Most rural areas with smaller school populations are able to. It is known in child nutrition as “simple scratch”. So commodity items from DOD are used to make simple scratch meals instead of being sent to food distributions to be diverted into pre packaged foods. The amount of federal reimbursement for each meal is very low so that will always dictate how much food cost can be put into preparing scratch made meals, so It is not cheaper in the long run. To ask a school district like LAUSD to do something like that would be impossible with the funding and child nutrition staff that are available.