h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

You're right about the problem, Kelli, but not about it being limited to my own locality. The mistrust you mention is more or less the same across the country. School catering professionals, when they meet (at conventions, exhibitions, LACA meetings and so on), are saying the same thing regardless of area. Of course there will be individual schools where what I have said doesn't apply. That's always the case when you speak in generalisations. But, in general, what I have reported is replicated across the country.

Sho:

JO is an excellent chef! And I agree that he seems to genuinely care about the food our children - and his own! - eat. But the program we're discussing was way outside his area of expertise, and there was much that he either did not know, or that wasn't felt 'appropriate' to air on the TV. [I suspect the former.]

If school meals were just a commercial 'opportunity', with no compulsion to provide them, either they wouild be much worse than even JO showed, or there would be no providers willing to offer a service. A (roughly comparable) service that I've mentioned before - Debenham's restaurant - can only provide a cup of coffee for the retail price of a school meal (main meal, dessert and drink)!

The average British school meals provider gets around £1.25 for each meal they provide. Out of this, they must provide ingredients, staff (with all the overheads that implies), management and light equipment (the bricks and mortar of the kitchen and dining areas are normally the responsibility of the school) to a level of Quality that is externally monitored. What commercial catering operation can take up a challenge like this and provide a meal that meets the aspirations of parents, children, government, nutritional standards organisations, schools and Quality monitors, while returning a profit for their shareholders (or break-even for a local authority service)?

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"

Army (in my day, at least) did pretty well to provide grown active men & women 3 balanced meals a day on not much more.

I really do sympathise because providing good, nutritious meals for children - that they will eat - must sometimes seem like swimming in treacle with your hands tied behind your back with weights on your feet and a hungry shark coming at you.

(not a battle I have to fight since when I ask the Gruesomes what they want to eat the answer is often "spinach with broccoli")

The programme was sensationalist. How much? In Germany, a land with no school dinners to speak of, it has been shown on tv and is a talking point at least in our office (but that could possibly be because they know that I have a personal - English - )

If he had gone into a school and said "blimey, mate, nothing for me to do here" a lot of parents and kids would have been scratching their heads and wondering why he had bothered.

We ( and I) watched Supersize Me. It didn't stop us going to MacD, but it did slow us down and make us think twice - and I think that's what this programme aimed to do.

I'd be interested to see just who are taking their kids away from school meals. Is it, as I mentioned before, the home-knitted müsli brigade, or is it the turkey twizzler noshers?

I'm informed it's all the parents who aren't prepared to say to their children "The food on offer is good food. Every day you're offered a choice of several healthy meals. You can't go to MacDonald's for your lunch. Eat what's on offer and stop moaning." Instead they just cave in, for an easy life, and buy processed c**p at twice the price. And yet these same parents insist their kids don't have school meals because they are so bad, just like JO showed us on the telly!

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"

hmmmm...

in that case, it might be an idea for schools to point out the correlation between what goes in and behaviour patterns.

I am so utterly convinced that neither of my kids is going to die of starvation within 24 hours, I offer take it or leave it only (within reason: if we're trying something new, I will have an alternative up my sleeve for refusniks)

Another thing we need... IMO... proper cookery/nutrition lessons (parents could be invited too)

there is enough literature about. There is enough information on the TV and in the papers, on the internet etc etc

There is no excuse to refuse healthy food and no reason not to offer it.

I'm sure that the decline will taper off. It is going to be an uncomfortable ride,though, and unfortunately crisp manufacturers and the makers of those dratted plastic-lunch-in-a-packet-which-is-not- wholly-related-to-cheese are the ones who will profit.

I'm gobby enough to point out the paradox to those parents though... I realise that not everyone has that freedom.

Who's JO again?

Jamie Oliver

http://www.jamieoliver.com/

This might well be the case if a school was built under the PFI scheme. It seems that the lack of public sector commercial experience during contract negotiations has given the operators a massive profit for, sometimes, providing a pretty ropey service.

Who are you saying is making massive profits? It certainly isn't the school meals providers, LA or private (commercial).

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"

This article was in yesterday's Telegraph and suggests that some schools have been unable to change their caterers when they were unable or unwilling to improve the menus on offer.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/05/07/npfi107.xml

Hi WA,

I've never heard of this, but that isn't surprising. The meals providers referred to are private companies, of whose operations I have little real knowledge.

Local Authority school meals providers get around £1.25 per meal; some (depending on practical arrangements) have as much as £1.50. And, as I have said several times, they are expected to provide a main meal, dessert and drink for the same retail price as Debenham's charge for a cup of coffee (ingredients cost - around two pence). Most LA providers manage to put 40-50 pence worth of ingredients on our kids plates for the same price. And they are struggling to survive the JO effect. Many have already closed.

The only legal requirement is for those children entitled to free school meals, and sandwiches would meet this requirement. BUT, the kids who have free meals would then be identifiable, and thus subject to bullying as a result Curreent school meals providers do all kinds of things to hide which kids ahve free meals, to save them from this bullying.

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"

Debenhams' charge for coffee is simply not relevant - their cafe is there to make a profit, not simply provide a service.
The fact that school meals services can break even while providing their meals may be considered as a tribute to their skills, but if it is known that they they do break even, comparisons with retail businesses become largely irrelevant.

I imagine most people in the UK are capable of recognising £1-25 to £1-50 per meal as cheap without the need for examples.

Is bullying a really big problem in the UK? It gets mentioned a lot, and it seems to be a prime motivator for doing a lot of things.

Is anything being done to go to the root of so many evils? Why is bullying endemic in the UK?

Get to the root of it? You mean stop children from being horrible little blighters? Good luck...

I'm quite surprised you single out the UK as well. I mean, hate to be US bashing (we get a lot of US news so these are the examples I know of), but I remember some very sad reports of school shootings from that side of the pond.

Fair bet its endemic everywhere IMO.

Yeah, but...school shootings seem to be entirely unrelated to the topic at hand. School shootings actually occur maybe a handful of times a year (at most). Are you saying bullying has the same frequency? If it does, then the people who make a big deal of it need to get some perspective.

Seriously, ton's if not most of the kids in my high school at school lunch. So I'm having trouble bridging the cultural gap, and understanding why there is such a huge stigma attached with doing the equivalent in the UK.

Some of the people here are suggesting that kids might pick on someone if they find out they are poor enough to qualify for free school meals. If the *only* meals provided were free ones then everyone would know which kids were getting them.

In my experience, kids will find a reason to pick on someone if they want to, so while you might get called 'charity case' you might equally get called four-eyes or whatever. I wasn't bullied for getting free school meals, and neither was anyone else in my year (that I know of), people were bullied, but not because they got free lunches.

School shootings I would've seen as related since many seem to be essentially a reaction to bullying.

Don't think there's any actual bullying attached to free school meals, I've certainly only ever encountered the precautions to prevent it. Being poor wouldn't have been a particular stigma where I was I don't think. Being ginger, on the other hand...

Actually, I think the free school meals bullying example has probably just been propagated by staff over the years who've had to come up with crappy 'anti-bullying policy' leaflets to convince the parents that they're doing something about it/have it under control. Likely anachronistic.

got it, thanks for the explanation.

If my leg was bleeding from a wound, I could bandage it. But that wouldn't remove the huge knife that had caused the wound in the first place.

If kids reject school dinners because they don't taste like the meals they have outside school, perhaps JO tried to bandage something without looking too closely at the cause of the problem. Turn it on its head.

Then the answer is simple. He must be persuaded back on TV to do a series called "Jamie's Home Dinners" in which he teaches adults how to cook simple and quick meals for children. Nothing that takes more than 10 minutes to prepare and no longer than 30 minutes to cook in an oven, or something that can be popped in a microwave. All meals with the minimum of fiddling about. All ingredients available from supermarkets, no special visits to a health food shop.

There are children starting school who do not have basic table skills such as using a knife and fork. This is not the fault of the school.
<-- working single mum and full time teacher, with an O level in Food and Nutrition.

"The only legal requirement is for those children entitled to free school meals, and sandwiches would meet this requirement. BUT, the kids who have free meals would then be identifiable, and thus subject to bullying as a result"

No - there is a legal requirement to provide HOT meals for ANY child who wants them. There are also nutritional requirements attached to that.

Now they are tring to ban mobile food vans from parking by schools between the hours of 12 and 2. I assume they'll then insist on local shops closing at this time too, to prevent children buying crisps.

As this goverment is keen on children being in school from 7:00 AM until 7:00 PM I asssume they'll need an evening meal too ?