The students actually ate the spinach greens in their chicken tortilla wrap sandwiches, and the vegetarian chili, too.

"It far exceeded my wildest dreams.  That was a lot of vegetables for these guys, campared to what they're used to, and they were being adventurous," Clare Seguin science enrichment teacher, said Friday at Lincoln Elementary School, 909 Sequoia Trail.

The spinach, grated carrot and cabbage in the sandwiches and the vegetables in the chili came from the Home Grown Wisconsin Cooperative in association of 25 local farmers using organic growing practices.  

The meal was an experiment in bringing locally grown produce to school cafeterias, called the Wisconsin Homegrown Lunch farm-to-school project.  It is funded by a nearly $100,000 grant from the US Department of Agriculture.  Participating elementary schools are Shorewood Hills, Lincoln and Chavez.  The project began last spring with school picnics featuring a spring greens salad and rhubarb muffins.

Most of the fresh produce served in the Madison School District is processed in California or even outside the United States, said Sara Tedeschi, Homegrown Lunch coordinator.  The district buys products that are already washed, chopped and bagged, said Frank Kelly, school district food service director.

"We buy from (large distributors that) get produce from all over the world, including South America," Kelly said.  "We can basically open the bag and use it whereas if we get lettuce from the (local) field, we have to wash and core it." 

There are many barriers keeping locally grown food our of schools, Tedeschi and Kelly said.  The school district operates on a tight budget and must minimize costs by purchasing large quantities for ready-to-serve goods from large food distributors and from the USDA Commodity Foods Program, making it difficult to use unprocessed local produce.  The district does buy local apples in season from Carandale Farm in Oregon.

Locally grown products generally cost more, and require additional food service labor.  Moreover, the school district needs produce mostly during the winter months when it's unavailable from Wisconsin fields.  Rink DaVee, general manager of the Home Grown Wisconsin cooperative, said, "We don't have the equipment or facility to do the processing, so it requires a special effort by the school district."

The cooperative is seeking a grant to research and establish a small, Madison area processing kitchen, and is exploring the possibility of working out of a state-certified kitchen owned by an existing business, DaVee said.

"We're working with the school district to hopefully grow the program here and be a model for groups elsewhere in the Upper Midwest," Tedeschi said.

The students at Lincoln were well-prepared for their vegetable-laden lunch.  Many of them had taken field trips to a nearby produce and chicken farm, and studied the links between land, food, freshness and good nutrition.

Marcus Seaton, 5, said he liked everything except the chili.  Of the farm, he said, "we got to pull carrots out of the ground and wash them and eat them.  They're fresh carrots.  They're sweet."

"There were a number of kids scrunching their noses up at the beginning, but they ended up trying it and liking it, so it's a very hopeful program," said Doug Wubben, who farms on the southern edge of Madison and had given talks at Lincoln about what he grows."  A lot of the kids wouldn't have touched it without being talked to."