OAKLAND — Fourth-grader Kali Jefferson sat in the Prescott Elementary School lunchroom surrounded by a coterie of friends, the only one among them who hadn’t brown-bagged it that day.

“It smells better today,” she said, wrinkling her nose, as she poked her fork into a school cafeteria-prepared Styrofoam tray of barbecue chicken and brown rice, accompanied by a small side salad — both shrink-wrapped with plastic. She only ate half her meal, while her friends wolfed down their home-prepared lunches.

“Children are picky,” said her mom, Nailah Watkins. “A lot of times, she’ll eat an orange at lunchtime, and trash the rest. I’ll go into the lunchroom and see food half-eaten and (in the garbage). There’s so much food wasted.”

But change is coming.

An ambitious plan by the Oakland Unified School District to build a $40 million central kitchen, instructional farm and education center at the corner of 29th and West streets in West Oakland will transform how school meals are made throughout Oakland.

The state-of-the-art kitchen is the district’s attempt to invest more in the growing farm-to-school movement. A central hub will feed a constellation of local finishing kitchens at every district school site that will cook a steady stream of fresh, healthy, locally sourced meals every day.

One of the first of its kind in the nation, the 48,000 square-foot center will provide learning opportunities in the culinary arts and agricultural instruction, and help urban school kids learn where their fruits and vegetables come from and how food is prepared. Construction starts this winter, and the center should be up and running by the 2017-2018 school year.

“The project will help us radically change the food that we serve in the district, because right now, we can only serve individually prepackaged foods,” said Jennifer LeBarre, OUSD’s executive director of nutrition services.

The entire school district is served by two central kitchens, one at Oakland High and another at Prescott Elementary. Together, those facilities prepare more than 30,000 meals a day — more than 7 million meals a year. Both are too small and outdated to act as a central location for fresh, locally sourced food to be delivered and prepared daily. The prepackaged meals they produce are often heated up at individual school sites with microwave ovens.

The concept for the Central Kitchen came about after the district partnered with the Berkeley-based Center for Ecoliteracy and the TomKat Charitable Trust. The groups were looking to partner with a school district to launch a plan that would address how caring for children’s nutritional and physical well-being would help them better succeed in the classroom and in life, said Zenobia Barlow, the Center for Ecoliteracy’s executive director.

“Oakland is a place where there is really significant hunger,” she said. About 73 percent of the district’s students are eligible for free and reduced meals. And research also shows that when students have access to healthy meals — real, not processed food — those students perform at higher levels.

The project is not without its detractors. Some residents think the center doesn’t belong in a residential neighborhood. It is being constructed on the site of the former Marcus Foster Middle School, which was designed by Robert Kennard, a prominent African-American architect who won an award with his colleagues for its open space design in the 1970s.

The middle school closed some time back, but the campus until recently housed special education programs and community basketball courts. Demolition of the school, ironically, started on Martin Luther King Day, further upsetting its opponents.

Plans to build on the site have been in the works since 2011, even though the community was only notified early last year about the project, said Lynne Horiuchi. She pointed out that the Foster-Hoover neighborhood has a history of having its wishes ignored.

“The imposition of the Central Kitchen development on this historically black community is an environmental injustice,” she said.

“Something like this would never happen above (Interstate) 580 in Temescal or Rockridge,” said resident Madeline Wells. “It will change the community forever.”

School trustee Jumoke Hinton-Hodge acknowledges the community engagement on the project could have been better, but she said the project is about social justice for students districtwide.

In Oakland, “families are working class, working poor and living below the poverty line,” she said. “And we know these kids don’t learn because they are malnourished … so I feel really good about the value this project will bring to the overall community.”

Contact Joyce Tsai at 925-945-4764. Follow her at Twitter.com/joycetsainews.