WASHINGTON, D.C. – To listen to First Lady Michelle Obama, one could conclude all the high school students tweeting pictures of “healthy” school lunches are just collateral damage.

For it’s the preschoolers she’s really after.

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In an interview with Cooking Light, Obama acknowledges they’re the real target of her “healthy” school lunch overhaul. The first lady says:

We measure this in terms of a generation. One of the things we stated in the Let’s Move! goal, or mission, is that we want to eliminate childhood obesity in a generation. So we’re looking at those kids who are coming into kindergarten right now, who are coming out of preschools who have now adopted new standards, and they’re serving different snacks. These kids are starting from nursery school, getting whole grains and fish and brown rice. I’m thinking about what happens to those kids [when they] go to high school, and they’re used to every day having a vegetable and a fruit, and they’re getting more activity.

We’re looking at that kid going through high school and then entering college with a whole new set of habits and taste buds. These kids will be acclimated to different tastes, and then they’ll go into college with that set of information and those skills and those norms. And hopefully they’ll become the voices of their generation for how to eat and live and build a quality life. We’re looking at those kids, and when they start to raise their own kids and they start passing on those habits to the next generation.

“So what happens in the schools is really impactful because that’s where you reach the most kids,” Obama says.

So her message to these older students, in essence, is “suck it up.”

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Obama – an Ivy League grad and former hospital executive – implies if she can’t figure out the complexity of healthier food, how could those rubes sitting at home all day?

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. …

I think most people think that if it’s on TV and it’s being advertised, it must be OK. But if you’re not reading labels and thinking about sugar content and looking at whether there’s real food in the food that you’re eating.

She also criticized macaroni with powdered cheese sauce.

And my kids loved the macaroni and cheese in a box. And he said, if it’s not real food then we’re not going to do it. If we want macaroni and cheese, we’ll cook it with real milk and real cheese. He said, there’s nothing wrong with mac and cheese, but it’s got to be real food.

So my oldest daughter [Malia], who was probably 8 at the time, [former White House chef Sam Kass] took a block of cheese and he said, if you can cut this cheese up into the powder that is the cheese of the boxed macaroni and cheese, then we’ll use it. She sat there for 30 minutes trying to pulverize a block of cheese into dust. I mean, she was really focused on it, and it just didn’t work, so she had to give up. And from then on, we stopped eating macaroni and cheese out of a box, because cheese dust is not food, as was the moral of that story. 

Naturally. Doesn’t everybody have a taxpayer-funded chef at their personal disposal?

“Change is hard for anybody,” the first lady adds.