Not satisfied with their cafeteria options, students of the Food Justice class at Luther Burbank High School on Tuesday put their own recipes where their mouths are.

The after-school class has been working with the Sacramento City Unified School District's Healthy Foods Task Force and Nutritional Services Department for weeks in an attempt to give students more of a voice in the meals they're served at school, said class adviser Aly Kronick.

Recently, the class was asked by the district to come up with recipes it would like to see included on the school menu.

On Tuesday, with the help of two school district chefs, 10 members of the Food Justice class took to the Burbank High kitchen to make tortas, chicken dumpling soup, fruit salad and bread pudding – dishes that will soon appear for a trial run in the Burbank High cafeteria.

"We're the ones that are eating it," junior Destiny Huffman, 17, said of the school meals. "We wanted to put our ideas into the kitchen."

The Food Justice class – or "Health Squad," as students call it – was started in January to help educate students about nutrition, with funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Kronick said.

By that time, the school district had already started to take a critical look at what it was serving in cafeterias. Last spring, SCUSD Superintendent Jonathan Raymond formed the task force to bring healthier food, including fresh, local produce, to the about 30,000 students that the district serves daily.

But in a March meeting with Brenda Padilla, the district's nutrition services manager, members of the Health Squad said some students still felt Burbank High's breakfast and lunch options were not appealing, were too unfamiliar to try or just didn't taste good.

The students ventured ideas for new dishes but said they felt they didn't have a say in the matter, Kronick said.

"I just figured, let's let them make the recipes," Padilla said. "As long as we can do it, we'll try."

So the Health Squad came up with three lunch items and two breakfasts, and pitched them to district officials at a recent meeting, Kronick said.

On Tuesday, they got into the kitchen to hammer out recipes and make sure the taste matched their expectations.

Once the recipes are finalized, the dishes will be served by the Burbank High cafeteria over a week before the school year is up, Padilla said. Students will be surveyed for their reaction. If the dishes are well received, they could be added to the menu for some middle and high schools next school year, she said.

The recipes pitched Tuesday may require some tweaking. Guacamole from scratch, for example, which was included in the tortas recipe, might not fall within the district's budget, which allocates about 50 to 80 cents to produce an entree, Padilla said.

Also, some ingredients might have to be swapped out to make the recipes satisfy the district's nutritional guidelines and for their seasonality, Padilla said.

But Tuesday was about nailing the taste and, after two hours of prep time, the students sampled their creations.

Phuong Dang, 18, a senior, produced a thoughtful verdict: The bread pudding was "a little soggy." The soup didn't need to be changed. The torta was "the bomb."

So will the rest of the student body like them?

"They'll have to try and see," he said.

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