To think that Jamie Oliver is right...

[Easywriter]

Shoot me down should you care to but I don't want my children to eat rubbish.

I'm not obsessed by my childrens diet but I want them to eat fresh, wholesome, nutritious food in the correct quantities.

The Government should stand behind Jamie Oliver in his quest to ensure that school meals are of a decent standard.

For some children it may be the only decent meal they eat in a day, for others it will be continuing what is standard in their homes.

If mothers want to feed their children hamburgers through school railings then they deserve to be preached to about healthy eating to within an inch of their lives. Being stupid yourself is no reason to justify letting your stupidity affect your child (I mean the hamburger mothers).

It's not cool to simply disagree with everything the previous Government (as a means to signify a new regime or as a cost cutting exercise) did and surely to give school children good meals is a no-brainer.

Just do it simpleton co-elition!
Surely I'm right!

MilaMae - I wonder when the sequel to a certain book of a few years ago will be published. "French Women Never used to Get Fat"?

souteastastra - my DS1's class has PE 3 times, most weeks. And kids used to sit down in classrooms, say in the 50s, a lot more than they do now. The emphasis these days is far more on active lessons rather than passive rote learning.

And it takes effort at school and at home in all aspects of life. Parents who instil a healthy lifestyle/ good moral values/ a positive attitide to education in their kids don't want that undoing in the 5-6 hours the kids are at school and vice versa.

And there are 3 seriously obese kids in my son's class of 19 and they were that way before they started school. They all have seriously obese parents. One of them regularly gets driven to school. Actually, about half the kids in DS1's class usually get driven to school, but this one only lives at the end of the school field. Can the school really be blamed for that?

Good ridence Jamie.

I agree with what one article says about the matter:
"Celebrity-fronted, dodgy science-fuelled, fear-injected authoritarianism: that, in essence, is what the Jamie Oliver school-dinners initiative represented."
www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/9102/

And whatever you think about his dinners campaign, one thing everyone has to concede - it didn't blood work!

Campaign stuff aside tho, i do love his cook books. Which quite hilariously have things like crisp sandwhiches in them. Now if I cooked his recipes on a regular basis I certainly would be unhealthy and probably very fat. Packed with cream, butter, cheese etc. Fat drenched chorizo. chicken with skin on. yum but so bad. Yep and Burgers are in there too.

Perahps if you get you fat drenched produce from a farmers market and then use Jamie's recipes it's okay?

And while feeding your child a burger through the school gates might make you a 'scummbag', perhaps if if you drizzle it in olive oil, put a basil leaf in there and put in a ciabbatta bun all the bad stuff would turn good?

If 25% of kids are not eating the new healthy school meals now, so they can eat the utter crap they're used to instead, then that's 75% of kids who no longer eat utter crap, but eat healthily. Before, it was 100%. Anyone who thinks that is a failure is mathematically challenged.

The schools that introduced the new meal schemes have markedly improved their exam results, which is a finding that is mirrored in schools in the USA who did that long before Jamie Oliver was interested in the subject. Food builds our bodies, and brains use a lot of energy and fat.

Which is the next issue - fat is not the enemy. Kids need some, we all do in fact. But fats are not equal. Trans fats kill you; good fats don't. Artificially produced slurry turned into burgers by dint of adding artificial everything is not the same as good meat ground up and shaped into a patty with a bit of sweated garlic and onion. Recipe books are usually "event" food for special meals, not the sort of thing you bang out on a day to day basis, and nobody's saying treats should be banned altogether. All kids deserve treats, occasionally, in fact even Jamie Oliver calls them psychologically important. But if your treat food is your kid's staple diet, you are parenting badly. No ifs, buts or ands. Food is a pretty basic element of your responsibility to your children.

I personally don't think schools should offer a choice as to whether kids eat well at lunch. It should be a given that a child who doesn't have a medically dictated special diet eats the school meal. Kids from some backgrounds won't get another chance at a nourishing plate of food that day. "Choice" is meaningless if one choice for a child is going to damage both health and education.

I was at uni with girls who lived on burger van shite but used awfully expensive moisturiser. The idea that their scummy skin might do better if they worried more about what they put into their bodies than on their faces seemingly escaped them. So it isn't about class - peasant food down the generations has been great, for the most part. People have forgotten how to cook because there are other options, and in the 70s everyone was told they were just as good or even better - advertising was't. School meals is just a start - they need decent home ec classes, real ones, so every child understands how to make a stew, a stir fry, a curry, a shepherd's pie, a pasta sauce, and why they should make them. Health and money, too. Cooking is cheap, done well.

These are such basic life skills. I can't begin to fathom how anyone could be angry that kids are given better options.

*advertising wasn't regulated well enough, and the evidence of harm not there anyway, yet.

Er i think you certainly are confuzled love. Missing the point utterly. and you've bored me too. off to bed now.

Um, darkbluebird did we read the same post?! Confuzled's posting seemed utterly sensible to me.... there is a definite link between what we put in our bodies and how we grow/look/feel, etc... What exactly did you disagree with?

Critcising jamie is outrageous. I know who I would rather put in charge of the nations health between andrew landsley and jamie Oliver.

School meals should be healthy, locally sourced, cooked on site and free to all, but not compulsory. Homemade puddings should be included IMO.

The obesity crisis should also dictate a lot more sports and exercise inschools. One hour of physical activity every day.

None of this is rocket science and shame on the current and previous governments for selling off our school kitchens and school playing fields. They sold our childrens futures and we allowed it to happen.

'Good ridence Jamie.

I think that this is very harsh. If nothing else he has made people think about the problem. I think that they react badly because they feel guilty-deep down they know they are letting their DC eat far to much salt and sugar. Processed food is to blame.

Sorry-I meant that processed food is to blame for an unhealthy life style. Cut out the processed food from lunch boxes and school dinners and you cut out the problem.

I'm a primary school teacher in Greece and you wouldn't believe what my pupils eat for breakfast and during the breaks. It's generally agreed that children of this age are becoming unteachable, (+ apparently Greeks are the most obese European nation, and globally are second only to Americans) but noone's putting two and two together and looking at the chemical crap that's going into their bodies. There are no school dinners here, but a few schools have canteens, where children could buy healthy-ish food if they wanted. My DS thinks we're terribly poor just because in his lunch box he gets a homemade sandwich and muffin, rather than a supermarket bought croissant or packet of crisps.

From the new school year, I'm starting a healthy eating project in school, using stuff off JO's site, if only to find a way to calm their additive-charged nerves and actually get some work done.

I do love what JAmie did about chickens. I love it that free-range eggs are now very close to being the norm, judging by the supermarket shelves.

Whenever Jamie is mentioned in this house, my OH always interrupts with a uber pious "praise be to Jamie"

I like the idea of JO campaigning FOR parents because they otherwise don't get heard. I don't like the idea of JO being appropriated as an arm of the nanny state. The last government was so into telling us what to do that I think JO's good intentions got a tad tainted with the same authoritarian brush. Ed Balls could have ben telling me the sky was blue, I'd still be tempted to tell him to feck off, just because he was Ed Balls.

You know, I do wholeheartedly agree that exercise is the key: my boys get 25 minutes during the day to run about, it is nowhere enar enough. School policies emaning many children have to be driven tos chools miles away don't help, either- we're at elast lucky that we can walk to one of our schools (SNU is 10km awa, buit too far LOL).

BA- yes is dinenrs are poor people will ahve to revert to lunches, but there's two reasons that not ideal:

1. On a personal level ds1 is ebing assessed for anorexia and sandwich kids eat in small groups about a field in summer; he ahs all his intake monitored and recorded by schoolw chih is only manageable for them in dinners- he would ditch half his sarnies anyway otherwise.

1. On a wider perspective, consider the free school meals kids. Yes yes I know benefit claimants etc- well aside from my more generally liberal politics we all know that many hard woking people are losing jobs and a great way to help them whilst they try and find another (quite apart from people who really are sick / disabled / recently escaped abuse / all the many good reasons there are to be on free school meals) is to ensure that their kids get a good hot emal a day: triply so when family might be homeless as well. In fact I worlked in a post allied to surestart and one thing they were campaigning about even back then was to help people on benefits over the long summer holidays when there was no free schoom meal but no more money: OK we can't afford that now but a nutritious option for those children is stilla very sensible priority that helps people when times are hardest and quite probably saves the country a fortune in healthcare a bit further down the line.

Re. Confuzled's post: wtf are girls doing at university if they are so dense???

Now there's another problem altogether.

Rubbish to the OP, you can't force people to eat things they don't want to, it will just create resentment towards good food in later life.

I love veg and fruit in my house it was treated as a treat as we didn't get it very often (too expensive) I still see it as a treat and treat myself often.

Nothing wrong with chips and chicken dippers, problem is they are not cooking fresh in the schools, they are cooking frozen stuff padded out with fillers and full of salt and fat etc.

The food stuff is the only thing I have against the previous government for which I would have voted again if I was allowed to (could not as non-British citizen). It probably will be the only thing as well I will agree on with this one.

I home cook , give healthy lunchboxes but when the school decided that some items (that I did not usually put in it) should be banned, not only recommended to not be given but had bocome forbidden food it made my blood boil and yes, I have been tempted several times to fill lunch boxes with it as a protest! The burger through the school fence thing was exactly that, a protest. It does not in anyway mean that those children only eat burgers and fries but that their parents decided to show how strong they felt about the issue of being stripped of parental choice all to often nowadays.

Jamie Oliver seems to be a pleasant enough person but I still do not want him to decide what the nation should eat.

""it will just create resentment towards good food in later life."" No need to wait for that long, I have never found giving fruits and veg to my Dcs hard until the all "only fruit and veg will do" saga. It is now a chore to them and a battle for me.

I had a job which involved going into school kitchens, both primary and secondary, in Scotland. I was shocked that since the changes were made to check the nutritional contents of meals there are more packet and prepared meals than before. The kitchen staff were complaining they weren't allowed to cook with freshingredients any more because the council had to know exactly what went into each meal to ensure it met nutritional guidelines which meant only packet foods could meet this. They weren't allowed to make a cake from scratch say, but they were allowed to make up a packet one. No fresh soup, packet and so on. Yes they were only allowed to put chips on the menu once a week but for me, how were white bread sandwiches with just packet ham in them, or packet soup or fried packet veggie burgers healthy?

Jamie Oliver did a great job bringing this issue to the fore- but havn't school dinners always been crap due to cost issues? I had school dinners in the 1970s, these were healthy on paper (meat & 2 veg) but the quality if the ingredients was dire. fatty meat, mash with black lumps, rice with stones in, overcooked stringy veg and liver full of 'elastic bands'. Not to mention the pink custard, semolina & frogs spawn (tapioca). Yeauch. There is no way decent meals can be provided on a shoestring buget, I would be prepared more for a decent meal but many can't (or won't) want to pay. A child near here died from food poisoning from school dinners & many more were ill due to using a very cheap & careless supplier.

Ryoko - you can inform and persuade people, though. That's why companies spend billions of pounds on advertising and marketing.

Kids only get 25 mins exercise in a day? That's just not true, is it.

School finishes at 3 o'clock, half past maybe, and then kids can run about and do whatever they want, possibly encouragED BY parents.

Why put the responsibility for getting kids active onto schools? It's ridiculous.

Plus schools in Scotland are obliged to give kids 2 hours of taught PE every week, not including the 1.25hrs of break time (which is also ridiculous but another issue).

There have never been as many sport and activity clubs as there are now.

AnneinEdinburgh, oh I do hope you complained in that job you had. I agree that the govt guidelines re school dinners border on the ludicrous.

"Re. Confuzled's post: wtf are girls doing at university if they are so dense???"

Oh, that's nothing. One guy who studied medicine was convinced that pool tables came equipped with gravitational fields around the pockets, and that cash machines printed money which was why they had shiny new notes. And a girl studying economics thought there were batteries behind the light switches, and that was what powered them.

darkbluebird, I didn't miss your points; I refuted them, as this is supposed to be a debate. Your resorting to personal attacks in response is needless, and a pity.

And AnneInEdinburgh, that's appalling, but to be fair JO's pilot school project focused on training staff to cook decent raw ingredients, from scratch. Extending that across the country is funding the current gov.t don't want to have to find, which IMO is why they are dismissing his work as a failure. 75% of kids eating far better, with measurable improvements in performance as a consequence, is an odd sort of a failure.

Arf at Confuzled's dumb-ass uni students

DH knew a girl who thought after your baby is born, they push the placenta back in for the next pregnancy!