Alicia Chan isn't your average teenage Doritos junkie. As founder of San Marin High School's Project Lunch Club, she's passionate about bringing fresh, local produce into school lunches. 

Project Lunch was the brainchild of the advocacy group Teens Turning Green, and it's sprouted food-oriented clubs at San Marin and Marin Oaks high schools in Novato, as well as many other Marin County schools.

"Basically my goals are to make food taste better, educate students and build a community around food," Chan says.

Every Friday, she and her friends meet to discuss ways to banish high-calorie, processed food and infuse school lunches with natural ingredients.

Community members have jumped on board with the program. They include local farmers, health-conscious businesses like Novato's Whole Foods Market, teachers, school administrators and parents. The goal is to link the classroom, the lunchroom and the home environment.

"It's actually been pretty extraordinary," says Judi Shils, executive director of Teens Turning Green. "The energy coming from students and parents and food services is amazing."

"Kids like junk. We all do," Shils says. "There's a time and place for everything, but I believe the time and place for everything doesn't necessarily have to be at school. ... When kids get involved and when their voices start to be loud and forceful and powerful, everyone pays attention."

Marin County has a wealth of local resources, including locally grown produce and a well-informed population, Shils says, "and yet the food in the schools doesn't quite measure up."

She's hopeful that the huge collective will be able to move mountains.

"If you identify what all the challenges are and you've got all this expertise in your mist, there's nothing you can't fix," she says.

Miguel Villarreal, director of Food and Nutritional Services for Novato Unified School District, says Project Lunch supports the goals he's worked toward for years. The district had already removed fruit juices and chocolate milk from its school lunches some time ago. Making bigger changes involves the support of the community, which Shils and her group are helping to foster.

"When I arrived in this community, a lot of these things weren't happening," Villarreal says, "so it may have been that it was accepted, but no one had taken the initiative to put it in place."

One change in recent years is that all the schools in the district have planted their own gardens to provide fresh produce for use in school cafeterias.

Another way of integrating the community and the cafeteria is called "gleaning." Every week, there are specific hours when people can visit local farms and gather unused crops.

"Gleaning is the process of going out to a field of produce and picking the fruit - the produce that wouldn't typically go to market because there were blemishes or it was overgrown just a little bit, or it didn't meet the market standard," Villarreal says. 

That produce would normally get tilled under the soil. Now, it's a free asset for Novato's healthy food program. Families in the district are encouraged to make a learning experience of gleaning the produce, which is then transported to local schools by Marin Organic.

"If it's potatoes, whatever it is we're gleaning, some of these families have never been out to a farm and seen how the food is grown, so it's very much an educational experience," Villarreal says. "You can't put a price on that. It's just incredible education."

The district is also highlighting a fruit or vegetable each month, encouraging teachers' use in their lesson plans.

"It is tying the classroom to the cafeteria and to the community, the families," Villarreal says. "That way the students are hearing it from all three of those areas."

Teens Turning Green hosted a School Lunch Challenge last week at Marin Academy in San Rafael. Professional chefs and the school community cooked and discussed healthy meal options.

Chan says she's learned that making changes at San Marin means understanding the restrictions and limitations inherent in the system.

"It's changing NUSD and then San Marin," Chan says. "But to change San Marin, you had to change NUSD."

The San Marin club invites Villarreal to its weekly meetings. They discuss real-world solutions to problems like how to provide low-cost meals using high-quality ingredients.

She says her club recently took a survey of the San Marin student body, and found that a lot of students would like to have a salad bar in the lunch room. There were also those who complained that they wanted some of the old, unhealthy food back.

Chan says her peers aren't against having healthy food, "they just don't know what healthy food could look like." Rather than bland and tasteless, food grown organically and locally can taste delicious, just like the dishes her mother cooks at home. 

She says she realizes she won't be able to change everyone's eating habits, but she hopes students can at least receive good nutrition in their school lunches.

"It is a small step," she says, "but small steps are the ones that matter."