Is this a 'healthy and nutritious' meal?

[purepurple]

Chicken dinner, roast potatoes, veg
Fruit and ice cream
Sound ok?
What if you knew the chicken was pre-cooked and delivered frozen, labelled 'product of Thailand' and the second ingrediant was salt, plus other ingrediants.
The chicken is served in gravy. The gravy contains yesterday's left over veg, pureed.
The roast potatoes are frozen.
The veg is cooked to within an inch of it's life, and is just mush.
The fruit is tinned fruit that is pureed.
The ice cream is labelled 'non dairy fat'

Is it just me or is this a terrible meal to serve to a nursery full of children?
And this is one of the good meals, the rest are based on minced meat and gravy, sausages, or fishfingers.
The children are fed value foods from the supermarket, like beans, fromage frais etc.
What do you think?
Have I just got high standards?

[Alieight]

Sounds pretty yuk to me, although don't have a problem with veg in gravy.

For those asking about non-dairy fat in ice-cream...fairly often it used to be pork fat. Started when EU rules on fat content of sausages meant that sausage makers had bucket loads of extra fat hanging around - have you never wondered why Walls make sausages and ice cream?

Mostly though now it's coconut or other vegetable oil. Dairy ice cream only needs 2.5% milk protein and 5% dairy fat to qualify as dairy ice cream. Regular ice cream is only required to have 2.5% milk protein and 5% of any other fat to 'qualify' as ice cream.

Magnum anyone?

[Pennybubbly]

Don't know how much the staff are paid - it's not something that I have ever thought of asking them. Average wages here are quite low though despite the cost of living, so £3:40 an hour doesn't sound unlikely to be honest. I believe however that many of the nurseries, even private ones, have financial assistance from the state.
The state nurseries are even cheaper. And the fact that my DCs couldn't get into a state nursery (they were full) means that the local city office contribute a total of £50 per child towards our cost - it's their 'fault' that we had to choose a private nursey, being the reason.
My DS (1) has a ration of 3:1 ration. My DD is 4, so the ratio is obviously higher. Also, as she is older, and doesn't need nappies either, we pay slightly less for her monthly fees.

[Pennybubbly]

Don't know what happened with the ratio vs ration thing there.
Must be all this talk of food...

[Pennybubbly]

Oh and want to add. Fees are calculated to a certain extent on how much you earn. My DH and I have reasonable salaries, but yet we still qualified for the £50 reimbursement from the City Office.

[nappyaddict]

Chicken dinner, gravy (with veg in), veg and roasties sounds nutritious to me.

However I would not be happy about the processed chicken.

Tinned fruit in juice I wouldn't mind about. Tinned fruit in syrup I wouldn't be happy with, neither would I be happy with the ice cream.

Frozen roasties fine as long as no added salt etc.

Whilst I've heard it is better for vegetables to be quite crunchy as they retain more vitamins etc it's unhealthy for them to be overcooked either.

[TheDailyMailHatesWomenAndLemon]

OK, so subsidised makes more sense (and the £3.40 an hour would be if the nursery were spending nothing at all on the facilities or equipment or food or nappies and weren't making any profit -- if the nursery weren't subsidised they'd be lucky to be being paid £2 an hour).

[IsItMeOr]

Hi purepurple - suggest you have a look at the DCSF guidelines for nursery catering here.

To be honest, apart from the overcooking of the veg, based on the info you've given, I think you may be over-reacting a little.

Tinned fruit absolutely fine, so long as it is in fruit juice/light syrup rather than heavy syrup.

Mixing veggies into gravy sounds very sensible way of getting extra veggies into children to me.

Guidance actually recommends non-dairy ice cream as an alternative to regular ice cream.

So perhaps you could share the guidance with the replacement chef when they arrive?

[JodieO]

Frozen potatoes are lazy, contain lots of crap and taste like cardboard!

[noddyholder]

It sounds revolting and the salt and sugar prob quite high in timmed fruit.Sounds horribly inedible though and not v tasty but prob wouldn't do them much harm if occasional.Processed chicken is full of salty water before freezing and is disgusting

[purepurple]

Isitmeor, thanks for the link.
I may be over-reacting, but the food has to be seen to be believed.
Having to smell it cooking and then dish it up really puts me off it. The food looks revolting.
The main negatives of the food are

• it is all overcooked, she uses frozen yorkshire puddings that take 4 minutes to cook. She cooks them about half ten and keeps them warm till dinnertimes. It is the same with the garlic bread. They are impossible to cut and have to be ripped up by hand.

-most meals are minced meat or the ready cooked chicken

-most meals come in gravy, which is just full of fat and salt. The meals are mostly one pot meals, easy for dishing up. The children can't use a knife and fork beacause it is mostly gravy.

[jamandjerusalem]

From the Soil Association/Organix campaign for Better Nursery Food:

It may surprise you to learn that when it comes to the food served in nurseries in England and Wales, this is the current situation:

No compulsory training for nursery staff serving food
No clear nutritional standards
No agency to monitor the quality of food provided
No Government department giving a lead or promoting good practice
No Government funding available to help nurseries improve provision

Pretty shocking, eh?

[purepurple]

jj, I have signed the petition
the problem is because nobody monitors the quality of food, it is all cost-driven. The cheaper the better.
The nursery menu sounds healthy but the reality is that the ingrediants are cheap and of poor quality.
Our last OFSTED inspection describes the food as healthy and nutritious. But she only read the menu.

[BonsoirAnna]

I sympathise with the OP.

Last year I was class rep in DD's French école maternelle. One of a class rep's duties is to keep an eye on the canteen, and one day I ate there with the children from DD's class. I was really shocked at what the children were fed: bread, cheese ravioli and a doughnut. And this is France, where people are supposed to know about nutrition. When I raised the issue with the man who runs the canteen he got very defensive...

[IsItMeOr]

Ooh, salt is a worry, and the "wrong" sorts of fats obviously not great. But does sound as if the main issue is that she's just (whispers) not a very good cook. What's happening when she retires?

[MIAonline]

It is disgraceful that children are served crap like that in a nursery. For some children nursery will provide all their meals for 5 days a week.

I agree that cost (and lack of training) is a driving factor. It is all about what 'looks' good on a written menu as the children are too young to say.

[whingingDailyHateMail]

I've been looking at a local nursery for DD, but the menu there has put me off - its really crappy food. Several mince based dishes, plus a sausage hotpot, and this was the specimen week's menu. No fish, not even fishfingers.

Nothing resembling a bit of unadultered meat, all processed to death rubbish. Which is fine occasionally IMO, but not every single day.

[purepurple]

Here are our dishes which are described as healthy

turkey hotpot which is minced turkey, veg and potatoes in gravy
turkey yorkies which is the hotpot served with frozen yorkshire puddings which are cooked and then kept warm for about an hour and a half
lamb curry which is minced lamb in gravy with a tiny bit of curry powder
cottage pie which is the lamb curry without the curry powder, served with seperate mashed potatoes
spagetti bolagnaise which is minced turkey and is served with garlic bread that has been kept warm for ages
fishfingers, mash and spaghetti
savoury lamb with jacket potatoes which is minced lamb in gravy with potatoes with the skins on that don't even have the black bits taken off (the children call them dirty potatoes)
pork dinner which is ready cooked fatty pork slices in gravy that come in a tray ready to go straight in the oven
lasagne which is made from turkey mince and has no cheese in because the cook doesn't like cheese
sausages, mash and sweetcorn and gravy
sausage casserole
and chicken pasta which is those hideous ready cooked frozen chicken pieces from Thailand in pasta sauce with pasta, the children can't chew the chicken and they end up spitting it out after about ten minutes of chewing
I hope that once the cook retires we get some decent food for the nursery and a bit of variety.
Parents, don't be fooled by the menu, ask lots of questions about the actual ingredients

[Loujalou]

A friend of mine runs a nursery and got slated for chicken nuggets. These were chicken nuggets she made herself and are one of the most expensive things on the menu!

[feralgirl]

Lazy, lazy, lazy. What a horrible menu, and your cook sounds like a right cow.

I worked in a daycare in the states for a while and the processed crap that was served up to the kids there was even more shocking. Literally everything came out of a packet or a tin: even the potatoes were tinned, the milk was all UHT and tasted foul, the cheese was plastic. It's fucking criminal that people get away with feeding kids crap like that.

As an aside, I also work in a secondary school with "Healthy Schools" status. What a lie that is. Carbs, carbs and more carbs; cheap, low grade meat; manky, soggy sandwiches; slushies that are brim full of sugar; horrible, processed cheese. The kids hate it, the staff hate it, it's overpriced and cooked by people who clearly don't give a shit or know about food.

[piscesmoon]

I would change the nursery or send a packed lunch.

[purepurple]

loujalou, I once suggested having homemade chicken nuggets or fish nuggets with oven chips and tomato sauce
"Too unhealthy", I was told
"No chips here, we are a healthy nursery".
I was abit taken aback, considering all the food is processed and smothered in gravy.

[providentielle]

The nursery I worked in had soup on the menu once a week. They warmed up the cheapest tinned tomato soup they could find and added a bag of brown sugar to it!!!

One of the many reasons I returned to nannying.

[MissSunny]

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[mathanxiety]

Are the leftover veggies taken off plates or taken from the cooking pans? If they're taken from plates, then are you sure they weren't spat out? The Thai chicken is probably pure poison, full of mercury, antibiotics and godknowswhatelse. How is the children's behaviour after the nutritious meal? The fruit sounds marginally ok but frozen roast potato probably contains a lot of transfats -- even dry mashed potato flakes might be better than roast. It's probably all very convenient for the retiring cook. But there has to be a better way.

[applepudding]

I thought that there were rules regarding manufacturing of food for very young children that this should have limited sugar and no salt?

I think it is the salt content which would worry me most in that if children are full time in this nursery up until school age then they have had their palate used to the taste of cheap, salty food and will find it hard to adjust to eating fresh, less seasoned food which they may be given at home or elsewhere.

Meals made from minced meat are not bad per se if the meat used is good quality and home cooked, but ready bought minced meat in gravy will contain very little meat, a lot of salt, thickeners, and things like maltodextrin (whatever that is!)