Hightower Lowdown

Coke, Pepsi, and other junk-food purveyors go school board to school board dangling hundreds of thousands of dollars in "educational contributions" in front of each one. Essentially, these are bribes, enticing a board to give the company an exclusive contract to put its vending machines in all of the district's schools. Hundreds of school boards have taken the bribe.

But parents, health-care advocates, and students have been waging fiery counterattacks to rid their schools of those obesity machines. In Los Angeles, for example, a creative bunch of mad-as-hellers sent every school-board member a Mason jar of sugar to represent what the average teenager was ingesting from the soda machines every day. They won a district-wide ban on the sale of sodas.

On another front, Gary Hirshberg was stunned when his teenage son told him he'd had pizza and Skittles for lunch at his school in New Hampshire. Luckily, Hirshberg was in a position to do somethinghe's the top executive of Stonyfield Farm, America's largest organic yogurt maker. Stonyfield is now sponsoring a program to put "healthy vending machines" in schools free of charge.

Food suppliers offer discounts so the snacks are affordable to all students. The healthy vending machines are now in school districts in California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington State.