When President Barack Obama noticed vending machines full of candy and chips during a Jan. 22 tour of the White House press complex, he mentioned that the journalists "might want to have healthier snacks."

Many representatives of food interest groups took it as a sign that the new president has a place for food policy on his to-do list.

After all, if President Obama believes journalists shouldn't snack on chips and candy bars, children probably shouldn't either.

I asked local food and agriculture advocates for their wish list for the new administration, and though they all have their own perspectives, they have remarkably similar goals.

Local food and school lunches were the buzz words.

"More support for farmers would be No. 1," said Greg Boulos, the western regional director of marketing for the Pennsylvania Association of Sustainable Agriculture, a nonprofit organization that works with farmers and consumers to improve the economic and social prosperity of Pennsylvania food and agriculture.

He hopes that the Obama administration will see the long-term and wide-ranging benefits of supporting a larger net of small farms. He envisions that support coming in "low-interest, short-term loans specifically geared toward local processing and local value-added production."

In layperson's terms, that means changing regulations so that farms can add value to their products in a variety of ways, such as slaughtering their own meat or processing their own vegetables and fruits, Mr. Boulos said. Many USDA regulations, such as those for meat processors, are written only with large-scale operations in mind and involve far too many hurdles to go through for small-scale certification. The effect has been to drastically reduce the number of small-scale food processors across the country.

Mr. Boulos also focused on an issue that seemed to be the No. 1 priority for most reformers: improving the food in schools. He advocates for changing the federal mandates on the school lunch program so that they encourage using local agriculture rather than discourage it.

One huge victory in the 2007 Farm Bill was the clarification of language first instituted in 2002 that allows for -- even encourages -- school districts spending federal dollars to use local foods. However, there is continued confusion about this rule, and there are other hurdles to implementing it. For one, it doesn't help that school districts' facilities and kitchens were designed for processed, rather than whole, foods. Many are not set up even to cut up vegetables or fruit.

Joshua Burnett, director of education for Grow Pittsburgh, a nonprofit dedicated to modeling, teaching and facilitating sustainable urban agriculture within the Pittsburgh region, pinpoints the farm bill and the Childhood Nutrition Act as the two pieces of legislation with the biggest effect on food policy and the most in need of reform.

The farm bill won't be reconsidered by policymakers for five to seven years, he said, but when it does "we'd like to see subsidies for larger farmers to be reduced and for smaller farmers to be eligible for subsidies."

For now, as part of the national Farm-To-School Network, Grow Pittsburgh is lobbying for grants that would be used to renovate or bring in new equipment that would allow local food into the school system.

This is exactly the kind of grant that would allow Michael R. Peck, Pittsburgh Public School's director of food services, to make the changes he sees as vital to improving the health of school children.

"In a nutshell, I think as a school breakfast and lunch sponsor we would be looking for increased funding to purchase whole foods, meaning foods without additives, artificial ingredients or preservatives."

The best way to bring whole foods into schools is to help them partner with local farmers. He also confirmed that the Pittsburgh school production center was built just to handle processed foods.

The lack of proper facilities is one of the reasons why school lunch menus often look like they were written by sixth graders with a taste for junk food, rather than food professionals.

But before school lunch menus change, the language of dietary guidelines also is going to need to change. Mr. Burnett of Grow Pittsburgh points to work done by journalist Michael Pollan, who explored the dangers of "nutritionism" in his recent book "In Defense of Food."

"I would like to see language changed around nutrition so that it would be talking about whole foods rather than these nutrients in the food; so that we're encouraging broccoli rather than vitamin A," Mr. Burnett said. Until that happens, school budgets will continue to force them to find the cheapest way to fulfill nutritional guidelines, and at the moment at least, it's cheaper to serve students Uncrustablesthan to make them peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

With a new administration in place, and a president that can practically be called a foodie, reformers have a renewed sense of optimism that finally the system may start to work with them instead of against them.

Now that's change you can stick your fork in.