Health officials of San Antonio are trying to reduce the obesity rate among children and improve their eating habits by taking a snapshot of what students eat. Five elementary schools in San Antonio participated in a $2 million research on Wednesday. The research includes taking a picture of students’ lunch trays before and after eating.

A computer program will then analyze the before and after photos of the lunch trays. The software is capable of identifying every food in the picture; right down to the number of ounces of food and the total calorie-intake of the students.

The project is funded by a grant given by the Department of Agriculture and the first of its kind in the entire United States. The cameras only take photographs of the food trays and not the faces of the children. Moreover, roughly 90 percent of parents agreed to have their children’s food intake monitored.

Parents will then receive a data which take into account everything their children eat in school. The researchers hope that once parents find out what kinds of food their children choose in school, they will also make an effort to change their eating habits at home.

The research is also expected to identify what children like to eat and how much of it they can consume in one meal.

Echon along with everyone in the research team are still in the process of fine-tuning their program. For example, they have just recently saw to it that the food served in one school is consistent with the foods served in others; both in kind and consistency.

One of the school principals, Mark Davis, said that they did not have a hard time getting consents from parents for this project.