Durham teachers, parents, farmers and school board members have been gathering to look into ways to make school lunches better for kids. And one member of this group even has a blog - growinggardeners.wordpress.com - devoted to all the new edible schoolyard gardens cropping up.

This local interest is coming none too soon. About one child in six is obese and another one in six is merely overweight. And these numbers are triple what we had in 1980.

Solving this problem requires changes in what we eat and how we stay active. That will take effort, but there's one thing that any family can do at home to turn this situation around quickly and cheaply: change what we drink.

Sodas, for instance, are a leading source of calories. The average American drinks nearly a 55-gallon drum's worth of Cokes, Sprites, Cheerwines and other sodas each year.

It's almost amusing to picture a year's supply of soda for a family - a pallet of 4 barrels delivered by a forklift - being set on their front porch. It's not so amusing that kids and parents in that family are setting themselves up for diabetes, which can lead to strokes, blindness, kidney disease and other problems.

I was overweight in middle school, so I know the social hassles of being out of shape are something no child wants to hold onto. I also remember a friend of mine pointing to my bottle of Dr. Pepper and calling it "sugar water." That stuck with me, even though now it'd be more accurate to call it "high-fructose corn syrup water." Yum.

And when in high school I read Henry David Thoreau saying that he was glad he had never lost the taste for water, I took a fresh look at that drink and realized that sodas - especially those with caffeine - never really quenched my thirst. After that, whenever I went to a restaurant or fast food place I ordered water. A slice of lemon would conquer the hint of chlorine and give me a free, satisfying and thirst-quenching drink.

At home, a commonly available pitcher with a Brita filter removes the nasty chlorine flavor. Before long I had acquired a genuine taste for a glass of cool, clear water. And when I say glass, I mean not a plastic cup or bottle or aluminum cans that add their own industrial flavors to a drink, but a real glass.

And it's struck me over the years that a good portion of one's daily happiness can be derived from the small domestic pleasures of life. Like the pleasure of drinking pure water from a simple glass tumbler. So much more pleasurable and far less hazardous than that barrel of soda waiting for you on your front step.