to find it difficult to believe that 'only 1% of packed lunches are as nutritious as school dinners'?

[gogoflo]

This is the statistic quoted repeatedly on the literature being sent home from school. Dc currently have packed lunch and though they'll try hot meals, tthey're keen to keep having packed lunches but school are really keen on everyone having hot meals once it's free. Just looking at the menu, tomorrow it's chilli and rice, jacket potato and beans or fish and chips followed by chocolate sponge and custard or jelly and ice cream.

Tomorrow their packed lunch will be crackers with ham, cheese and sausage, carrot, pepper, cucumber with hummus, fruit salad with 4 portions of fruit and a biscuit. I don't think school dinners are more nutritious and struggle to believe that so many people are sending their children to school with such crap packed lunches that fish, chips, chocolate cake and custard is nutritionally better.

Aibu to find this statistic difficult to believe?

However, I know at our primary that lots of parents use hot lunches on days where they have after school activities, and then just serve a quick supper of cheese and beans on toast, or similar

Yes, I do it too. If we've got after school activities, or a night where there's a lot of to-ing and fro-ing going on, I'll give them school dinner so I can just bung beans on toast or some sandwiches or something in their direction

I still need to cook in the evenings, so in all probability they'd be eating two cooked meals per day, or quick stuff such as beans on toast, sandwiches, jacket spud. To be honest, I don't want to be cooking or making different things every night

Is it cost effective for us to pay £2.50 per lunch (I have 2 in school), per day, then feed them something different to everyone else in the evenings? I can do a big shepherds pie and veg which will feed 5 of us for the same money. Could this then mean a larger portion of our shopping budget is given over to lunches, meaning we have less money to spend on evening meals?

My older daughter is coeliac, and a lot of the pre-made GF products are pretty disgusting, so I cook most of what we eat from scratch - so, for example, I find it easier to make 1 big chicken and veg pie with homemade pastry with GF flour for all of us, rather than fart about reading labels, separating food, etc. Is my chicken pie (chicken, mushrooms, carrots, peas, homemade GF pastry) less healthy than what school is dishing up? No, I really don't think it is

I think the evening meals that I provide are a lot better and more nutritious that what our school is dishing up at lunchtime. Yes, they have the odd Nutella sarnie on white bread, the odd packet of crisps, and chocolate mini-roll, but looking at their diet over the course of a whole week, I don't think school dinners would improve it

Duchesse
if you think
"Pizza, spaghetti hoops in tomato sauce, chips, water and stodgy pudding"
is the average school dinner.

and
"hummus sandwich on wholemeal, strips of pepper and carrot, kiwi fruit, small handful mixed raisins and dried apricots and pumpkin seeds, water"

is the average packed lunch

you are away with the fairies

To those who were asking :) It's a private school, lunches are included as part of the fees and you are not allowed to take in a packed lunch unless you have life-threatening allergies. I complained and was told 'if one does it they'll all want it and anyway your DD does eat her dinner' - yes, on fish & chips day! I sent her in on a curry day (meat option was also curry, so the only 2 meals available were curry-based) with a packed lunch and it was confiscated. So I just made sure she had a very nutritionally-dense evening meal and made plans to change school asap...

15 years ago when DS was in infant school it was a pretty standard lunch.

I'm getting a little confused with some of the particulars here. Where we are the school dinner will NOT be compulsory. You can have it for free in infants but you can opt out. All my DD school were worried about was you filling in the form so they could receive the funding they aren't bothered if you took the dinner or not. Are some schools (apart from the private ones) saying this new initiative is compulsory it's not. You can still give your child pack lunch if you want.

We are lucky enough that the school dinners are ok (still the crap cake no butter no sugar no milk WTF is this cake made of) but generally I'm confident with the meals my DD has at home she will have a balanced diet.

We are struggling massively financially at the moment and not having to fork out £50 a month for school dinners is frankly a god send. I'm not exaggerating when I say £50 for us is a massive amount of our budget.