IN THE CLASSROOM:Thanksgiving dinner dissected

When students in Scott Smith’s science class sit down for Thanksgiving dinner this week, chances are they’ll know exactly what they’re eating.

On Thursday, Smith’s freshman class at Newport Harbor High School did a lab in which they took three holiday meal staples — turkey, peas and carrots — and tested their chemical contents. With the rations coming out of baby food jars, the students poured them into test tubes and mixed in chemicals to check for starch, sugar and protein.

Smith, who has done the lab for 10 years, uses it as a lesson on nutrition. It’s a happy coincidence, he said, that the lesson always begins right before Thanksgiving.

“It almost always falls into this time of year, so it works out well,” he said. “I could have used ground pork baby food, but that wouldn’t be nearly as fun.”

For the Thursday lab, Smith gave each student test tubes containing the three pureed foods and had them drop three chemicals into each one. Each chemical reacted to a different kind of substance, which meant that the food changed color depending on its ingredients — yellow-orange for sugar, dark purple for starch, light violet for protein.

After the students were done examining their holiday dinner, they applied the chemicals to a group of mystery substances that Smith had assembled — containing egg whites, sugar and other combinations of ingredients.

Over the next few weeks, Smith’s class will continue studying the nutritional value of foods. In future projects, he said, the students would analyze the labels on junk food and fast food. Once, he had them bring items from home to test for ingredients, but it got too hard to cram chunks of potato chips into glass tubes.

Scotty Pantoskey, 15, of Newport Beach, said the lab on Thursday was informative, but made Thanksgiving dinner look a little less appetizing.

“When it’s all mashed up, it makes it more disgusting,” he said.

Others, though, saw some other possibilities in studying nutrition in class.

“Can we bring in French fries, please?” Charlotte Farrell, 14, of Newport Beach, asked Smith. “I’m usually the hungriest during this period.”