Healthy Food

K RITI SEHGAL, 29, a University of Pennsylvania grad who lives in Center City, is co-founder (with her brother, Kunal, who lives in New York) of Pure Fare. The company, launched in April 2011, provides fresh, healthy all-natural foods supported by Web tools that enable consumers to track health goals. Pure Fare has two locations: 21st Street near Walnut, and South Street above 16th, both in Center City. Q: Tell me about the idea for Pure Fare. A: It started as a technology idea.

Parents, it might be time to rethink that "clean your plate" mentality. Researchers at Pennsylvania State University have found that overeating begins in children as young as 5. Babies and toddlers eat when they're hungry and stop when they're full, but school-age children gobble whatever's in front of them - and more. About half of American adults and 20 percent of children are overweight. Those numbers are twice what they were 30 years ago, largely because of high-fat diets and lack of exercise.

Take a batch of tasty restaurant dishes and the chefs who produced them; stir in a fresh outlook on food service and updated nutrition guidelines. Then serve it all with snappy Disney-produced public service announcements. Voila! You have Team Nutrition, a new public/private program of school meals and nutrition education designed to give children healthy food choices. "We want to get away from lunches that are too high in fat," said U.S. Department of Agriculture Under Secretary Ellen Haas, adding that more than 25 million children in 92,000 schools nationwide participate in the school lunch program.

IKNEW it was going to be a while before the next 24 bus showed up at the Frankford Transportation Center, so I took a seat next to a mother and child who were also waiting for the bus. At first, I was perplexed when the mother yelled at her daughter, who was in diapers, "Sit down and finish your fries and soda!" I wanted to say, "What are you doing giving soda to a child in diapers!" But before opening my mouth, I paused for a moment and surveyed the food options in and around the depot.

Horrible nooz from Orygun! There's a chain of restaurants here, apparently successful and growing, called Machezmo Mouse, Healthy Mexican Food. It says right on their sign "Healthy Mexican Food. " This appalling concept features a menuful of dishes with those little heart-healthy heart signs next to them. Egg-Beaters Rancheros. Good Lord. I am pleased to report that I could not find a single Hispanic individual in their downtown joint. Meanwhile, a couple of snacks for thought have emerged lately.

BY NIGHT, he serves dinner for $135 per person. By day, he serves . . . chicken tenders? Philadelphia chef-restaurateur Marc Vetri is haute, yet dudelike: He's into fast bikes and light-as-air spinach gnocchi with brown butter. His business partners are guy-gourmets, too. Manager Jeff Benjamin likes country singer Kenny Chesney and fine Italian wine. Chef Jeff Michaud goes for boxing gyms and melt-in-your-mouth pasta. Still, no matter how rugged their pastimes, team Vetri has built a big-time business pleasing the hoity-toity set via superchic Italian grub.

SUMMER IS ONLY halfway over, but the kids are starting to climb the walls. You're on a first-name basis with the local burger joint drive-through staff, and you can't take one more day of Disney Channel reruns or Nintendo Wii marathons. If this sounds like you, you're in luck. We searched for unique ways to get the kids out of the house, get them to eat healthy - and maintain your sanity for another 40 days (yes, we counted) until school starts. We asked Cary Borish, co-owner of the family-run Marathon Grill restaurants, for some out-of-the-ordinary, kid-friendly summer ideas.

Willing to put his mouth where the money is, singer-songwriter Tim Gleeson will perform selections from his solo CD, No Sad Songs , at your place. "They're called house concerts . . . there's lots of stuff about them on Google," Gleeson says in his Moorestown home studio, a pleasant, orderly space full of guitars and recording equipment. "I've done a couple so far. " Such is the low-fi yet high-tech life of a working American roots musician, even an established local performer whose work appears on other artists' recordings - including a disc recently nominated for a Grammy.

Wendy Capocetta had only a half-hour for lunch. But she drove past a string of food outlets closer to her job in Stratford, Camden County, to the newest kid on the sandwich block - Bruegger's Bagels in Somerdale. From a menu of 11 bagel varieties and 28 "toppings," including a dozen types of cream cheese, Capocetta settled on a plain, toasted bagel with plain chicken, no mayo. She passed on a cup of Javahh!, the house coffee, and went for unsweetened iced tea. "It's not heavy," Capocetta said of her meal, as she flipped through a newspaper that the cafe had placed on a rack for its dining-in customers.

Canning the sale of soda in Philadelphia's public schools is a good first step, but the district must also improve the nutritional value of its school-lunch program and the snacks it sells, nutrition advocates said yesterday. Citing concerns about students' poor nutrition and a growing obesity problem, district chief executive Paul G. Vallas announced earlier this week that he planned to ban the sale of soda in schools when the district finalized a beverage deal. "This is a strong statement about the role of the schools in helping children develop healthy eating habits.