The students at Crenshaw High School have a number of ways to describe their cafeteria food, but none of them are good. Some call it "welfare food"; others have termed it "government cheese." One 17-year-old student even did a dramatic skit to show how she feels about it: Walking up to a shut classroom door, she knocked on it, pantomimed sliding a tray underneath, held her nose, turned on her heels and shuffled away.

"Prison food," she said. "That's what it's like."

During lunch time at Crenshaw, students reluctantly stagger into lines to pick up Styrofoam trays loaded up with district-mandated food: square pizza with bland sauce and cheese that slides off in a single rubbery white sheet, which the official lunch menu dresses up with self-evident descriptors like "oven-baked" or "sliced pepperoni." It comes with a cup of limp canned vegetables or a decent piece of fruit.

Seventy-eight percent of the students at Crenshaw High get their lunches for free, or nearly free, but very few of them like what they get. "It's a psychological issue," said the cafeteria manager, Shirley Warner. She thinks there's nothing wrong with the food, only that it's presented as a hand-out.

"Nobody wants other people to think you're a poor child because you've got a free ticket."

And that leaves the teachers and administrators at Crenshaw with yet another complex problem, as though low reading levels and unpredictable home lives weren't enough. Whether the reason is taste or pride, many students find the cafeteria food so "gross" that they toss it away uneaten and go without lunch for the day. After school, they head to local fast-food joints where a few dollars can buy a hot, greasy meal.

The link between food and academic performance has become one of the main weapons wielded by food policy activists in the battle against childhood obesity, so much so that First Lady Michelle Obama made "healthier food in schools" one of the pillars of her "Let's Move" campaign.

In England, chef Jaime Oliver's "Feed Me Better" campaign boosted middle-schoolers' test scores and reduced absenteeism by banishing fake-foods like "Turkey Twizzlers" and replacing them with baked fish and broccoli. After one school in Appleton, Wisconsin began replacing soda vending machines and burritos with water and fresh vegetables in 2002, they noticed students were calmer and more focused. Some Crenshaw teachers argue that the high-carb, high-fat foods high school students eat are part of the reason why the students can often be inattentive, sleepy or disruptive.

"Napoleon said armies fight on their stomachs," said Crenshaw life-skills teacher Steve Johnson. "It's logical to assume that students learn on their stomachs as well."

The students at Crenshaw are part of a more sinister epidemic spurred by a shift in eating habits over the past few decades. When children rely increasingly on fast food meals, they chart a course for health problems later in life. Diabetes and heart disease plague the community that surrounds Crenshaw High, much as they do in other middle-and low-income communities across the U.S.

"One thing that always shocks me is when African Americans as young as 19 and 20 tell me they have diabetes," said Elaini Negussie of the American Diabetes Association. "They are getting it at such high rates when they shouldn't be getting it for another 20-30 years."

Negussie is one of the health experts brought in by the Los Angeles Urban League to present information on diabetes treatment and prevention to students at Crenshaw High and residents of the surrounding 70-block area. She's part of a phalanx of public health agencies and organizations invited to staff booths at "health fairs" in the region as part of the health dimension of the Urban League's Neighborhoods@Work initiative.

Throughout the first three years of the initiative, the Urban League held several health fairs each year, and a few hundred attendees came each time. Many of the Urban League's health partners said residents found them to be a useful event.

"They actually did come up to us and say thank you for the resources," said Hilda Stuart, an L.A. Care Health Plan representative who distributed tips on finding health coverage to those without health insurance. She said lower-income households often don't realize they have options to get treatment for diseases like diabetes.

"They didn't know about the family resource centers that we have available," she said.

The Urban League has tried to start community gardens, including one at Crenshaw High. The Urban League staffer responsible for health, D'Ann Morris, also hosted grocery store tours, in which Ralphs store managers taught a few dozen self-selected residents about reading food labels, buying low-fat milk and using olive oil instead of butter.

"There was a man there telling us what to eat and how to cook it, and it was very good," said Shirley Witherspoon, a resident who took part in a grocery store tour last December.

But despite the Urban League's public education efforts, the odds are still stacked against a full reversal of the area's high obesity and diabetes rates: most of the restaurants in the area serve up fried food, gang presence makes it dangerous for kids to play outside after dark, and the rise in single-parent households has led to a shift away from home-cooking.

"Mom and dad are working, so now the children are doing what mom used to do," said Bertha Wellington, a local business owner who lived in Crenshaw for more than 40 years until she recently relocated. "It's 'I left $5 on the counter, go get yourself something, and make sure you come home and eat it and lock the door.'"

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Socioeconomics play a big role when it comes to the types of food that families can afford, according to Ruben Brambila, who works on youth obesity issues at the Los Angeles County Health Department.

"The reason we do not cook the way we used to is because we have places that offer food that's much more affordable than it is to cook," he said. "The food is much cheaper, it's quicker, and it tastes good, but it's saturated with fat and preservatives."

And those trends are exacerbated for the families of students at Crenshaw High when meager incomes can mean harder choices when it comes to groceries. About 30 percent of students are in group homes, and Crenshaw staff said they know of instances when foster parents pocketed their government-provided subsidies while feeding their charges noodles and Kool-aid.

More importantly, Crenshaw families' food choices are often limited by the harsh truth of food economics. As long as farm subsidies continue to flood food markets with synthetic sweeteners and industrial fats, it's cheaper to eat junk than it is to eat healthy.

"When you're poor, you're gonna get what you can for your dollar," said Sybel Stanley, a Crenshaw High parent resource coordinator. "All they're trying to do is fill their bellies."

And when a family has known hunger, Stanley said, weight is often the least of their worries.

"We don't equate fat with not being healthy," she said. "We only equate it with our kids not having to go to bed at night hungry."

The Urban League's health programs try to convince residents that home cooking can, when done properly, be just as filling and economical as a few items from a dollar menu.

"With the people I have worked with, once they do get the information, their eyes are opened," said Meka Webb, an African-American campaign coordinator for Network for a Healthy California, which is one of the Urban League's health partners.

"They think, 'Perhaps it's not so daunting, not so difficult, and I can make something instead of going to McDonalds.'"

But the Urban League may be missing a key demographic that will determine the future health of the community. Wellington, who attended one of the grocery store tours, said that most of the participants were over 40.

"There were just a few from the next generation down," she said. "Mostly it was people from my generation or older."

But it's the neighborhood's young mothers and teens who are most likely to pass on their eating habits to their children. The Urban League responded by saying that they mainly advertise their health events through fliers in the neighborhood, and that they have not specifically sought the participation of younger generations.

"A targeted campaign for youth has not been implemented to date," Morris said. "It is our plan to include youth at some point in the future."

The group has also had trouble getting students at the high school interested. When the Urban League set up an after-school workout program for Crenshaw students, only 27 students took part, and the program eventually ended because of dwindling student participation.

Ahjaleah Price is a Crenshaw junior who's been helping round up her peers to take part in the Urban League's programs at the school. She's not sure why more people didn't stick with the training sessions.

"We impacted a lot of 9th graders," she said. "They absorb more, and they listen to adults. But we got very few seniors - they do their own thing."

An April 22 health fair held at Crenshaw High tried to reach young people on their own turf, with mixed results. Nearly 40 organizations handed out glossy brochures, and Morris and Price raffled off Quiznos gift certificates to students as rewards for filling out a health questionnaire.

But it's uncertain how receptive they were to the information, some of which was from acupuncturists, breast-cancer groups and other irrelevant organizations. Brambila said young kids are more malleable, but starting at 6th grade, students' mentality tends to be, "I'm in charge of my body, and I can eat what I want," he said.

Instead, Brambila recommends encouraging kids to take charge of the obesity epidemic by attacking the powers that be.

He likens the strategy to the American Legacy Foundation's Truth campaign, which aimed to rally teens around the idea that tobacco companies are taking advantage of them.

"Instead of saying 'Stop smoking,' they said, 'Look what the tobacco industry is doing to you,'" he said. "Just by engaging them in that, they noticed that overall tobacco consumption rates are going down."

For obesity and diabetes, Brambila recommends a similar approach. Instead of being passive recipients of information booklets, teens should be encouraged to denounce marketers for pimping junk food and urge government officials to create more safe parks.

"If the students were the ones administering it, there would be different outcomes," he said. "A lot of them are already taking action in their communities. They don't like to be told what to do."

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But that still leaves the problem of Crenshaw's cafeteria food.

The rectangular pizza slices and canned green beans measure up under the district's nutrition requirements, but the school can't seem to give them away.

To remedy that, public health advocates suggest increasing the amount that the federal government pays schools for providing free and reduced-price lunches to students. If schools had more money to spend on ingredients, they argue, students would be more likely to eat nutritious lunches at school and less likely to beeline to McDonalds on the way home.

"There's not enough money being given by the government to offer the best type of food available," Brambila said. "We're giving this food to youth because it's more affordable. But if a restaurant doesn't offer good-tasting food, you don't want to go back there again."