Prue Leith wants to ban school packed lunches?

[SneakyGremlins]

Good luck with that.

www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/amp/47733670

Yeah, DD is fussy as fuck (was billions times worse and slowly getting better) and hates pizza,sausage rolls , ketchup and many many other things. She eats well enough at school, and on the days where there's nothing she'll eat(once a week) she'll have jacket potato (no cheese,because they changed it and now she doesn't like it). How far we've come from the terrifying days of one bag of crisps and an ice cream a day.

This stinks of the whole "if he's really hungry he'll eat" attitude. Plenty kids don't.

Although if Prue wants to pay for bigger kitchens and better food in schools she can go right ahead.

When ds was weaned he would eat everything and anything - he was eating mousakka on holiday at 11 months old.

Then he developed food issues. At his worse he would go days without eating. Now he lives on his small handful of safe foods which include a mix of “beige” food and a few fruits.

People don’t believe me but my kids genuinely would rather be hungry than eat something they don’t like
So the idea that ‘they’ll eat if they’re hungry’ just isn’t true for every child

Beside my boy with adhd is a million times worse when he’s hungry
Good luck teachers with that in an afternoon

But that's because you let your children drink gravy off plates, don't you know?

....and only feed them breadcrumbs coated deep fried food, don't forget

It will never happen. Don't worry about it.

Ridiculous. School dinners would cost me £20 a week, I can make packed lunches for a fraction of that.

All this angst about what they eat at lunch goes out the window when they get to high school, get out at lunch and can buy all manner of crap in the shops anyway. Our high school doesn’t have the capacity to cater for all kids at lunch.

I found it too expensive with 2 DC, they both had packed lunches, that were healthy and that they had time to eat. If they had school dinners, they found that they could be wasting all their lunch time waiting in queues and have to bolt their food down. They didn't like the options, either.

I think Pru is talking balls, and not only that but I'd also get rid of blanket FSM for KS1 and Reception. The amount of food waste I see is disgusting (and I've eaten the meals plenty of times - they're nice). Black bags full of wasted food. Children will literally sometimes have a bite and that's it, no matter how much we coax and cajole.

Short of forcing it down their neck, there's not much we can do except suggest to parents their child has a packed lunch containing things they will actually eat. Parents generally won't do this though because they can get the meals for free. This is in an affluent area as well.

I have a picky eater when it comes to school lunches. He was weaned onto curry and recently paid £6 of his own money for a bottle of Vampire Slayer hot sauce. He finds school lunches too bland and not to his taste.

Lots of free schools have compulsory school meals.

Lots of other state schools have great meals and almost 100% take up and yes they cater for every dietary need.

I find it hard to believe a school can cater for every possible dietary need.

Even if there's a vegetarian option, who's to say that a lot of the kids at the front of the queue won't suddenly fancy it, leaving nothing for the true vegetarians?

If they were free and catered to allergies/religious requirements/vegetarians etc. I'd be fine with it.

I think in practise though I agree It'd be really hard to have suitable healthy options for everyone - I can imagine some DC ending up with a plain jacket potato though!

My one child on packed lunches has coeliacs. I shocked by the number of people who think that this is a wish-washy wheat-free trendy affectation rather than an auto-immune disease, as a result I don't have much confidence that people will understand about the importance of avoiding cross-contamination. So packed lunches it will remain.

I agree with her. The dds are very fussy but eat their school dinners. Their primary has its own kitchen and sources food locally and is very healthy food focused. The food is lovely I can't fault them.

The dds are very fussy but eat their school dinners.

That's an oxymoron, surely!

If they are very fussy but will eat school dinners that would suggest an element of being “pandered too”

Ds used to have school dinners when tuba jackets where on his acceptable list. Then one bad one meant he didn’t eat at school for a week. So now he has packed lunches which are full of what most would class as “shit” but he eats. 12 months down the line he still hasn’t touched a jacket potato

My school had a big 'eat it or don't eat' policy (private school) and I just stopped eating at school entirely. I didn't have breakfast or lunch from the age of 13 to 18 and if I was going on out after school, I just didn't eat that day.

I have mixed feelings about it. On one hand, I survived and I'm not sure it did me that much harm. On the other hand, I was clinically underweight and had to have a bunch of frustrating conversations with a counselor as everyone was convinced I was anorexic. I really wasn't (and no one would think that now looking at me!). I just really hated being forced to eat food I didn't like.

I find it hard to believe a school can cater for every possible dietary need.
Well they do here. I had a look at the dietary needs form for the Helsinki schools and they even provide for diabetic children with carefully carb counted meals at the times needed (the form asks what time and how many carbs)
Also noticed the city playgrounds provide a free meal to all children under 16 who go to them during the summer holidays, though it's not as substantial as a school dinner, something like a sandwich or a bowl of porridge and fruit.

But shat about kids where criss contamination is an issue, or they have multiple allergies which leads to a very limited diet, or have sensory issues which mean they won't eat strange food at all?

My eldest has a dairy allergy. The school were informed before she started by the health visitors and we spoke with them about it too as she was too young to regulate her diet for herself. By Year3 the doetician had written to the council with her dietary requirements so that the notification came from the appropriate person at the council education department. The school never managed once to ensure she had a dairy free school meal. Some days there were no dairy free options and if her class were the last one sitting they basically had whatever the rest of the school had left for them. Some days she would end up with a cheese sandwich take the cheese out and eat dry bread. They told us packed was the only alternative as they didn’t have resources to babysit. I don’t trust the school to be able to cater for allergies and with my son being allergic to soya as well, it’s a recipe for disaster averted by allowing us to provide packed lunch. It’s also £2.50 a day which adds up on crap wages. I’ll
Happily slap Prue Leith in her lunchbox... same with Jamie Oliver for taking the sugar out my favourite drinks.

Any kitchen should be able to prevent cross contamination, if they can't they shouldn't be operating. Often school dinners are provided by a central kitchen that delivers to local schools and daycares, so it can cater to every specific diet.
But I don't know how they deal with sensory issues, that's one thing that wasn't on the form I looked at, except maybe the section that said about other matters relating to the diner which I assumed was about behaviour. Maybe they speak with the parents and come up with a suitable plan.