A loaf and a block of cheese is not lunch for ten days

[ZazieSheHer]

So some of the free school lunch boxes contain very little food.

Marcus Rashford condemns free school meal packages

“...a package, supposedly containing £30 worth of food to last for 10 days, comprising just a loaf of bread, some cheese, a tin of beans, two carrots, two bananas, three apples, two potatoes, a bag of pasta, three Frubes, two Soreen bars and a tomato”.

mobile.twitter.com/RoadsideMum/status/1348646428084760576

Can’t imagine what it’s like home schooling hungry kids. Would like to say I’m shocked but I’m not.

It would have been cheaper to give parents vouchers to spend.

It would, and I think that's by far the better solution and allows for special diets etc.

@Katyppp

It's a lot easier to fling insults at posters you don't agree with than try to engage. Lots of hyperbole, lots of whataboutery but no answers to WHY people cannot budget in order to feed their children.

As a tax payer I'd like to know why £30 is being spent on less than £10 worth of food. People being able to budget is an interesting topic but totally irrelevant in this case. We, all tax payers, are being scammed and the govt is involved in allowing it to happen. I hope they sort it out.

Because I’m off work and bored out my mind, I decided to make a mock up of a 10 day lunch menu and see how much it would come to on Asda.

2x Portions of Tuna Pasta Salad
3x Tomato Soup & Cheese Toastie
3x Ham & Cheese Sandwiches
2x Baked Potatoes with Beans & Cheese

Snacks- Pack of Crisps and a choice of Apple, Banana or Yoghurt.

As well as this, a bottle of diluting juice and 2 pints of milk.

Came to a total of £12.63 and that’s for slightly pricier yoghurts.

Might not be the healthiest of lunches but at least it would fill a child up and there even be extra for the weekend/extra snacks for hungry growing children.

What the fuck is wrong with people that they think what is being provided is even remotely okay. Makes me so bloody sad to see kids being failed yet again during lockdown 😔

Lol to make an EDIBLE soup out of 2 carrots you will need other veg (garlic, onion, whatever), some herbs or spices, stock cubes and a bloody blender

It’s not a case of ‘ah two carrots, you can quickly and easily whip up a hot nutritious soup that will feed the family for 2 days!’ Why are there always comments like this 🙄

They wouldn't have paid retail prices but the lower bulk wholesale prices.
Well, in a way they still will have same overheads as any similar food business (who also all buy in bulk, and usually through contracts that are negotiated by quite cut-throat departments of hundred people, and many of them wield quite a lot of control over the suppliers).
Say, if for 10'000 families you buy five tonnes of flour at wholesale prices (to achieve genuine difference in price), after securing the contract (someone skilled to do negotiations) you will have to pay for delivery, appropriate storage, put in health and safety procedures around the storage, pay for someone to repackage it in an appropriate environment into smaller packaging - which also has to be ordered, delivered and checked for compliance with food hygiene rules - with appropriate equipment, you can't really use kitchen scales for this.
That's only one item on the list.
I am quite sure that this is something that supermarkets do more cost-effective already, compared to setting up the whole enterprise from scratch during difficult times. So retail prices are probably not a totally inappropriate benchmark here.

It’s terrible and makes me so sad that this is what our children are being given

My 15 year old DD's lunch pack for 5 days -

1 single serving packet of udon noodles
6 rolls with same day date on them
2 sachets mayo
Small block of cheese (about 5 servings)
2 green peppers
1 very old potato
2 apples
2 oranges
1 tin tuna
1 tin meatballs
1 tin sweetcorn
1 packet rich tea biscuits
1 small yoghurt

Seems to be a combination of 'Brakes' catering stuff the school already use and donated foodbank type stuff.

I'm really grateful for the help, and I think it's ok if not enough veg as I'd like, and DD is vegetarian but they weren't to know that.

Some of the attitudes of people are disgusting though.

Sorry I should have said 10 days

Chartwell's used to provide school lunches at my children's school and they were dire. Meat was almost all gristle, the bread was white rubbish, and a sandwich consisted of two dry crusts with a scraping of waxy margarine to avoid waste. I genuinely felt sorry for the kids having to eat it. Standards improved dramatically with a different supplier. The fact that they think these boxes are adequate comes as no surprise.I
I really think something like the Morrisons boxes with easy to prepare food would be a million times better.

My 15 year old DD's lunch pack for 10 days

1 single serving packet of udon noodles
6 rolls with same day date on them
2 sachets mayo
Small block of cheese (about 5 servings)
2 green peppers
1 very old potato
2 apples
2 oranges
1 tin tuna
1 tin meatballs
1 tin sweetcorn
1 packet rich tea biscuits
1 small yoghurt

@TheyKnewIWasTrouble

Well... for £20, This is what Morrisons, a profit-making supermarket, can deliver this to your house.

www.morrisons.com/food-boxes/box/cupboard-essentials-box

I'm struggling to see where the money is going.

If you spent the extra £10 on some fruit, yogurts, juice etc that would be a good amount and far better value. Maybe they should give the contract to Morrisons.

@Ereshkigalangcleg

But not being able to afford a 4p stock cube to add to the soup is probably a deeper problem, that can't and won't be solved by food parcels covering school lunches for one child.

That doesn't justify paying a greedy private contractor 30 quid a fortnight for a tiny amount of raw food which in most cases needs to be cooked. They are supposed to be providing meals. Which means at the very least everything needed to cook them.

That's not what I said on this thread - I agree that if the original food parcel photo (aka cheese-and-bread one) is representative of the truth, then the matter has to be urgently investigated, it is a disgrace.

I don't have a lot of issues with other pictures sent by outraged people on the twitter thread. Devon one seems quite adequate for 5 days, and the one below is not what I'd pick myself for the budget (2 children), but I don't see the horror.

twitter.com/Stessy24/status/1348973147127574529/photo/1

@LucilleTheVampireBat

It would be great if people could stop using this thread as an exercise to "meal plan" and show us a) how frugal they are and b) how little they/their "beanpole" children eat.

Well said. I think a lot of people are envisaging what they would do with this food parcel, in their current situation. Whilst I wouldn't be thrilled, I think I could probably come up with a few decent lunches with the items provided but I am hugely privileged in many ways. I am well educated. I grew up in a home where cooking from scratch was the norm. I have a well equipped kitchen and utility room and cupboards full of items like herbs, oil, flour etc. I have never had to worry about fuel bills. I have a warm, clean, safe home, a loving relationship and a stable family background. Nobody in my family has any mental health issues and whilst I do have physical health problems they don't generally stop me from cooking. (And when they do, my husband or children are able and willing to do it.) In my circumstances I could probably come up with something edible from these foodboxes. But whilst obviously you can't generalise, the vast majority of people who are eligible for them do not have lifestyles like mine and do have other difficulties in their lives. What I could do with those ingredients is largely irrelevant- this is not an episode of Ready Steady Cook. And as for the boxes being "free" - of course they aren't! We, the tax payers are paying for them. Clearly some people are happy with the idea of a small amount being spent on the food, another small amount going to the packers etc (presumably minimum wage) and a big chunk of the money going into the pockets of those who are already stupendously wealthy, but I am not. The whole thing stinks.

I think many of you "I could make 10 tiny lunches out of that" posters are forgetting that the purpose of FSM is to ensure every child has at least one decent meal a day.
So while you might scrape together half a tomato sandwich, a few cubes of cheese and a slice of apple, I ask would you be happy for that to be a main meal for your child? They may not have anything at all, or just toast or a snack for breakfast/dinner.

This company is profiteering from children in poverty.
Regardless of who's fault you may feel that they're in poverty, it's absolutely not theirs and they should be provided with some bloody good nutrition at least!

@PearlescentIridescent
But I just pointed out that school food parcels are a completely wrong tool to solve this problem.

I think the Welsh picture is a bit of a pisstake and adding fuel to the "ungrateful" responses that is a load of food. For 2school weeks.

The company is Chartwells, a division of Compass whose chairman is a Tory donor apparently.

The Tory donor named by James O'Brien on LBC this morning is no longer in charge of the company (Compass Group plc) - a new chairman/director took over on 1 December 2020. His appointment was announced in August last year - easy enough to check on the company website.

Wikipedia hasn't updated the name of the new chairman although the entry does say;

Compass Group plc is a British multinational contract foodservice company...It is the largest contract foodservice company in the world [with] operations in 45 countries and employs over 600,000 people. It serves around 5.5 billion meals a year...

@DuncinToffee

This gets better, was it even bread flour! although I personally wouldn’t mind that as I like baking bread but I can imagine many parents have enough on their plates without faffing about with baking bread!

Not read whole thread but as Katherine Ryan pointed out. If you're going to have a situation with a small minority taking the piss, would you rather that puss taking minority be corporate Tory donors or poor people. I know my answer.

Surely the best solution is to add the school meal amount to child benefit or universal credit payments.

There would no doubt be a small minority of piss takers, but those piss takers are not going to be feeding their kids properly whatever the FSM system.

The society should be identifying those kids and managing that problem effectively.

My child does not receive FSM, but I am incensed that the government is wasting so much money on that crap.

@zaphodbeeble

Not sure what height has got to do with it?

For the people who think the food parcel shown in the OP was bad, you'll love this one. It'll feed two children for a week the lucky ducks. We'll soon be out of the obesity crisis (and into a malnutrition/scurvy/fuck knows what else crisis).

twitter.com/nickb123452/status/1348951285995864064?s=20

I think I could probably come up with a few decent lunches with the items provided but I am hugely privileged in many ways. I am well educated. I grew up in a home where cooking from scratch was the norm. I have a well equipped kitchen and utility room and cupboards full of items like herbs, oil, flour etc. I have never had to worry about fuel bills. I have a warm, clean, safe home, a loving relationship and a stable family background. Nobody in my family has any mental health issues and whilst I do have physical health problems they don't generally stop me from cooking. (And when they do, my husband or children are able and willing to do it.)

So much this! Ditto last time round when free school meals were stopped during half term. Twitter full of tories smugly writing imaginary ‘if I was poor’ shopping lists, showing how they could make a £3 chicken from Aldi late for ages but it always assumed someone had loads of time to dedicate to preparing and cooking food, adequate space and utensils and fuel, stocked cupboard for dried herbs/spices and other extras plus the knowledge and skills or access to recipe books/the internet. It’s all from a very privileged perspective.

[quote hoxtonbabe]@DuncinToffee

This gets better, was it even bread flour! although I personally wouldn’t mind that as I like baking bread but I can imagine many parents have enough on their plates without faffing about with baking bread![/quote]
But surely, parenting, almost by definition, does involve a bit of "faffing about", both in general and in particular about what children eat, no? Not all responsibility stops with the government? And I am not a big fan of the government currently voted in (I am not British), but surely they are not single-handedly responsible for this?

@MrsMomoa think it’s bloody obvious that someone tall like a 6 foot year11 boy is going to eat a lot more than the meagre lunch you are claiming to eat