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

That 'Home Dinners' idea is a good one - he saw the need for that himself. As I said before, he went home with one of the most resistant kids to see what he ate at home and ended up showing the mum how to cook easy and cheap food that was good for the kids - wasn't some of that in the book attached to the programme? Again I wonder if anyone within the school meals services has actually written to Jamie Oliver and told him what is happening, he doesn't strike me as the kind of person that abandons a project after the initial blaze of enthusiasm so he may have some ideas of what can be done, or what he can do to help.

Aren't there two arguments here? On the one hand it is being said that parents are stopping their kids eating school dinners because the JO programme made it look like they weren't healthy. On the other hand it is being said that the *kids* won't eat the healthy food because they'd prefer to eat junk. I don't see how you can blame JO for the second of these. I can see that his campaign to insist there is less junk on the menu might mean that the *kids* reject the school meals, but this seems to me to be a different problem that needs to be addressed.

I am informed not. I don't know enough to argue the point myself. Perhaps the LA has some responsibility, while the individual schools have others?

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These are two out of a number of issues that need to be balanced if school meals are to succeed. 1. Parents want healthy food for their kids, at the minimum possible price. 2. Head teachers want meals that keep their kids alert and studious, and occupy school resources for the minimum time. [Nearly all dining halls are also gyms or classrooms, or...] 3. Government organisations want healthy food that gives our kids a good start in life, hopefully resulting in long, healthy lives contributing to the nation. 4. Quality monitors want meals prepared and served in clean and safe environments, delivering optimum value for money to their customers. 5. Kids want what they've seen on TV adverts, which is what they and their friends want to eat. 6. School meals providers want a service that meets the needs of their clients within budgetary constraints. Even if there is no profit to be made, they can't afford to make a loss.

Satisfying all of these needs at the same time is already challenging. A loss of 33% of meals served since JO's unknowing assault is a catastrophe for school dinners. There is a significant chance that history will remember JO as the naive fool who, with the sensation-seeking media, destroyed the school meals service in Britain. Across the nation, school meals are in BIG trouble. Hours and jobs are being pared to the bone, in an attempt to survive. I know without doubt that this is real, it's already happening and it's not an exaggeration.

I don't know if anything can be done about it. I don't know either why no-one has (a) answered the issues raised by the JO programmes, and (b) publicised what's happened as a result. Compared with the global war on Islam, school meals aren't headline grabbers.

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So good he signed it thrice?

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Actually, I think many kids just want food that simply isn't obviously bad - no overboiled veg, gristly meat, or gravy with a layer of fat which congeals on top as soon as it hits the plate. Even if it's poor on occasion, as long as there are good as well as bad days, many kids don't mind - they're probably more interested in how quickly they can finish eating and get outside to play or hang around.

Well the kids he went home with wouldn't eat roast chicken, in fact said he wouldn't eat something (might have been chicken and veg in a tortilla) even if Jamie paid him 100 quid - although processed chicken lips wrapped in fat and sugar and salt were liked a lot, which is why his mother was shown how to produce things the kid might want to eat to widen his tastes to include actual real food.

Are you a parent, Potholer?

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I think we've got a whole load of different developments going on and trying to lay the blame on JO is I think a bit simplistic.

First up school dinners in my day, circa 1955-65 were disgusting. But so to was the typical, post war English diet. Elizabeth David didn't really become well known until the 60's.

By the 1990's some school kitchens were producing really good meals using local produce. When we celibrated Mrs WA's 40th the school cook and her team catered and it was excellent. But she was a properly trained cook.

From the 80's on we get into the realms of junk food, microwaves and advertising. More importantly school funding under Maggie began to be squeezed. Remember Maggie Thatcher milk snatcher. New Labour appeared over the horizon with Education, Education, Education but the damage to the school kitchens had been done. As Jamie found the cooks had become little more than heater uppers.

The final piece of the jigsaw is the explosion of cookery programmes, Jamie, Rick, Gary et al, and an increasing interest in good food plus a realisation that bodies are similar to computers. Rubbish in, rubbish out. This year there was a Radio 4 Food Programme award to somebody who has done a lot of research into how food effects the behaviour of the inmates of young peoples institutions and lo and behold behaviour improves with proper food.

It will take a while to flow down and I realise it is hard if you live in an area that is a fresh food desert, some Liverpool GP's are now selling fruit, but for the health of the Nation we have to get kids and parents eating less junk. Increased funding for school dinners would seem a good place to start.

But my local area has met or exceeded the amount recommended by JO for several years. I accept all these good ideas, and I know that the programmes had a potentially good effect. In practice, it has resulted in 33% fewer children taking school meals, and the possible destruction of our school meals service. Given what has actually happened, ask yourself: are our kids better off now than they were before JO opened his caring but uninformed mouth?

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I think you are using JO as a scapegoat. The real villains of the piece are the big protein companies like Cargill, the big food producers like Unilever, Supermarkets and the advertising industry.

Smoking is a good analogy. I'm sure the first researcher to suggest it caused lung cancer was crucified. So too was the research chemist in Aberdeen who suggested feeding GM potatoes to rats caused cancer. Where you have large vested interests they will always defend their profit and the status quo. Educating parents and children is the key.

The recent fall in uptake is as a direct result of JO's programmes. So say the parents, when asked. How can this be using JO as a scapegoat?

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JO's is right on message. The quality of school meals has to increase for health and behavioural reasons. By blaming the reduction in the uptake of school meals on him is surely shooting the messenger. The parents need to get that message.

But didn't you say that the problem was that the parents either don't listen or believe you when your meals service already meets some of the challenges posed by JO?

That isn't his fault either.

No, it isn't. But before his programmes were aired, our local school meals service met or exceeded every criterion that JO mentioned. Now it's fighting for its life.

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I wonder if there might be a sort of generational problem with cooking?

What if the old-style cooking is all some parents know how to do? They're probably going to cook what they're used to as well. What if what they're used to is vegetables cooked to the point of flavourless disintegration, casseroles, liver, boiled potatoes, roast dinners. Give any of that to kids and they're likely to struggle.

I don't know if its true, or perhaps it was true and has passed now, but its sparked by memories of it being a real chore to get through a lot of my mum's cooking when I was a kid.

Don't we just pick up our parents likes and dislikes? I can't bear to taste aniseed, because my Mum always hated it! And I like to veg cooked to near-destruction, because that's how my Mum cooked it. [Now, however, I'm happy to eat crunchier veg too! ]

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I always thought I hated pork, turns out I just don't like it cooked to within a whisker of becoming leather - and I don't like everything drowned id Daddies sauce so no, I don't think we pick up our parent's likes and dislikes.

I agree with Kelli, my mum hates garlic and never cooks with it, but one look at

http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/dangoodman/entry/chicken_cooked_with/

will show you that I love the stuff.

Very much not the case I'm afraid.

And JO is till very much involved as he launched a rather furious tirade at the government after picking up his two Baftas on Sunday.

He's still waiting to even get an appointment with the Education Secretary to discuss the problem, so perhaps you should be writing to whowever that is now (or perhaps hedge your bets and write to whoever it will be next week ) and ask them to tell JO where to get off?

how about a part of the modern problem is that parents often don't have time to cook with their kids?
I know I don't (except at the weekend - when we actually do - but then I have to let other things slip to get the time to do that)

I don't think that JO or anyone else is suggesting that schools take over the role of parents in educating children to eat healthy food.

It's an argument I hear coming from teachers about various things all the time. The thing is: society has to bring up children with the parents, and schools are a vital part of that. Parents, of course, need to take on the biggest part, but the rest of us need to get or oar in too.

Getting children to eat healthy food, along with getting parents & schools to give them healthy food has to be a many pronged campaign, we can't leave it to one or the other.

And as long as breadcrumbed-deep-fried-turky-beaks are cheap, then people without the money for organic wholefood are going to buy them.

But that's a whole other argument