Stop the Pop

Kasigluk, Alaska

 

It takes a lot of work to get hamburgers, French fries, and Cokes to the school in Kasigluk, Alaska. The nearest highway is 400 miles away. There are no cows in Kasigluk. Or potatoes, for that matter. The village sits on the banks of the Johnson River, near the Bering Sea. During the summer, wild grasses stretch to the horizon. When the wind blows, the tall grasses make a peaceful rustling sound. About 540 people live in Kasigluk, give or take a few. During the winter, when the river becomes solid ice, they often travel on snowmobiles. And they have to bundle up. The village is so far north that on some days the sun comes out for just three hours and the temperature drops to 50 degrees below zero.

The people who live in Kasigluk are Yupiks, members of an Eskimo tribe that was among the last to encounter the modern world. For generations the lives of the Yupiks revolved around the land and the rivers, the gathering of food and the celebration of family life. Until about fifty years ago, Yupiks obtained almost all of their food by hunting, fishing, and harvesting wild fruits and vegetables. Children were taught at an early age to pick berries, catch small birds, trap rabbits, and collect water from melted snow. Many of the fish caught during the summer months would be dried and saved for the long winter.

It was a hard life. But the Yupik culture also had a great beauty tied to the seasons, the landscape, and most of all the rituals of hunting and gathering. The Yupiks had a name for the darkest part of the winter, when the sun would hardly ever appear: Cauyarvik. It meant “the time for drumming,” and the coldest days of the year would be filled with village festivals, music, and dancing. People wrote songs and poetry, made masks and entertained one another during the Cauyarvik. They believed that all the souls of human beings were connected, even to the souls of animals. Seals that were captured were thought to have presented themselves as a gift to hunters who had behaved honorably.

In 1959, Alaska became the forty-ninth state of the United States and outsiders increasingly settled in the town of Bethel, twenty-five miles southeast of Kasigluk. A new airport opened in Bethel that same year, making it easier to fly in food and supplies from distant cities. Now that Kasigluk was part of the United States, Yupik children were required to attend school for nine months of the year, sitting in classrooms for much of the day. Instead of gathering food with their families, many children from Kasigluk were now sent away to boarding schools run by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs. Few of the teachers were Eskimos, and the classes were taught entirely in English. A child caught speaking Yupik in school might have his or her mouth washed out with soap.

The Yupik elders had warned the children that they must be upterrlainarluta, which means “always getting ready,” especially for the unexpected. One thing that the young Yupiks could not prepare for, however, was how quickly life would change in their village. The arrival of new people, new customs, and new laws from the outside world brought many conveniences. But it also threatened the heart of the Yupik culture: the unique rituals and reverence surrounding food.

Today most of the families in Kasigluk have cable television. They have a lot of spare time to watch TV. About half of the village’s adults are unemployed. The opening of large commercial fisheries nearby has made it harder for Yupiks to catch fish in the Johnson River. Instead of picking berries and trapping rabbits, the village children can be found watching Nickelodeon, MTV, and reruns of Friends. They see ads for Burger King and McDonald’s, even though many of them have never seen a real fast-food restaurant. The TV shows and commercials all seem to be preaching the same message: This is what you need to look like, this is what you need to buy, this is what you need to think, in order to be happy, pretty, popular, cool. The village elders still speak Yupik and want their children to respect tradition, while the images on TV promise the same American dream to everyone, everywhere.

Kasigluk now has its own school, the Akula Elitnaurvik School, attended by one hundred students from kindergarten through twelfth grade. The classes are taught in English, and the food served in the cafeteria wouldn’t seem out of place in Des Moines, Iowa: hamburgers and French fries, macaroni and cheese. Much of the food has been donated or sold at a reduced price by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Soda is sold at after-school events. The Akula Elitnaurvik School has its own warehouse, which can stock up to a year’s worth of processed foods. Once a month, the school used to have a Native Food Day, and students would be served local dishes such as reindeer. Native Food Day was recently discontinued, and so at school the kids now eat nothing but food produced thousands of miles away. How do you get hamburgers, French fries, and Cokes to the school in Kasigluk? Like just about everything else, you get them there by cargo plane.

Three or four times a year, a plane carrying about a ton of frozen food heads to Kasigluk. It flies above the Kuskokwim and Johnson rivers, above a wildlife refuge that’s home to rare birds (like the emperor goose) and rare animals (like the vegetarian muskox). It flies above an arctic wilderness that looks endless, that seems so ancient and pure you can almost forget, for a moment, the frozen hamburger patties and frozen pizzas that have come along for the ride.

mcschools

Throughout the United States, the menus in school cafeterias have come to resemble the menus at fast-food restaurants. The same kinds of foods are being offered at both places—increasingly, by the same companies. For years Ray Kroc liked to put new McDonald’s restaurants near schools, but it wasn’t until December 1976 that the first McDonald’s opened inside a school. It was a high school in Benton, Arkansas, and to mark the occasion a gigantic portrait of Ronald McDonald was hung on the cafeteria wall. Students there could hardly believe their good luck. McDonald’s viewed the opening in a high school cafeteria as an experiment. “We don’t know if there will or won’t be any others to follow,” said a McDonald’s spokesman. “It’s an interesting thing and we’re watching it.”

Thirty years later, about 19,000 public schools—one of every five in the United States—sell branded fast food in the cafeteria. Pizza Hut, McDonald’s, and Subway now serve fast food at elementary schools. The fast-food chains view school locations as just one more place to make money. Why have school officials, who are supposed to be concerned about the health of their students, invited these companies into their cafeterias? The answer also has to do with money. As communities have reduced spending on education, schools have scrambled to find enough money for teachers, classrooms, desks, computers, athletic programs, textbooks, and cafeteria workers. Selling food that kids like to eat has seemed to be an easier way to get money than convincing their parents to pay higher taxes. A number of school officials are even proud of the decision to sell fast food. “We want to be more like the fast-food places where these kids are hanging out,” a Colorado school administrator told the Denver Post. “We want kids to think that school lunch is a cool thing, that we’re ‘with it.’ ”

Some schools sell exclusive cafeteria rights to a single fast-food chain. For example, in San Lorenzo, California, the school district signed a contract that makes Burger King the only fast-food restaurant at Arroyo High School. Student workers at Arroyo High wear red Burger King uniforms and caps while selling Whoppers. Even the garbage cans there have Burger King logos. “I don’t think it’s healthy,” a ninth-grader told a reporter, “but I eat it because it tastes good.” Other schools invite different fast-food chains into their cafeterias on different days of the week. On Tuesdays, it may be Subway; on Wednesdays, McDonald’s.

Some kids have become so used to eating fast food and junk food at school that they get angry when it’s taken away. Several years ago at a high school in Rhode Island, when administrators decided to take French fries off the lunch menu, students boycotted the cafeteria. A week later the fries were back. In 2004, when administrators in Starr County, Texas, removed sugary cereals and cookies from school meals and reduced the amount of fat and sugar in other foods, a group of students protested with signs that said, NO MORE DIET and WE WANT TO EAT COOL STUFF—PIZZA, NACHOS, BURRITOS, CHEESE FRIES. Half of the boys and one third of the girls in Starr County elementary schools are overweight.

 

A “cool” and “with it” school lunch menu

the bitter cry of children

Hungry kids, 1909

 

A hundred years ago, the first school lunch programs weren’t created to make money. They were started because American children too often didn’t get enough to eat. In 1906, John Spargo’s book The Bitter Cry of Children revealed that 2 million schoolchildren in the United States were so poor that they frequently went hungry. Most schools didn’t serve lunch, and kids either went home for a meal or didn’t eat. When a school did have a cafeteria, it was usually run by volunteer workers serving limited amounts of donated food. Spargo argued that hungry children could hardly be expected to pay attention in class and that spending money to educate kids without spending money to feed them was “an absolute waste.” A couple of years later the first government school lunch program was started in New York City. Dr. William H. Maxwell persuaded the city board of education to offer a school lunch program in every school “whereby the pupils may obtain simple wholesome food at cost price.”

During the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt decided that the federal government should help feed poor children. Roosevelt instructed the USDA to buy food from farmers and ship it to schools. The new program helped farmers by giving them money during the Great Depression, and it met the needs of poor children. The federal government hired people to work in school cafeterias.

By 1946 the national school lunch program was serving meals to 6.7 million children. That year Congress passed the National School Lunch Act, which expanded the program and announced that its goal was “to safeguard the health and wellbeing of the nation’s children.”

As the years passed, the needs of children became less important than the needs of companies hoping to sell them things. Soda, candy, and fast-food companies approached school officials and asked if they could put their products inside schools. The U.S. government worried that selling junk food and soda violated the spirit of the National School Lunch Act. In 1977 the USDA blocked the sale of “foods of minimal nutritional value” in schools. The National Soft Drink Association and other food companies didn’t like that rule and filed a lawsuit against the USDA. At first the junk-food and soda companies lost in court. But they wouldn’t give up, and in 1983 a federal judge ruled that sodas and junk foods could be sold in schools, with some restrictions.

Today, 43 percent of elementary schools, 74 percent of middle schools, and 98 percent of high schools have soda machines, candy machines, snack bars, or stores that serve foods high in sugar, fat, and salt. Many schools depend on money from the sale of soda and junk food to pay for uniforms for their sports teams, trips for their marching band, and other activities. The junk food competes with the food being offered by the National School Lunch Program. Given a choice between junk food and food supplied by the U.S. government, many kids go for the junk.

Jade Alexander is a thirteen-year-old eighth-grader who attends a public school in New York City. Her eating habits seem typical these days. Jade usually eats a twenty-five-cent bag of potato chips for breakfast. She thinks that the lunches served at her school are “nasty” and won’t eat them. Instead she buys food at the school store right next to the cafeteria. “I love eating out of the school store,” she says. “They have this thing called ketchup chips—potato chips with ketchup flavor on them. The store also has Bee honey-barbecue chips, and they have Combos, Fruit Roll-Ups, candy, and cookies.” Since the food she buys at the school store isn’t filling, Jade often meets her friends at KFC, McDonald’s, Burger King, or Wendy’s after school.

In the Brooklyn neighborhood where Jade lives, there aren’t many restaurants that sell healthy food but there’s no shortage of fast food. The Popeyes near her house has bulletproof glass to protect the workers, and trays of food are passed through a revolving plastic door. Jade struggles with weight and knows that her problem, like her diet, is becoming typical. “Our school,” she says, “it’s mainly fat kids.” That may sound like an exaggeration, but Jade’s comment isn’t far from the truth. More than 40 percent of the children in New York City public schools are now overweight, and almost 25 percent are obese (extremely overweight). In the city that created America’s first school lunch program because poor kids were too hungry, many now have too much to eat.

the coke dude

While some companies want to enter the schools in order to make money selling products, other companies look at schools as a good place to recruit future customers. Sometimes a company can do both. Children spend about 7 hours a day, 150 days a year, in school. When kids are in school, they’re away from their parents. They have to listen in class. They have to do as they’re told. They’re a perfect, captive audience for corporate advertising. Many companies now send schools “educational” materials to be handed out in the classroom. Children have to be careful about believing everything in these materials. Kellogg’s “Kids Get Going with Breakfast” program, aimed at third- and fourth-graders, said that cereals are low in fat—“Go ahead and enjoy them!” It failed to mention that many of Kellogg’s cereals are also high in sugar.

The schools most likely to accept free educational materials are those with the least amount of money to buy books or pay their teachers good salaries. Channel One is a commercial television network aimed at schoolchildren. It gives free televisions to classrooms. There’s only one catch: students must watch two minutes of ads on these free TVs every day. Poor schools often can’t resist the offer of this equipment, even if it means forcing children to see ads. In a struggling Minnesota school district, General Mills gave $250 a month to ten elementary-school teachers. In return the teachers agreed to cover their cars in a vinyl wrap advertising a breakfast cereal named after a type of candy: Reese’s Puffs. General Mills called the teachers “freelance brand managers.”

A number of fast-food companies have created programs that link doing well at school with getting to eat at one of their restaurants. The Pizza Hut “Book It!” program offers a free Personal Pan Pizza to kids in kindergarten through sixth grade who read certain amounts each month. Pizza Hut expanded the program not too long ago to include preschoolers at 36,000 child-care facilities nationwide. McDonald’s has programs that reward good grades with free food. These fast-food programs seem to be well-meaning efforts that encourage kids to work hard at school—until you look closely. They are also clever marketing schemes. A small child who visits Pizza Hut to get a free pizza almost always comes with parents or grandparents, and maybe a brother or sister or two. They all have to pay for their own food. What seems like a good prize is also a good way to draw people to your restaurant. More than 20 million elementary school students are now enrolled in Pizza Hut’s “Book It!” program.

Over the past ten years soda companies have launched major advertising campaigns in American schools. Adults are now drinking less soda, and persuading kids to drink more is one way to increase sales. “Influencing elementary school students is very important to soft drink marketers,” an industry newspaper explained, “because children are still establishing their tastes and habits.” Eight-year-olds were considered the ideal customers, since they had about sixty-five years of buying sodas ahead of them. “Entering the schools makes perfect sense,” the industry paper concluded.

The fast-food chains are also happy when children drink more soda. The chicken nuggets, hamburgers, and other sandwiches at fast-food restaurants usually are the least profitable things on the menu. Selling French fries is profitable—and selling soda is incredibly profitable. “We at McDonald’s are thankful,” a top executive once said, “that people like drinks with their sandwiches.” Today McDonald’s sells more Coca-Cola than anyone else in the world. The fast-food chains buy Coca-Cola syrup for about $4.25 a gallon. They add the syrup to bubbly water and serve it in a paper cup. A medium Coke that sells for $1.29 contains about nine cents’ worth of syrup. Buying a large Coke for $1.49 instead, as the worker behind the counter always suggests, will add another three cents’ worth of syrup—and another seventeen cents in pure profit. You can earn a lot of money selling sugar and water in a paper cup.

Thanks in large part to the marketing efforts of the fast-food chains, Americans now drink about twice as much soda as they did thirty years ago. In 1975 the typical American drank about twenty-seven gallons of soda a year. Today the typical American drinks about fifty-two gallons of soda a year. That’s about 557 twelve-ounce cans of soda per person every year. And for every person who doesn’t drink any soda, there’s somebody who drinks more than a thousand cans a year. In 1978 the typical teenage boy in the United States drank about seven ounces of soda every day; today the typical teenage boy drinks more than three times that amount, getting almost 13 percent of his daily calories from soft drinks. The amount of soda that teenage girls drink has nearly tripled during the same period of time, reaching an average of seventeen ounces a day. Many teenage boys now drink five or more cans of soda a day. Each can contains the equivalent of about ten teaspoons of sugar.

Even though soda tastes good, it isn’t a good drink for kids to have all the time. Some critics call it “liquid candy.” Coke, Pepsi, Mountain Dew, and Dr Pepper contain caffeine—a drug that can make kids irritable, give them headaches, and disturb their sleep. More importantly, soda is often a substitute for healthier drinks, such as milk. Thirty years ago, teenage boys in the United States drank twice as much milk as soda. Today they drink twice as much soda as milk. Drinking too much soda as a child may lead to calcium loss and a greater likelihood of broken bones. Even toddlers are now drinking soda. About 20 percent of American children between the ages of one and two drink soda every day.

School districts across the United States have been signing profitable deals with soda companies. In return for allowing kids to buy soda, the schools often get a share of the money. These deals, however, don’t always work out as planned, forcing teachers to behave like soda salespeople. In 1998, at the beginning of the school year, School District 11 in Colorado Springs, Colorado, realized that its agreement with Coca-Cola wasn’t raising as much money as expected. The district had promised to sell at least 70,000 cases of Coca-Cola products a year, but in the previous year had managed to sell only 21,000 at its elementary, middle, and high schools. John Bushey, an administrator at District 11, warned principals that their sales were falling short. He sent them a letter with a few ideas about how to solve the problem.

Allow students to take Coke products into the classrooms, Bushey recommended. Move Coke machines to places where students could use them all day. “Location, location, location is the key,” he wrote. If the school principals felt uncomfortable about allowing kids to drink Coca-Cola during class, Bushey suggested letting them drink the fruit juices, teas, and bottled waters also sold in the Coke machines. At the end of the letter, Mr. Bushey signed his name and then identified himself as “the Coke Dude.”

toothless

Kristina Clark of Glennallen, Alaska, is a twelve-year-old Blackfoot and Athabascan Native American who loves playing basketball, soccer, kickball, and football. She wanted to join the wrestling team, but the coach at her school wouldn’t let her wrestle boys. Kristina thought that wasn’t fair, and she let the coach know it. When she has strong feelings, she speaks her mind. And she has very strong feelings about junk food and soda pop. Several members of her family drink four to five cans of soda a day. Like many other Native Americans and Eskimos today, they’ve lost almost all their teeth.

Kristina has researched the subject and can tell you that during the 19th century you could travel far and wide in Alaska and never meet an Eskimo with a single cavity in his or her teeth. Vilhjalmur Stefansson, an explorer who traveled throughout Alaska in 1906, took a hundred Eskimo skulls to New York City so that researchers could examine their teeth. All of the skulls were carefully inspected at the American Museum of Natural History, Stefansson wrote, “but no sign of tooth decay has yet been discovered.” The skulls belonged to Eskimos who had died before Americans visited Alaska. But Stefansson worried about the future of some Mackenzie River Eskimos he’d met. “Toothache and tooth decay were appearing,” the explorer noted, “but only in the mouths of those who [liked] the new foods secured from the Yankee whalers.”

 

Kristina Clark

 

Today many Eskimos are toothless, thanks largely to their new diet. It’s not uncommon to meet Eskimos who drink half a dozen cans of pop every day. The sweet taste of the soda is only one part of its appeal. In remote rural areas, good drinking water is often hard to find. In villages without decent plumbing, people still have to get water from storage tanks or from melted snow, and that water often doesn’t taste very good. At many stores soda is cheaper than bottled water.

Coca-Cola executives are well aware of the large demand for soda in Alaska. In recent years Coke has thought up some imaginative ways of advertising to Eskimo children. In 2000, the Coca-Cola Company and a local bottler in Alaska decided to paint airplanes that regularly flew from the town of Bethel into dozens of Eskimo villages on Alaska’s west coast. The planes were covered with enormous Coke and Sprite logos. They delivered mail, soda, and supplies to Kasigluk and other villages in the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge. The Coke planes were a strange sight, with their brightly painted soda ads, flying over 22 million acres of wilderness. The year after Coke painted the planes, it paid Trajan Langdon—the first Alaskan player in the National Basketball Association and a hero to many Eskimo children—to fly into Yupik villages. Langdon arrived in Coke planes, visited children at schools, and gave out free T-shirts.

 

Trajan Langdon

 

“Young people in the small villages and towns of the Alaska bush often don’t have the same opportunities as their big-city counterparts,” Coca-Cola said in a press release announcing the visits. “They seldom come into contact with anyone outside their small town. So when a group of people flies into the bush bearing gifts and an NBA star, it’s quite the local event.”

Coke failed to mention that these Eskimo villages also don’t have dentists. Edwin Allgair, a dentist who moved from Ohio to Alaska in 1998, travels every so often to Kasigluk and other Yupik villages, providing dental care to the children. He remembers visiting a village store one day in a community of about 160 people. Forty of them were children. It was a Monday, and the store had just received a stack of sodas four feet tall and four feet across. When he visited the store again on Friday, the sodas were almost gone. The owner of the store told him he had another shipment coming in a few days.

Dr. Allgair quickly did some math in his head. He calculated that to finish off that much soda in a week, every single person in the village would have to drink three to five cans a day. He figured that the owner of the village store earned about $20,000 a year just from selling soda. It’s no coincidence, Dr. Allgair says, that many teenagers in the village have lost all their permanent teeth before they’re sixteen.

Another problem that Dr. Allgair finds in Yupik villages is called “baby bottle syndrome.” When mothers put soda or other sugary drinks in baby bottles, their children often fall asleep with the bottle in their mouth, creating a breeding ground for tooth decay. Baby bottle syndrome often causes the upper teeth to rot away into black nubs.

 

Baby bottle syndrome

 

Kristina Clark was upset by the dental problems she saw at Glennallen Elementary School. She says it made her angry to see “little kids with their teeth all black, drinking Pepsi and Coca-Cola all the time.” She didn’t want kids to suffer from bad teeth the way members of her family did. But she didn’t know what to do about it.

In 2002, when Kristina was a fifth-grader, she started thinking about the soda machine down the hallway from the cafeteria at her school. It was supposed to be turned off during lunch periods, but nobody at the school bothered to do so. Kids bought Cokes from the machine all day long. While visiting a health clinic with her mother, Kristina learned a lot about the harmful effects of drinking too much soda. That night she went home and made a poster, including some of the facts she’d learned at the clinic. The next day Kristina went to school and taped the poster to the front of the Coke machine. Across the top of her poster she wrote a simple message in bold letters: “Stop the Pop.”

The poster stayed up for about two weeks. Then Kristina walked past the machine one day and noticed that the poster was gone, tape and all. Nobody told her why. When she asked the principal at Glennallen Elementary if the school would consider getting rid of the soda machine, the principal listened to her and then didn’t do a thing.

don’t blame us

The power that fast-food companies and soda companies now wield inside schools has led many critics to believe that changing the law may be the only way to kick these companies out. In 2003, Mary Kapsner, a state representative from Bethel, felt uneasy whenever she saw the Coke planes take off from the local airport. Mary was thirty years old at the time—and had been elected to office at the age of twenty-four. Her mother was Yupik and her father was from Nebraska. She’d grown up loving traditional Eskimo foods and still kept dried salmon strips in her refrigerator as a snack. She wasn’t happy about how good eating habits, practiced for centuries, were quickly slipping away. When she heard that many high schools in Alaska were inviting fast-food chains into their cafeterias, she became even more worried that local Yupik foods might vanish forever.

 

Mary Kapsner

 

Mary’s husband, Jonathan, was a bush pilot who had come to Alaska from Minnesota. They had two kids. Jonathan told her that he was often hired to fly into Yupik villages carrying nothing but soda pop. Mary talked to people at the local hospital and dental clinic who described what soda was doing to the health of Eskimos. She decided to use her power as a state legislator to prevent schools from selling too much soda. The same companies that distributed Coca-Cola in Alaska also distributed alcohol, and she worried that kids who were now drinking six-packs of soda every day would soon be drinking six-packs of beer. Although these social problems were enormous, Mary decided to start with a small change. She pushed for a new state law that would forbid public schools to sell soda between eight in the morning and five in the evening.

Mary knew that some schools needed money from the machines to pay for uniforms and student travel. She promised that if her bill passed in the state legislature, she’d help to find other ways to give schools the money they needed. Her bill required that soda machines be turned off only during school hours. Coke and Pepsi could still be sold at sports events or after school.

Nevertheless, Mary’s plan was swiftly opposed by the Grocery Manufacturers of America, the world’s largest association of food and soda companies. The industry group sent a letter to leading members of the Alaska legislature, arguing that it was wrong to single out soda as the main cause of tooth decay. “Many factors contribute to the formation of dental cavities,” the group wrote, “including diet, the level of oral hygiene, and access to professional dental care.” Despite the friendly tone, the underlying message of the letter was clear: Don’t blame soda for bad teeth. Blame yourself.

Mary didn’t buy that argument. “Professional dental care” was hard to get in Eskimo villages because they were remote and few dentists wanted to live in them. Teaching children to brush their teeth was part of the solution, she felt—but the soda companies had a big responsibility, too. After all, they were flying Coke, Sprite, and Trajan Langdon into these villages, not toothpaste, toothbrushes, and world-famous dentists.

Alaskan distributors of soda visited Mary’s office in Juneau. They said her plan was a bad idea. “Why are you singling us out?” they asked. Their complaint made Mary wonder if she should go after the junk-food and fast-food companies, too. The legislature never passed her soda bill. In the meantime some local dentists and health officials painted a Dumpster in the center of Bethel, expressing their view on the matter:

 

Dumpster in Bethel

the power of one

At Glennallen Elementary, Kristina Clark recently sat at a student council meeting with her hand raised as high as it could go. She hadn’t given up the fight against soda at her school. A new principal named Michael Johnson had been appointed, and she felt a little more hopeful. He used to be her fourth grade teacher, and he always took her opinions seriously. Kristina was ready to tell the five other kids on the student council why the soda machine should be removed from the school. She’d done some more research and outlined a few talking points. At first she thought that nobody was calling on her because they didn’t like what she was going to say.

When Kristina finally got her turn to speak, she calmly listed the problems that drinking too much soda can cause. Once she finished, the student council voted. The choices were (1) to keep nothing but soda in the machine, (2) to replace half the soda with fruit juice and bottled water, or (3) to get rid of all the soda. Everyone voted to replace half the soda with fruit juice and bottled water—except Kristina, of course. She was terribly disappointed and thought that kids would keep buying the soda anyway.

As Thanksgiving approached, the new principal thought long and hard about the arguments that Kristina had made about soda, about the courage it took for someone so young to speak out, about how she’d defended her beliefs when other kids disagreed. Mr. Johnson was impressed. Not long afterward, Kristina walked down the hallway and looked at the spot where her “Stop the Pop” sign had once been. The soda machine was gone.