California schools experiment with farm to table

LOS ANGELES (KABC) -- Thursday's lunch at Gratts Learning Academy was burgers, milk, carrots and fruit. Sounds like business as usual, but something special was going on.

"Today, we're actually launching an initiative called California Thursdays to really promote statewide how our children our eating California foods," said David Binkle, the food service director for the Los Angeles Unified School District.

One million students from 15 school districts in California are test driving the experimental school food approach.

Binkle says it's all about California foods for California kids.

"Over a 128 million times a year, we're feeding our children, so when you think about it, that's more than 700,000 meals a day," said Binkle, referring to the school district alone.

Center for Ecoliteracy's Adam Kesselman says it's healthier and less expensive for the schools to do the prep work themselves.

"Largely, our food system was a national and international food system," Rethinking School Lunch Program Manager Adam Kesselman said. "We're really trying to focus on local production."

LAUSD is the second largest school system in the country and often exceeds government standards for the dietary guidelines. When the district serves meals that are cheaper, more environmentally friendly and nutritious, it's a win-win for the kids, schools, family farms and the environment.

"The closer we get the food to the children, the more we're saving, because we don't have a lot of the distribution and transportation costs," Binkle said.

That translates to about a 10 percent savings.

At the end of the day though, the kids just want the food to taste good.

"We don't really focus on where we get the food from, we just go straight to eating it," fifth grade student Alyssa Evans said.