Jacket Potato Drama

[ANdiel]

So, I have 3 kids in primary school, today we received a notification on the school app about next years school lunches, where we live it’s universal very school meals in primary and packed lunches are highly discouraged.

Currently every day there are 2 mains (typically one vegan and one meat based apart from veggie Wednesday where both are veggie/vegan friendly), soup, Jacket Potato’s with toppings and some pre-packed sandwiches available. Yogurt, fruit and Jelly available for dessert.

The school has informed us that next year there will be no Jacket Potatoes. They reason being they want to encourage children to have more varied school meals and reduce food waste.
Next year the kids will have the option of either

• Soup and Main Meal
• Main Meal and Dessert
• Soup, Sandwich/Wrap and Main Meal

Well well well there is outrage … it was all that was being spoken about at the gate and several parents have informed the group chat that they will be sending emails as this isn’t good enough and now their children won’t have hot meals at all as they don’t like the main offerings!! (Someone should let them know soup is hot!)

AIBU to think this is crazy and no Jacket Potato is fine, surely the options there are enough? Would you be happy with this or no?

I would be annoyed because if my DD doesn’t fancy the hot main she always has a jacket potato. On the odd occasion she’s had a sandwich instead it’s not enough and she ends up grumpy and hungry at pick up. They could vary it by offering either jacket potato or tomato pasta on alternative days.

There would uproar here too! I think the reception kids live off jacket potatoes! From our experience with age comes less picky eating, not reducing options, they’re just cost cutting but trying to come up with a child positive reason for it.

I am with the upset parents.

A good cook in a school is a rare and welcome thing, and so many school meals will not be appetising. The reasons why children may be choosy will not come from lazy parents in many cases, but simply the variety of home diets people have. Then there are many children for whom it is the only hot meal a day they receive.

Reducing the options will disadvantage some more than others.

Soup in a primary school?

Kids really detest soup generally, and it won't be a Heinz tomato ''safe'' one, either, but most likely a carrot and turnip soup that would appeal only to adults.. so more wastage.

Soup needs to be piping hot to be palatable, so also a scald risk.

"It is unknown how many people in the UK have Arfid. But given that studies have found that between 1% and 18% of those with an eating disorder have it, and that 1.25 million Britons have an eating disorder, the number of people with Arfid could range from 12,500 and 225,000 sufferers, according to Beat.An NHS Digital survey in November on the mental health of children and young people in England aged eight to 25 found that one in eight (12.5%) of those aged 17-19 had an eating disorder last year."

Edited to state:Guardian report Feb 24.

That's adults as well, but clearly quite a lot even before we think about kids with ASD etc.

It's disgustingly ablist to remove the safe option for so many children.

My son has JPs twice a week due to his very fussy nature and not liking the other options. He won't try them, he just won't touch them. I have to admit I would be stressing if our school removed the JP safe backup. I don't need school dinners to introduce variety or whatever, that can be my focus at home. I want to make sure my kid eats OK at the place he's legally forced to be for 30+ hours a week.

I would kick off. I have an autistic child and this would not work for us at all. I would be providing a packed lunch.

Soup in a primary school?

The primary my kids attend offers soup as a side every day. From memory, they do lentil which is lovely, chicken noodle which dc1 loves, tomato and minestrone. It's served in cups and I don't think there are many soup related incidents. We are in Scotland, it's currently cold and wet and both my two claim to have had soup today. Neither have soup stains on their clothes (dc2 is 5).

I have to be careful with my food because of stomach problems. Take away the jacket potato option and kiddies in my situation might not be able to find anything suitable to eat. (It would depend on what the main meal was that day. Gluten's out, so wraps might be a problem and a spicy main meal would be a bad idea.)

Never known children not to like soup unless they are very fussy in general. I used to make thick blended soups with sweet root veg.

At our primary we have to choose and book the meal choices in advance - so there's no waste.
Can't they just do something like this?
There's usually 2 or 3 main options, a sandwich type option and a jacket potato option every day. The filling varies each day too!

Jacket potatoes are still a safe food for me as an adult - bad day? Jacket potato. Cold day? Jacket potato. Can't decide what to have for tea? Jacket potato! I also lived off them when I was pregnant and felt like shite with morning sickness.

Pretty sure they are also way healthier than bread / wraps! And so cheap too... I can't fathom why they'd get rid tbh!

this is interesting - my DDs primary school have just introduced the jacket potatoes as an option and my DD mostly picks it. She isn’t a fussy eater but she really doesn’t like sauces - like gravy, most pasta sauces, fish sauce and the school menu is mostly made up of everything with a sauce on. I had to even get a doctor to sign this special meal request form the school gave me just so they didn’t put gravy on the roast dinner as according to our council that’s how it comes and the kids don’t have a choice. Fair enough I understand we shouldnt play into the fussy eating. She had packed lunches for a while on the days she didn’t want to risk gravy covering the entire meal , or veggies mixed in with a tomato type sauce which they do often but doesn’t specify on the menu so it was always a gamble to know what to send her with.

anyway , it would be a shame if they stopped doing them at our primary school as I now know she gets a hot meal everyday

Jacket potatoes with various toppings is an absolute staple in our primary school.

Yes that's why my dd takes a packed lunch now...they make school meals too complicated...my dd who eats everything and I mean everything...soup I'm afraid is a no no ...I can't imagine any child eating soup...

Surely to save waste, the best thing to do would be to put meal requests in advance? Our primary did just that. You had to give notice of hot meal the following week by the Thursday previous to allow Cook to order etc.

I did struggle initially as a lot of my kids need for school lunches were 'oh shit we've got no bread'

In the event a child needed a short notice hot dinner, they always managed to rustle one up. Usually because a universal meal child was not in that day. Their lunch waste plummeted.

Adult ARFID-er...

Soup is basically hot puke. Runny food with bits in it, hot. It's an ARFID nightmare.

It has taken me the better part of 40 years to come round to soup and even then its veggie only, smooth thick soups, unless I made it myself, in which case some textures are ok, sometimes!

“Encouraging more varied food choices” sounds like a load of spin to meI’d like to see this more varied menu they are introducing which is at the same time going to reduce food waste. It will be something to do with budgeting, someone has decided that if X jacket potatoes a day are eaten on average it doesn’t warrant Y oven costs .. maybe they are right… they should be upfront about it though. Jacket potatoes are such a good fall back if you don’t like the other option, or are vegetarian, or feel a bit under the weather and want something plain.

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Baked Potato showed me the way
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You must listen to what Potato say

Wash your hands and stay indoors
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And if you want to have a better day
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B-A-K-E-D-P-O-T-A-T-O
Baked Potato

Jacket potatoes are on the menu everyday in my child's school, they are very popular so I could imagine there would be some uproar if they removed them from the menu!

Baked potatoes are a regular option at my DC school. They’re healthy, cheap, filling, go with everything and lots of kids like them.

This. It's very odd. Counter-intuitive if it means more kids start bringing a (potentially less healthy) packed lunch.

Which means it's probably about cutting costs.

Just to add - quorn isn't a safe option for children with food intolerances. Depending on the variety of quorn used, it may contain lactose, egg, onion, garlic and in some cases wheat. It's also expensive - far more so than serving a jacket (or half a jacket for the little ones) potato with a bit of topping.

Saying “We want to encourage more varied eating, so we’re taking a popular option away” is an oxymoron (with the emphasis on the moron…)

My bet is that the school is forced to provide the other hot options, but not enough kids want them, so they’re trying to force them into it by taking away what they actually want - as well as trying to force kids into taking school dinners by “highly discouraging” packed lunches 🙄 I hate the level of control schools try to exercise over things like this.

As for people saying it’s an “expensive option” - I get that they take a while in the oven, but it’s not like they’re being cooked to order. The oven being on for an hour a day shouldn’t be financially crippling. Also, it’s a fucking potato!! It’s hardly like they’re serving up quail’s eggs on a bed of saffron rice with truffle shavings and it’s all going in the pig bin. Potatoes are ten a penny. Dig a hole in Norfolk and you can’t move for the bloody things!

If the school is genuinely panicking about wastage, make less of the dishes nobody wants instead of taking away an option kids like to force them to have roadkill stew or whatever it might be.

Roadkill stew 🤣🤣🤣
Quorn roadkill stew for the alternative no doubt. 😉

We had meat and potato pie at junior school. A fantastically vague description. Probably slightly more appetising than BSE pie though; it was that era.

They just are the expensive option.... Look at supermarket prices to see.
For the sake of ease, I'm comparing frozen products that take a similar time to cook. So not having to factor in the 1hr+ of cooking for a JP.

a pack of 4 precooked jacket potato costs around £3.50 for 800g, so maybe maximum 8 100g portions (½ a jacket ) for kids, costing 43p ish.

but you can get 1.5kg chips for £1.65, so 15 portions (100g) will cost 11p.