Dozens of children sat in the field behind Vienna's Wolftrap Elementary School on Monday in a scattered rainbow of t-shirts, attentive until they were asked to answer a certain question.

"What's your favorite vegetable?"

Hands shot into the air, fingers wiggling and palms waving as the answers rolled forward, "peppers," "jalapenos," "asparagus."

But they didn't often find those vegetables on their school lunch trays, they said.

"Most of my friends pack their lunches," said one boy, surrounded by a group of friends who were quick to agree. "It's just not ... good. It doesn't taste good."

More than 200 students, parents, community members and officials spent the afternoon at Wolftrap Elementary School in Vienna on Monday for the first National Food Day Event sponsored by Real Food For Kids. Bayou Bakery Chef David Guas and Chris Guerre, a local farmer and owner of Vienna's Maple Ave Market, put on a salad demonstration using produce from Guerre's farm. Tim Ma, the owner and chef of Maple Avenue Restaurant, parked the restaurant's food truck in the field behind the school and cooked up several giant beef burgers, sliced into sliders, along with Patrick Bazin of Bazin's On Church.

The goal was to show kids there are natural, fresh foods nearby that taste good,too. But the real challenge is getting that food into lunchrooms, organizers said.

The burgers Monday were made just from beef; hamburgers served in schools have more than 30 ingredients, organizers said, something they want to change.

"Food is personal to people, costs are involved ... but it can't be an excuse to not do it because it's hard," said Chef Ann Cooper, the "renegade lunch lady" who came to Wolftrap to talk about her own experience revamping lunchrooms in Berkeley, Calif and Boulder, Colo. "It's hard to teach kids English and math. It's not easy, but we do it."

Cooper talked with school board members and several board candidates, including all of the candidates for this Novemeber's at-large race, before the event.

"We went from highly processed junk food we were serving to kids to fresh cooked food from scratch, no high fructose corn syrup, no trans fats. Whole grains, fresh fruits and vegetables, organic milk at lunch," Cooper said. "We really need to feed kids better and we can."

A task force of parents and some nutrition specialists have been studying the county's school lunch service, said FCPS spokesperson Paul Regnier. He said the task force recently presented a report to Superintendent Jack Dale, and the system expects to respond to that report by early January. 

At Monday's event, local chefs, farmers and businesses owners said there are community resources largely untapped by the school system that can help brainstorm ways to get more real food, and less processed, pre-cooked food, into lunchrooms.

"We have lots of smart people, we have a lot of people who can help with this," Wolftrap parent Jocelyn Hsu told school board members and candidates. "We don't want this to be something we toss over the fence and say 'You fix this.' We want this to be a community effort."

The Fairfax County Council of Parent Teacher Associations adopted a resolution created by Real Food For Kids groups in McLean and Vienna, which has also been adopted by a handful of school PTAs over the past several months.

Volunteers at Wolftrap and other county RFFK organizations said they'll continue to help other schools adopt that resolution.

For more about the event, watch the video in the media player above.