appropriate. Childhood obesity can contribute to lifelong health problems that have tremendous personal and public cost.

Even so, any public response to this issue must square the pathetic reality of the American diet with one of the great ironies of marketing. At the same time that we, as a culture, have been persuaded that fast food and packaged food are good to eat, we also have come to believe, through constant representations in advertising and other media, that only slim people are attractive. This contradiction has contributed to the high incidence of bulimia and anorexia among young women, and to unhealthy preoccupations about body image among young people of both genders.

Given the social context in which the childhood obesity problem has developed, it appears that any school response must incorporate nutrition education into its program in a meaningful and thoughtful way.

This would be tricky, because children must become convinced that eating well is in their own best interest, which in the context of their short-term, socially centered worldview equates to popularity. At the same time, an educational effort must reinforce self-esteem and not exacerbate the unhealthy concern about body image.

Sorry, but I’m not optimistic.