Horrified by school dinners!

[WillieverlearnQ]

I went to my daughter’s school yesterday for dinner with the parents. All they had was two scoops of mash (my daughter did say that it is usually just one scoop) the thinnest slice of turkey I have ever seen and a tablespoon of carrots with a drizzle of watery gravy. With a tiny pot of ice cream. When I was at school it was nothing like this.

She has been asking for packed lunches for a long time but I’ve always refused. But today and going forward I will always make her a proper lunch.

It just make’s you question what on earth is going on? How can that be a sufficient for a child at school for 6 hours. Also why on earth are parents paying £3 for such a terrible meal.

My primary school dinners (late 60s/early 70s) were horrible. Lumpy mashed potato, grisly meat and overcooked cabbage. Sponge and thin, watery custard or pink blancmange for pudding. Shudder.

I used to cut the liver into teeny bits and bury it in a pile of mashed potato. Only way I could get it down.

It does not surprise me!!

It's always the most vulnerable that get treated like this.
I went to visit my 91 year old uncle in hospital.
It happened to be lunchtime, he was given 3 chicken nuggets, 10 chips and a jelly.
I had to tell him what the chicken nuggets were.
He ate the lot because he was hungry but he said it was awful.
Absolutely disgusting imo.
And he can't go home for a decent tea.

Same! Also as we had refillable water it was 'one mouth of semolina' and then 'one big gulp of water' to take the taste away. On semolina days I wasn't able to run around for the remainder of the lunch hour as I used to have sloshy water belly!

Jeez my daughter goes to an independent senior school and lunches and breakfast snack are included and look nothing like those posted.

Not only were my childs FSM in Scotland really awful (moudly or absent veg/salad/fruit) & mostly 'pasta pots' or chips all trucked in weekly they were also stolen 3 days out of every 5 which School never really did anything about.
She took a packed lunch in the end.

We spent 2 years at a middle (state) school in England who had a local women who cooked the meals fresh daily. Nourishing, filling, tasty. Night and day.

Oh yes, there were a lot of stews. And rice pudding with a skin on. And crumble and custard - with a skin on.

That looks a billion times better than any other school dinner I've seen. At least you can tell what it's meant to be!

If what you say is true, OP, and I’ve seen your photos so it is obviously true - how on earth are we getting all these obese children that I see coming out of primaries near me? There seems to be a vast difference between their lunch portions and the actual size of the (mainly) 7-11 years age group.

I'm also impressed that OP's photos show meals on normal plates. Have schools given up the sectioned trays that look like something from a prison?

Im not sure what you were expecting them to be like. They are standard school dinners in terms of size and menu. I dont think there is anything wrong with the portion size for a young child. It is difficult to judge the nutriitional quality from a picture, but i dont think it is terrible. There is protein & carbs. Veg could be boosted on the breakfast one. School kitchens try to produce something kids will eat that meets nutritional & calorie standards within budget. If you want better, charge more & stop free meals (poor kids will go hungry which is terrible) or pay more tax and increase the budget (id like this option).
Meals in the 80s weren't better. I experienced them. Deep fried hot dogs (the ones that come out of a tin) featured regularly.

School dinners were definitely not better in the 80s!

Preschool - greasy lumps of battered fish with over salty mash (it is one of my earliest memories!).. Pies that were all gravy and flabby pastry and again, icecream scoops of flabby mash. If you didn't eat your main (as it was inedible and vom worthy) you didn't get pudding.

Primary - dried leathery bits of liver with icecream scoops of salty mash and a congealed gravy. Pink custard and a biscuit for desert. Flabby limp chips and overcooked mixed veg, slice of cheese and onion pie.. Chocolate concrete and a pink milkshake for desert..

At my school, the kitchen wasn't fitted for cooking, only serving (half of it was totally out of action due to a dodgy roof and wall) - so the food came from the nearby secondary school (two miles away) in an unheated van.
It was then served to the 12 people sat at the table by the two oldest kids who sat at the head of the table - this meant if they did not like you, or just were greedy arseholes, the youngest kids down the far end of the table would get the nastiest bits, and the least. I can still remember dinners where I had a chunk of solid liver, grey and dried out, and three flabby chips and nothing else.

Secondary - chips galore! Chips with everything (And they were nice chips too) chips with cheese and gravy, chips with sausage rolls, chips with pizza. In the upstairs dining hall you could get chips, rolls, salad (pre plated cheese salad or ham salad, not a salad bar where you picked your own) pizza slices, crisps, chocolate etc. Downstairs dining hall (immediately below, shared a kitchen over two floors with a central lift) you could have proper hot dinners, but these were sausage and mash, sausage and chips, fish fingers and chips, lasagne and chips... burger and chips.

Third years on could get a pass to go home for lunch or to a nominated friends house - eating at the local chippy was not permitted (however they had a back room they'd let quiet, sensible kids in to eat and this tended to fly under the radar).

I quite liked semolina. You used to get a blob of jam in the middle, which I used to mix in. It wasn't as good as sponge and custard, but better than the weird pink stuff that didn't taste of anything that was supposed to be blancmange, I think.

OP mentioned ice-cream. We only got that on special days. Then it was one very small scoop on a cone.

Our school parents provide a morning snack and an afternoon one. So it's not an issue portion size wise. They have a breakfast club too. Fruit, cereal, toast and water.

It obviously varies.

Ergh so true. The only thing i would eat was thin sliced mutton with mint sauce ha ha! YANBU for putting your child on packed lunches OP but things definitely weren't better in the good old days.

My children's school have changed the school dinner provider this year and both of my children kept coming home complaining that it was so horrible that they couldn't eat it, so were hungry all afternoon. Having spoken to other parents who said their children had also been saying similar, I have started packing their lunch for them. It's a shame because many parents aren't able to pack lunches, especially if they get free school meals.

A very long time ago, I worked for a food company that made ready meals for supermarkets and school meals that were reheated in microwaves.

I could literally see that the Bolognese mince for the schools was paler than the ready meals because they used a lot of soya. When I commented on this, the quality manager says the kids don't care because they slather it in ketchup anyway.

They don't care about kids' nutrition. They care about making money.

This is the same rationing seen in NHS hospitals. Pre-cooked food (I use 'food' loosely there), transported by catering to the school, pre-heated by keeping it in heated metal boxes and then served to the children. It's not nutritious for patients recovering from injuries or surgery, neither is it nutritious for growing children.

No money? Can't pay for a chef. So it all gets carted in.

Just the way it is I’m afraid. School dinners are compulsory at my kid’s school which is fine, but they are always starving as the portion sizes are so small. The school does say they can go back for seconds but there’s no time as they have to operate in shifts for the year groups. So I end up having to send them with extra food anyway (teenage boys) especially if they’re playing sport.

I remember school dinners being just as bad in the 70/80s.

Honestly this looks like standard canteen fare. When we had a works canteen this is the sort of thing we ate. Somebody else prepared it so I was generally glad to eat it.

I remember crying when I say the lunch they gave toddlers in the sure start centre my babies went to.
chicken nuggets and ketchup. that was it.

I was in hospital recently and the food was awful, although people on the ward said it was really nice. Everything tasted of chemicals. The portions were about the same size as the picture of the school dinner.

The puddings though were really nice. All the meals were considered nutritionally balanced. I wonder if the schools get the same

Those meals look fine for 7 yr olds.

Is she hungry because she isn't eating it? If she is eating it I'm surprised she's starving at 3.15! And if she is, it's not long to get home for a snack.

Saying that my kids always came out of school starving. I'd forgotten.