Out go Pop-Tarts, in comes broccoli. But will students eat healthier school lunches?

Children can be hard-core food lovers -- just not with foods you want them to love. Schools in Chicago and across the nation are learning how hard it is to make lunches more nutritional without giving “healthy” a bad rap.

“If they’re going to feed us healthy, they need to feed us something good that’s healthy,” Mijoy Roussell, a sixth-grader at Claremont Academy who was skipping lunch in favor of a packet of candy, told the Chicago Tribune. “This food is disgusting, which is why I’m not eating lunch.”

For the current school year, Chicago schools did away with doughnuts, Pop-Tarts and nachos and brought in more whole-grain products, foods with less salt and a wider variety of vegetables. This Chicago Tribune article reports that lunch sales from September through December dropped about 5 percentage points, or 20,000 lunches.

The article also says: “New lunch standards closely mirror new federal rules proposed by the [U.S. Department of Agriculture], offering a glimpse of the tests other districts soon may face.”

OK, it’s hard for broccoli or any other vegetable -- wonderfully prepared or tasteless -- to go head to head with nachos. And kids know they have options, like waiting until they leave school to make a fast-food run.

So maybe some of this healthy-food training has to start at home. HelpGuide.org offers these tips to help kids develop healthy habits:

--Have regular family meals.
--Cook more meals at home.
--Get kids involved in shopping, preparing meals, etc.
--Make a variety of healthy snacks available instead of empty calorie snacks. --Limit portion sizes.

But back to Chicago. Schools decided to bring back a popular spicy chicken patty sandwich with 1,100 milligrams of sodium. Here’s what the paper observed:

“The Tribune watched recently as about 90 percent of the students in the lunch line at North-Grand chose the spicy chicken patty for their meal ‘because everything else tastes nasty,’ said junior Mariah Crespo.”

The food lovers have spoken.

RELATED: Healthier CPS lunches make kids, and one adult, cringe