MANTECA - Oscar Romero passed through a long line of lunch options Tuesday, Oct. 16 — jumbo corn dogs, super nachos with chili beans, yogurt cups with raisins and prepackaged peanut butter and jelly Uncrustables.

In the nearby salad bar was a colorful spread of fresh fruits and veggies, but the 5-year-old Stella Brockman Elementary School student paid little attention, opting instead for Maxi Cheese Stix and chocolate milk.

The choices might pass muster with Oscar and other Manteca Unified School District students, but one trustee said she was shocked when she read the lunch menu.

“Chicken nuggets, jumbo corn dog, beef dippers. They’re all processed foods,” said Trustee Nancy Teicheira. “They don’t get a healthy meal. … When I was a kid, you got real food.”

Teicheira would prefer to see more foods cooked from scratch, an idea that seemed to resonate with parents on the new Nutrition Committee formed at Teicheira’s recommendation. But changing the way the district serves its 35,000 students might not be easy.

Sandy Oliver, who oversees production of 3,000 lunches each day as kitchen supervisor at Stella Brockman, said about a quarter of the food cooked in her kitchen is made from scratch.

A crew at the school, one of four “centralized kitchens” in the district, cooks enough food for eight nearby elementary schools, delivering hot food to their doors each day. Most schools do not have kitchens capable of cooking their own food, Oliver said.

Cooking from scratch for 3,000 kids is difficult, Oliver said. Each time nachos appear on the menu, cooks whip up 30 pounds of chili beans in giant 60-gallon pots; when turkey day rolls around, so many roasts are needed that it takes three days to cook them all.

As the district has grown, Oliver said, it has turned to more processed food to meet the demand. While Oliver used to make hundreds of cookies from scratch every week, she now slides trays of frozen cookies into the oven.

“It’s quality food — it’s not junk,” she said. “But we’ve gotten a lot more prepackaged than we used to, because the district has gotten so large.”

Some processed foods are “very good,” said nutrition services director and dietician Mary Tolan-Davi, and the district works hard to seek them out.

Each of seven daily meal options — each sold for $1.50 for a full-priced lunch, or 40 cents for reduced-cost — has been chosen not just to meet but to exceed state guidelines, Tolan-Davi said. The district takes part in the state’s Shaping Health as Partners in Education program, a voluntary grant program that carries strict nutritional guidelines.

Elementary school lunches must have fewer than 664 calories, 22 grams of fat and 1,100 milligrams of sodium, and they must meet 10 other standards as well.

There are no guidelines for sugar content.

District meals consistently meet each standard except sodium, according to charts provided by the district. The average elementary school meal contained 1,218 milligrams of sodium for the week of Oct. 8 — 11 percent more than the limit.

Sodium is “probably the biggest challenge we have,” Tolan-Davi said. The biggest culprits, she said, are salad dressing and trail mix.

Healthier foods are being integrated into the menu. Schools have recently started serving whole-grain tortillas and brown rice, which have been surprisingly popular, Tolan-Davi said, and they have developed a turkey-and-gravy recipe that is nearly fat-free. Energy Island salad bars in each school serve eight fresh fruit and vegetable choices each day.

But making the transition to cooking from scratch would be a massive — and very expensive — undertaking, Tolan-Davi said.

“Our facilities are not set up for homemade,” she said. “We don’t have the facilities, or the staffing. … I think we make as much as we can, and we take pride in that.”

Small and ill-equipped kitchens hinder districts throughout the state, said Phyllis Bramson-Paul, director of Nutrition Services for the California Department of Education.

“There are many, many schools in California where the kitchen might have been designed for 300 and they’re now serving 1,200,” Bramson-Paul said. “They cannot cook in that kitchen.”

Phasing out processed foods requires a financial and ideological commitment, Bramson-Paul said, but some districts are making the transition.

“It doesn’t have to be that way,” she said. “We get what we pay for. … If we want freshly prepared food, which I think we all do, we need to start paying more for it.”

Berkeley Unified School District is one of the districts in Northern California that has made a drastic turnaround, Bramson-Paul said.

Berkeley Unified started cooking most of its food from scratch two years ago, said Ann Cooper, that district’s nutrition services director. Any food the district cannot cook, it buys from small local businesses.

Batches of oven-fried chicken, rotini with fresh tomato or meat sauce and chicken tamales are cooked fresh in a central kitchen and sent out to Berkeley schools.

“It’s a quality issue,” Cooper said. “All processed food just has a lot of chemicals in it. Coloring, additives, preservatives...(Scratch cooking is) all much healthier,and it tastes better."