Feenstra: The point is, basically, can school lunches include locally grown foods?

Narrator: This is Science Today. When you think of school lunches, you probably get a queasy stomach. But Gail Feenstra, a food systems expert at the University of California, Davis, says it doesn't have to be that way. She and her colleagues are promoting the idea of local farmers supplying food to school lunch programs. A school district would pay a local farmer in advance for regular deliveries of fresh produce. The farmer would get some measure of financial security, and school lunches would contain food that wasn't canned or processed.

Feenstra: And then kids get to know the farmers, food service directors and cooks learn how to cook seasonally, and kids learn what it means to eat that way -- to get away from that processed, packaged, high waste, high throwaway and fewer fresh foods, that's what they have now.

Narrator: Feenstra says it's a way of connecting local farmers to local communities. For Science Today, I'm Steve Tokar.