our daily bread.

Byline: Anna Wintour

This is our annual shape issue, which as ever celebrates the beautiful variety of our female forms. But we're particularly proud this year to bring you a story that concerns itself with the shape of our children and, by extension, the health of our nation as a whole. In Katrina Heron's fascinating piece on Alice Waters ("Edible Education," page 374), the woman who 30 years ago gave America a chic and revolutionary alternative to French cuisine, we learn of a brilliant program in Berkeley, California, called the School Lunch Initiative. Waters is working with the Berkeley public schools to make the eating of lunch part of the educational curriculum: That is, the kids are growing and harvesting their vegetables organically a la Chez Panisse, then cooking and, of course, consuming a delicious and nutritious meal: herbed chicken paillard and polenta, say. Over lunch they discuss food-its cultivation, its relationship to good health, for example-and all in all partake of what Waters calls "the pleasures of the table."

This is not a vanity project for the edification of the foodie classes. It represents Waters's attempt to do something about the obesity epidemic that threatens to undermine the health of American children. She believes that if you learn at a young age to eat well, it will allow you to make better choices for the rest of your life. In an age when top chefs typically devote their efforts to burnishing a television career or selling product lines (and why not?), Waters has chosen to take her fame and do something wonderful with it. With luck and funding, her initiative will ripple through school districts across the country. I urge the enlightened likes of New York's Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Senator Hillary Clinton to throw their weight behind Waters's project and help root this program in their home state. I also urge the fashion and beauty industries, known for their superb efforts for breast cancer and AIDS, to take up this cause, which will incidentally affect the way America looks in the decades ahead.

For those of us who have grown up without the benefit of ...