CONCORD, Calif. – Teachers at Mt. Diablo High School are recruiting students to become political lobbyists for overhauling the National School Lunch Program.

Several students in the school’s sustainable hospitality program recently traveled to Washington, D.C. to talk to lawmakers about inhibitive USDA regulations on school food and push for “Twenty-First Century Home Economics,” the San Jose Mercury News reports.

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“This was a political move. We needed to have the kids speak up, ‘stop feeding us junk,’” Mt. Diablo High teacher and chef Cindy Gershen told the news site. “They became lobbyists for healthy foods …”

The goal is to rework funding for the National School Lunch Program because the current program is expensive and not working very well. MDUSD food service director Anna Fisher believes the current federal restrictions for school food is not enough to encourage kids to eat healthy.

“Is there a way to reframe the whole school lunch program?” Fisher asked rhetorically.

Pamela Singh, executive director of the local nonprofit Wellness City Challenge, told the Mercury News the current federal food restrictions come with steep administrative costs, and students and teachers at Mt. Diablo are looking into ways to make it more effective.

“We’ll be looking at the qualitative and quantitative data,” Singh said.

“The change needs to come at the government level and they need to see what is inhibiting us from incorporating healthy food into our schools under the current USDA guidelines,” she said.

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To that end, district officials are working to incorporate science-based nutrition and math into lunch lessons through grants and a pilot program at three elementary schools and the high school.

Mt. Diablo senior Celeste Rios said it’s that type of education about nutrition that changed how her family of 11 eats at home, and she was giddy that lawmakers in Washington, D.C. were open to students’ suggestions.

“They were actually interested in listening to our stories,” Rios said. “Our goal is to change food in our schools. If we could have our government implement it, a lot of people would follow through with it.”

The Mt. Diablo “Sustainable Hospitality Pathway” – the student food program – is “a rigorous, relevant and innovative career-technical education program” that prepares students for a future in healthy food service, agri-tourism, eco-tourism, outdoor recreation, and “greening traditional tourism,” according to the Wellness City Challenge website.

It also seems to conflict with a movement toward pre-packaged “healthy” foods encouraged by the current federal food restrictions on calories, fat, sodium, sugar and other nutritional elements championed by first lady Michelle Obama.

“From garden to plate, they are teaching students the fundamentals of creating healthy meals from scratch and what a real meal looks like,” according to the site. “Every school day, the students are in the professional kitchen classroom cooking, in the garden, or in the environmental education classroom, learning about and experiencing real food.”

Students in the program also work to craft new lunch concoctions for the school that comply with the USDA guidelines, an effort that no doubt sparked the political lobbying in D.C.