School lunches

Yes... In my day...etc.etc.

What about those who adhere to kosher or halal rules?

I don't think it is for the school to decide what a child should or shouldn't eat at lunch time. I disapprove of the lunch box police just as much as I disapprove of lunch boxes containing only a bag of crisps and a chocolate biscuit. I think it is reasonable to ban all soft drinks (including fizzy ones) unless these are available (which I don't think they should be) to the children having school lunches on the grounds of fairness. Ditto sweets.

Has anyone else encountered the competition of Japanese lunch boxes that contain beautiful creations which take hours to prepare and seconds to destroy? I doubt that British mums would go to such extremes but I can see a competitive edge creeping in at some schools if monitoring the lunch boxes becomes routine.

TBH, cold chips can be quite nice, especially dipped in mayonnaise. Not different essentially from potato salad (without the chives or spring onions) when you think about it . Lot of fuss about nothing IMO.

I think schools have to buy halal. Not sure they even get a choice. Neither do the rest of us from what the thread we had a while ago about bad (non-existent) labelling seemed to be saying. Something else forced on us by control freaks.

Well one could say that the health cost of poor diet and obesity in the short and long run cost the community, e.g. 'us' a huge amount of money. One could also say that feeding kids crisps and chocolate and fizzy drinks on a daily basis is a kind of abuse - because it impairs their health, again short and long-term, and also their behavior, attention, etc - so their education and therefore their life. Why do we try and limit alcohol and cigarettes for the young then? A poor diet can result in diabetes, osteoporosis, and much more.

Packed lunch should not be banned ' but certainly guidelines and education should be given as to what is acceptable. It is so sad that my grandson is mocked for having healthy packed lunches by others, isn't it?

Remember those mums passing McDonald burgers and chips through the school gates because the school had banned unhealthy foods from the canteen? Don't we owe to our kids that they should be fed a 'healthy' diet. Nothing wrong with chips or crisps, or chocolate, etc, as part of a healthy diet btw. Sadly it is often the children who are also poorly fed at home who are poorly fed via packed lunches.

Yes, I think we know all that, granjura, but there must surely be a limit to how much the government and schools can and should interfere when it comes to feeding our children?

Otherwise they may as well be taken into 'care' from birth to make sure they're getting the right nutrition, not being exposed to smoking, etc....

At the first school where I was HT I inherited a system where all children aged 3-7 staying all day had to have a school dinner. The meals were good and all the children ate them and enjoyed them. Staff were keen to supervise at lunch as they got a free meal as payment and they liked the food! When they got to Junior age almost all children remained on school dinners, those who brought a packed lunch tended to be kids who joined the school later! This was in subsidised ILEA days and the school cooks were properly trained and the menus came from a great ILEA cookbook! Delcious, but not particularly healthy desserts: butterscotch tart, chocolate cake and custard etc! Yum! main courses were well balanced meals and gave a choice also variety over the week.
At my second school, outside the ILEA area, the lunches were very inconsistent and I would not have forced anyone to eat them. The caterers were a private firm and working to a minimum per head to maximise profit..so Turkey Twizzlers (before they were banned!), and nothing cooked from scratch all packaged or frozen foods except the baked potatoes.

However I have seen a packet of Jammie Dodgers as a complete packed lunch and a packet of murray mints for a 6 yr olds pudding. Daily jam sandwiches not unusual either. Which is OK if kids go home to a more nutritious supper but I suspected that was not the case!

I spent a huge amount of time as a head fighting the caterers as they consistently failed to provide good enough meals. It was a big national company.

So making kids eat school lunches wouldn't necessarily improve their diets, it would seem.

Not unless you could get the nutritional recipe right and force the kids to eat it...

And that would be abuse.

Yes. Although I do remember a couple of the teachers at my grammar school trying their hardest to bully pupils into eating the horrible, lumpy mashed potato we were given with every meal!

My GS eats so little he really would starve if he had to have school dinners. He does have one on Fridays when they have fish fingers. His mother went to a Have a School Lunch day to show him that they did jacket potatoes that he could eat. Unfortunately she found the potatoes completely inedible so it was back to packed lunches! She bakes things like cheese scones and cheese straws and he always has fresh fruit and a yogurt. No fizzy drinks because he only drinks water.

I think it would be more useful if schools did more to educate children about nutrition and cooking. Most children like taking new ideas home and might be able to improve their own families' diets (or just be really irritating).

Sorry but schools DO loads to educate kids about balanced diets! However it really is up to parents to get their kids to eat healthily. They have been fed for five yrs before they start eating at schools. Habits set in early. I think schools should provide reasonably priced balanced meals. If they are good take up will reflect that. Too much fuss over a biscuit and occassional pkt of crisps!!

And there's nothing wrong with a burger for lunch if that's what parents choose to feed their kids. Load of cobblers all the anti-burger misinformation there is about. Meat is good food. So are animal fats. So long as no-one who doesn't want to eat burgers is forced to do so, there isn't a problem. You can't have choice for some people and not for others.

And what ej says about schools educating children about food choices is perfectly true. The control freaks need to stop naggin'!

We are agreed not only about silliness of compulsory desserts (where did that come from, they weren't an expectation in the house I grew up in? )
But about bloody food police. Not content with J Oliver we had an in-house officer who made sure that we obeyed to the letter (you had to do this if you wanted a "Healthy Schools" award. So, wait for it Bags at the breakfast club the caterer was not allowed to sell bacon sandwiches, or fried egg maps. But they were allowed to sell griddled eggs it seemed. (fried on a flat surface?)
We also experienced a steep drop in uptake of school meals once the JO rules were introduced because the children voted with their feet en masse and went to the chip shop or the bakery across the road.

You'd think the food police would learn from experience, wouldn't you, jess? They behave like a bunch of unreasonable ideologues.

I mean idealists in the grip of impractical ideologies.

It's a case of stick your oar in where you have the illusion of control, and it costs while, back at ranch, ConDems have caved into industry pressure re packaging of cigarettes and minimum pricing on alcohol.
Absent lots of schools serve halal compliant school lunches these days otherwise they could not comply with their obligation to provide FSM for those entitled. And let's not forget that if the majority have packed lunches the poor old FSM kids tend to get an inferior service because numbers go down.

Isn't it true that all the big supermarket chains use only halal meat because it would be too expensive to separate it out from non-halal?

Add comment | Report | Private message whenim64 Sat 13-Jul-13 07:38:35
Just a quiet word of support for Jamie Oliver, who came into the school meals fray because he was shocked at what was being cooked, or warmed up, for children. Turkey twizzlers, mechanically extracted meat slurry that you wouldn't give your dog, over-emphasis on chips, poor nutritional balance, and meals provided for less than the prison system is allowed. He took on the politicians and they ate him alive. To his credit, he raised awareness about the lowering of standards for school meals. The bureaucracy that governs what kids can eat has done more damage than anything else, but that can't be attributed to him. He has commented recently that he will never get involved in the politics of school food again.

I agree that there is too much fuss being made about what children eat, where they are healthy and not under-nourished. Jam butties and the odd Kit-Kat shouldn't make anyone throw their hands up in horror, nor the occasional trip to McDonalds. It's the kids who fall through the net that need the support and better quality food. If a perfectly healthy child has crisps in their lunch box, what's it got to do with anyone else? When an under-nourished looking child has junk food that will not sustain them, by all means intervene and find ways to improve their diet, and do it in a way that doesn't stigmatise them.........and stop sending letters saying that kids who spend ther leisure time charging round and bouncing on trampolines happen to fall outside the agreed measurement by a sqillionth need to have their weight monitored. Do these people ever look at the child before wasting a stamp?

I am listening to Today on Radio 4, and it was reported that offering free school meals to all primary school children, starting in certain very deprived areas, is being considered. More kite-flying?

It may well be more kite-flying, but if the idea does fly, then I think it's a good idea.

Won't that depend on the quality of the food - if it is put out to tender, the history of out-sourcing to the lowest bidder, cf hospital cleaning, does not inspire me with confidence.

Yes, the end result, the 'what ends up on the plate' matters a great deal. I'd like to think some lessons have been learnt along the way. Conceptually I like the idea. A reasonable first step in re-addressing the whole 'school dinners' debate.

Yes of course when Jamie O highlighted some of the worst aspect and it stopped schools selling twizzlers sugary drinks
I think JO really wanted a committment to spend more money on them and improve the quality of food, not make a lot of rules about what was not allowed.
The problem came when a committee/quango (the schools food trust) was appointed to draw up a long list of rules that had to be applied in all circumstances.

Gove has, according to the Inde "joined war on packed lunches"
He has no scruples when it comes to headline grabbing.
But he has no money to provide better funding for lunches - we are just entering a phase of austerity and spending cuts that will make the last few years look like land of milk and honey.