Why is food in schools so bad the U.K.?

[workwoes123]

This may count as a TAAT but it’s more a thread inspired by a thread .

I’m British, I remember fairly crap school dinners in the 1980s. fizzy juice on tap, chips most days. But that was 30 years and an obesity crisis ago.

I live in France now and my kids are in french schools. There are no snacks, no breakfasts, no vending machines, no play pieces. School dinner is a salad starter, a main course with meat / fish / chicken plus veg and carbs, followed by cheese / yoghurt and fruit / occasional dessert. That’s it, for a school day that starts at 8am and finishes at 4:30pm. Today the menu was:

Green salad / tomato pasta salad / beetroot salad
Beef stew / cod in curry sauce with mashed potatoes and mixed vegetables
Cheese or yoghurt
Fruit or isles flottantes (meringue on custard).

I’ve just been on a thread where children in a U.K. secondary school are being offered chocolate croissants for breakfast, bacon / sausage sarnies as a snack (a snack!), iced buns as an afternoon snack. Is this normal? All of this is in addition to a the actual school lunch? Why are the children so hungry that they need snacks as well as a meal?

Did Jamie Oliver not sort all this out? I had this vague idea that school food in the U.K. had improved since I were a lass - has it?

Also the difference for the independent sector. This is a menu from one of the GDST senior schools

I've experienced a different European country and Uk with my Dc, and it's a mixed bag.

Infant age 3-6: Breakfast buffet available every day, help yourself and sit at tables with others to eat it. For luncheveryone sat at mixed age round tables and the eldest children served out the food to everyone. Main course, then pudding brought out when everyone had finished.

Primary school age 6-10 expected to bring own packed snack for mid morning (school started at 7am). No lunch served, school finished at lunchtime.

U.K. Primary - hot lunch served every day but brought in by outside caterers as school has no kitchen. Not very good quality, though looks ok on paper.
You have to have it every day, no mix and match, so Dc took packed lunch.
Leave the table as soon as you are finished or there isn't room for everyone. My Dc is a slow eater, and this encourages him to leave stuff so his friends don't go out to play without him.

U.K. Secondary, on site kitchen, great range of hot food, but then got badly affected by Covid due to lack of space and stopped serving hot food. Just getting back on track now but not as good as it was. Dc now in the habit of a packed lunch anyway.

The canteen at my child’s school is run by a profit making company and they won’t remove the junk because it sells and it might impact their profits.

Because we want it all. But we don't want to pay for it.

In other countries they invest more in their education and nutrition of children.

Here parents just complain.

I mean the solution really to having to provide three or 4 options for you 2 pound 25 ( regular, halal, vege) would perhaps be to do one really good quality healthy vegetarian option. But parents would kick off over not receiving 3 chunks of poor quality meet in a tasteless unseasoned sauce.

You cant create something out of nothing. We are going to have to accept the slop pr accept we have ti pay a bit nore to get something decent.

My son's school got even worse over covid, for a long time they were eating out of disposable cups with disposable cutlery, there didn't seem to be any vegetables. Now things are a bit more normal but their idea of vegetables seems to be baked beans. School dinners are very poor in this country IMO.

Or we could not let profit making companies be responsible for feeding our kids?

My daughter's school lunches seem quite decent although the portions are small. They have Chinese noodles, macaroni cheese, pizza on Thursday. Everything is always served with at least 2 vegetables and chips only on a Friday. The only thing I am not really happy about is the dessert. They are always offered a cookie or cake. They also have yoghurts and fruit but who is really going to choose that when cake is on offer. If there wasn't cake my daughter's would eat the fruit and yoghurt.
I remember my school lunches being quite nice in the 90s. We had a professional chef and had rice with lentils, rice with mixed beans. Lots of delicious variety, I still remember it and long for some of it.

This menu is amazing. It's restaurant quality.

Because when a school enforces freshly cooked, vegetarian communal lunchtimes where everyone sits down together and talks (Michaela schools), parents on here likened it to child abuse. Parents here simply will not accept their kids not getting what they want or having to eat something they aren’t 100% a fan of.

France and Japan have a large cultural expectation around being thin and conforming. Combined with a good cultural attitude towards food, there you are.

I remember Jamie Oliver trying to introduce healthy food into schools. What a shame the parents didn't co-operate. We are in the grip of an obesity crisis made worse by the fact that medical staff are getting into trouble for suggesting are overweight, as it hurts their feelings.
So there's not much hope really

Primary schools the logistics are a bit easier - generally smaller, less pupils, free meals making take-up much more predictable. Secondary schools are between a rock and a hard place. They need a catering solution for their pupils. They contract a company based on their offering - that they can make healthy nutritious choices available, they bring samples, it’s all great. The flip side is they have to offer a decent revenue-generations scheme for that caterer too; they need enough pupils to buy in. So there has to be an element of attractive junk too to get them to spend their money. Then the service starts and it often goes downhill with quality of ingredients etc nothing like the trial menus - and there’s little they can do then, they’re contracted in. The company will say it’s not enough budget, they need to cut costs so the ingredients are cheaper etc. Pupils vote with their feet, vicious circle.

I’ve heard there’s a catering company that serves several secondary schools near us which is trying to charge the schools themselves thousands of pounds as ‘breach of contract’ because of the pandemic. i.e. when schools didn’t have pupils in to buy their services! Shocking. But if the schools don’t pay what happens to the quality of food - the caterers make it clear they’re in dispute and service suffers but meanwhile you’re contracted in and it’s not that easy to just ‘change caterer’ midway through a school year.

It all comes down to funding. Good food is not cheap and ingredient costs are rising. It’s political as well as cultural.

Dd's on late lunch and there is often no choice left. Some days she would have plain pasta with chips and cheese on top. Fortunately she can now go out for lunch and the Co-op lunch meal deal is healthier and cheaper.

Ah I just knew this would be either an non-Brit or someone overseas here to slag off the UK. I’m not wrong.

I can’t comment on the status of UK school dinners as I’ve lived on the Swiss side of the Franco-Swiss border for the last decade, but by the sounds of it, it’s hit and miss and not uniformly bad.

There are frequently pastries and cakes on the school menu in France, as I know from my MIL who’s a primary school teacher in Provence and family and friends (DH is French).

I’m sure there’s room for improvement in British school dinners but then there’s also certainly room for improvement in French secondary schools in stopping the ridiculous levels of smoking amongst teenagers.

My teenagers love the "chicken scoop" at their school. Lord only knows what it is though! I assume some kind of chicken nugget. They take a packed lunch most days but sometimes have to buy a lunch because we've run out of bread. I'm not sure it's any better at the other end of the age range. My dad was in a nursing home getting fed rubbish like Potato Smiley Faces or jelly and ice cream.

Theres a thread the other day listing snacks for 2.5 year olds, WTAF do they need snacks for? Are these kids doing a days work! What happened to 3 meals a day and a treat on Friday?

Culture. Funding. Socialism. A lack of inverse snobbery about food. In the UK working class culture prides itself on rejecting fancy food, which includes a lot of healthy stuff.

Tbh it's mainly because we as parents feed the same crap to our kids and safely that it's what they get given in school. We don't have a shared food culture with an agreed idea of what healthy looks like.

@KimWexlersPonyTail (great username!)

It’s standard here in French Switzerland (and in France) to offer the kids a ‘quatre heures’ i.e. a 4 o’clock snack, which is often something like Nutella sandwiches or a fromage blanc with sugar/honey. DH had the same ‘quatre heures’ as a kid for years - a bottle of Orangina and Nutella tartine.

I guess a lot of it is cultural.

There's no expectation here that children should be given a choice in school food: the attitude is that we know what a good meal looks like, that's what is going to be offered, that's what they will eat - and of course most French children have been taught to eat this way since childhood.

There is a choice of 2/3 different salads, 2 main courses, choice of fruit / compote / dessert, but it's within the context of a balanced, healthy meal. The cantine sells nothing else and only opens at lunchtime - no breakfasts, no sandwiches / rolls, no muffins, no chocolate bars, no fizzy drinks, no daily baked potato options etc. They also don't cater for vegetarians (a non-meat option is available, but it's usually fish), halal, no pork diets, etc. Packed lunches are not allowed unless a doctor certifies a medical reason for needing to bring food from home.

And outside the school there are no chip shops, no Greggs. It's not cheap to buy lunch from a boulangerie (€7,50 for a baguette sandwich, plus a drink and a yogurt as opposed to €4,25 (about €3) for school lunch). School lunch costs are means-tested, families on low income get them practically free.

My point was that the French way makes it so easy to avoid unhealthy food. In the UK (I know I'm generalising) children seem to be surrounded by opportunities to make unhealthy food choices, both in school and out. It's not perfect here (France and other EU countries have an increasing obesity problem, in children and adults) but it just seems like such a no-brainer to not offer chocolate croissants, bacon sarnies and iced buns in schools?

I’m not from France but from Spain, so a fairly similar Mediterranean diet.

First course at school lunches is always salad. And it’s not optional. You’ll get the odd child who moans at the sight of cut up tomato but they’ll eat it, and you definitely don’t have parents demanding their child is fed something they like. Like chips or burgers.

I think this is the big difference with the UK. The menu plan the pp showed us states that salad is optional with choices XYZ. Why is it not compulsory? Veg (I assumed boiled) is served with some meals but I’m pretty sure kids can leave it on their plates. Not to mention the nutritional values or raw vs cooked veg are massively different.

I know many parents who would claim ‘oh, but my child shouldn’t be forced to eat lettuce every day, they don’t like raw veg’. Unless there are sensory or physical reasons why a child couldn’t eat salad, why is it presented as optional in the UK? Do we also allow children to skip a Maths lesson or a History lesson because they don’t like it?

Education is about teaching literacy, numeracy, making children aware of our environment, of our past and present societies. It’s also about making them aware of how to feed their bodies. How to feed their future children. How to take care of their physical, mental and intellectual health, none of which can be achieved on an unhealthy diet.

It’s like that thread yesterday where the OP was looking for a way to get her DD out of PE. She also stated subjects like Art, languages, Technology, shouldn’t be enforced if children didn’t want to take them. Her attitude said it all, about what she thought the word ‘education’ encompasses. It’s not just English and Maths that we need to educate kids on.

I don't work in a LA kitchen the school chose a private company where they stripped the staff down to minimum wage . A member of staff left and they didn't replace them. So you have a kitchen understaffed underpaid , but... we do serve 3 healthy mains plus a jacket and salad bar, 2 choices of dessert p.us fruit and yoghurts this is all prepared cooked served by me .I have 1 assistant who sorts out the di ING room and one that solely washes the plates trays and cups. The company have now reduced my hours to 5 a day to do All of this plus the ordering and kitchen cleaning and the biggest sho ker our budget per child is 0.84 pence per day !!

[quote MadameHeisenberg]@KimWexlersPonyTail (great username!)

It’s standard here in French Switzerland (and in France) to offer the kids a ‘quatre heures’ i.e. a 4 o’clock snack, which is often something like Nutella sandwiches or a fromage blanc with sugar/honey. DH had the same ‘quatre heures’ as a kid for years - a bottle of Orangina and Nutella tartine.[/quote]
Nutella....That nutritious blend of palm oil and sugar... 😋

It just reflect what they eat at home.

I’m ve lost count of the number of parents I know who’ve said “X only eats fish fingers and chicken nuggets” or “I have to make three different meals or they wouldn’t eat”

In fact, just look at threads on here.

Sorry! Breastfeeding and typing with my left hand didn’t quite work out!

You get the drift though

OP, France is not the paragon of culinary health you seem to like to think it is. It’s McDonald’s number 1 market in Europe and full of families and teenagers.

There are industrial boulangeries everywhere selling cheap baked goods akin to Greggs.

They also don't cater for vegetarians (a non-meat option is available, but it's usually fish), halal, no pork diets, etc. Packed lunches are not allowed unless a doctor certifies a medical reason for needing to bring food from home.

I do want to point out that this is not something to be proud of. They should be providing those options or allowing packed lunches (and regulating contents) for those children who don’t eat meat or avoid certain foods due to religious reasons.

Even in Spain, the land of jamón and marisco, 20 years ago, we were allowed to bring food from home if vegetarian or on a halal/kosher diet. I grew up in an area with a relatively large Muslim population so the risk of not being flexible was hundreds of children not being registered in school because they couldn’t eat anything during a 9-5 school day.