For most city kids, there's only one link in the food chain, and its name is Safeway or Stop & Shop. They know money doesn't grow on trees, but have no idea that food, in fact, does. A bag of pre-sliced apple wedges may be as close as most urban kids ever get to an orchard.

The natural world is just as alien to suburban children, whose native habitat has dwindled over the decades from backyards and ball fields to the narrow digital confines of MySpace. Child advocacy expert Richard Louv calls this modern malady "nature-deficit disorder." In Last Child in The Woods, Louv quotes a fourth grader who says "I like to play indoors better ‘cause that's where all the electrical outlets are."

Kids have no clue how the food that winds up on their plates got there. A generation or so ago, suburbs were encircled by a greenbelt of small family farms, and people could pick up fresh eggs and baskets of berries from little mom-and-pop produce stands.

Now, former farmland is cluttered with condos and strip malls, and our kids sit mesmerized by their monitors, chugging down sodas and chomping on chips, growing paler and pudgier by the day. Pressed-for-time parents fall back on frozen and fast foods, and a whole family sitting down to enjoy a meal together is so rare, it's front page news.

But two nationwide programs have a plan to bring Americans back to the land and connect us to the farmers who feed us, while teaching us how to eat better, too.

A project called Green Tables unites the National Gardening Association with the women's culinary association Les Dames d'Escoffier to promote a "healthier food supply through educational programs, scholarships and good-old fashioned cooking and gardening tips," according to the New York Times. One of Les Dames d'Escoffier's stated goals is "helping Americans better understand the link between rural and urban farms and their tables."

The National Farm to School Network has similar objectives for America's kids; "serving healthy meals in school cafeterias, improving student nutrition, providing health and nutrition education opportunities that will last a lifetime, and supporting small local farmers," according to the Farm to School website.

Culinary luminaries like Alice Waters and Jamie Oliver have lobbied long and hard to improve school lunches; Waters with her Edible Schoolyard program in Berkeley, Oliver with his Feed Me Better campaign in Britain. With Green Tables and Farm to School taking the cause nationwide, maybe we'll start to see kids get excited about growing their own greens, and better still, eating them.

But it could be a long row to hoe. A friend of mine, an assistant principal at a Hudson Valley high school, took one of his school cafeteria's menu options, pizza with a side of fries, and tried to make it healthier by changing the fries to a salad. He received phone calls from irate parents, complaining that their children should be able to have their fries, and pizza, too.

Can the Green Table project persuade such parents to switch allegiance from deep-fried to farm-fresh? I don't know, but my hat's off to them for trying.

Image: greentables.org