There's no getting around the fact that Cathy is a little strange. A middle-aged, indeterminately-shaped blond woman, she's always smiling -- a rather tight smile -- standing with her hands behind her back. The hubbub of a school cafeteria rises up around her, while she blurts out encouraging comments like, "You're a Vitamin Superstar! There's both Vitamin A and Vitamin C in that food!"

I met Cathy, the virtual lunchroom lady, on a website run by the Carollton-Farmers Branch school district in Carollton, Texas and designed by a company called Winning Habits.com. The site is designed to educate students and parents about the nutritional content of school meal menu items.

You can go online and pick your school from a drop-down list. Once you click your way into the cafeteria, Cathy appears, standing behind shelves holding the day's menu choices. Users can click and drag items to their tray. When they do, the price of the item pops up on the left, a nutritional analysis appears along the bottom, and the clock behind Cathy flashes either green for go, yellow for slow, or red for "whoa!" (I thought that was a nice Texas touch.)

As you load your tray, the program keeps a running total of the price of the meal you've selected, and of the nutritional content -- calories, carbs, fat, sodium, the works.

The idea, according to an article in eSchool News, is that parents and kids can sit down together and make menu choices for the next day, or simply experiment with what makes a healthy meal. It's part of an overall effort to help stave of childhood obesity. And at least for a one-time visitor like me, it's kind of fun. I can't imagine some of the more attitudinal middle schoolers of my acquaintance finding it anything but lame, but can see it working pretty well for some upper-elementary kids.

There are a couple of quirks -- I couldn't figure out how to put things back after putting them on my tray, so some inadvertent clicking loaded me up with three chocolate chip cookies and a bowl of "cheddar shreds." The caloric impact was devastating, and I may not eat again for a week.

And no matter how badly you choose, Cathy never has a negative word to say about your decisions. She'll praise you for your salad, and even for your "cheddar shreds" ("Way cool! You know where to find your Vitamin C!") but maintain a smiling silence about all those cookies.

I guess that's because there are no bad foods, only bad choices.

The developers hope other districts will be interested in hiring Cathy for their own virtual lunchrooms.

http://studentnutrition.cfbisd.edu/content/story.aspx?type=customcontent&sid=1034036