Despite research on the general barriers that teachers face in teaching nutrition, there are few long-term, in-depth ethnographic accounts of teachers' challenges in teaching nutrition, especially in inner-city schools plagued by disadvantaged conditions. Therefore, in this year long study we used interpretivist ethnographic (Denzin, 1997) methodologies to investigate 13 middle school health and physical education teachers' (6 males, 7 females; 4 Caucasians, 9 African Americans, 2-44 years of experience) perspectives and practices regarding nutrition education. We collected data through extensive class, school, and in-service observations, document analysis, and formal and informal interviews. We analyzed data using constant comparison and analytic induction, while facilitating trustworthiness through researcher journals, peer debriefers, triangulation, negative case analyses, and member checks. We identified three salient themes explaining how these teachers understood and taught nutrition. First, most teachers exhibited or described “defeatist” teaching perspectives, feeling that their instruction often “fell on deaf ears.” They cited numerous factors in students' lives hindering their acceptance of nutrition instruction including parents (negative role models and nutrition providers), easy and cheap access to non-nutritious foods, difficult and costly access to nutritious foods, not wanting to waste activity time for sedentary nutrition instruction, sub par cognitive development, homework ambivalence, and absenteeism. This created an emotional tug-of-war where teachers believed in helping children become healthy, but encountered often insurmountable resistance from students that, over time, wore teachers down. Second, these teachers described lower priorities for teaching nutrition education given time restraints and students' pressing life conditions. They were responsible for teaching both physical and health education to students two times per week for only one semester each year. As a result, they felt forced to make critical decisions about the content they should and should not teach. In the end, when teachers taught health education, nutrition took a backseat to topics the teacher felt were more immediate and present in students' lives, namely violence prevention/conflict resolution and sex education. The discussion focuses on the need to help teachers understand and navigate the complexities of urban conditions in order to help students develop perseverance and resolve in the face of overwhelming challenges, helping them shift from “defeated” teachers to “world changers.” In addition, the discussion makes a case for policy changes leading to additional instruction time in health education to facilitate more content coverage and in-service education to help teachers manage these urban dilemma and develop curricula tailored to their contextual realities. Keyword(s): middle school issues, nutrition