School meal changes - good idea for reducing health problems or controlling of diet?

[mids2019]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c624vezv52do

I think we have been here before with Jamie Oliver some time ago. Ideas like this in my opinion look great in paper and an easy win for government but implementation is a real challenge.

In a school I used to govern there were losses taken by catering companies in the school I offering healthy food with a lot of children avoiding healthy choices by taking in packed lunches or indeed not eating, overloading with carbs after school.

For a lot of deprived areas the aim maybe should be to ensure children get a t least fed without perhaps concentrating on food quality. I don't think you can necessarily change dietary culture easily or by essentially force. You don't want to inescapably antagonize parents and cause a meritocratic burden on teaching assistants if they have to for instance check packed lunches.

Good idea on paper but I am sure there are seasoned cynic a rolling their eyes a bit at this one.......

Like most things in goverment it’s no banning things which will lead to improvement but the proper funding which will make a difference. I think the qaulity of food is important.

Nothing in this stops kids buying that huge can of Monster and sausage roll on their way into school.

Imo schools need to have longer lunch times and get back to a culture where the kids sit and eat a meal. Lunch times are so short and its all grab and go crap. They just want to be out with their friends playing football and chatting. They dont want to forego their precious lunchtime to sit and eat which I do understand. So its not just about the actual food. Ideally schools should go back to employing their own staff who actually cook meals rather than heat up food. Deserts etc wouldn't be an issue then as they are home made with real ingredients and not upf. They would also not be run for profit. Cant see this happening.

I agree good quality is important for children but I am just pessimistic about such schemes. If it's a no brainer and we have known about good diet for decades what aren't there already rules? The reality is schools can't deal with the administrative burden of policing diet unfortunately and you have to ask why schools are made to take on the hassle? Why not ban under 16s from McDonalds?

imo experience schemes like this lead to teenagers skipping meals and angry parents. There is also a hint of patronising the poor by saying he's you can have free school meals as long as they are the meals we decide on while the more 'responsible ' middle classes get to choose.

It’s all very well creating more rules, but they need to fund it as well. If schools had the budget to have a school cook who prepared decent quality food that would be a start.

Until 4 years ago I’d worked in around 25 primary schools over 20 years (peripatetic so in an out different ones each day) and I don’t remember any in the last 10 years that were frying anything. Certainly the two high schools locally mine have attended are also similar. With high schools I think making food that kids will eat, and therefore not feel the need to leave school to go to the chippy, McDs or the likes is better than having a lot of food teens won’t eat.

Ah, so an acknowledgement that the universal free school meals have represented the provision of nutritional crap.

Let's provide proper quality food for our children, possibly subsidised, never free.

Let's have teacher's focus on teaching rather than parenting.

It's an interesting one. When I were a lass in the 60s/70s the school meals sounded fab. All pies, stews, cobblers, veg, etc. They were so ghastly, they were inedible largely. Black eyes in cheap mash, greasy films, overcooked cabbage. Bright pink spam. I used to finish the day starving. Chips and nuggets would have been preferable.

When DS transferred to the independent sector in 2003/4, the lunches were fabulous: well cooked fresh food and lots of variety. They were £4.50. At least served on a proper plate with proper knives snd forks.

I agree. Sadly, as a proponent of healthy diets, I don’t think attempts to provide mass ‘healthy’ meals on a shoe string budget to children who aren’t accustomed to eating the type of food they are offered, does anything to actually ensure the children are fed.

Obesity is much lower in countries where quality food is valued. I live in a country where there’s generally excellent quality in school lunches plus one of the lowest rates of obesity in Europe. Funnily enough, they don’t police snacks like they do in the UK. I think it’s because people are generally better informed about what’s healthy, and value good food - compared to the massive amount of UPF that’s consumed in the UK.

Yes it will be a challenge for many in the UK to get used to eating better food at school, diet is extremely bad in the UK and this could be positive change. But I agree, it needs the funding and education about a healthy lifestyle to go with it.

I’m so on the fence about school meals. When my son was at a private nursery, he at such a variety interesting sounding meals - most of which he roundly rejected when I tried to recreate them at home. As he’s got older he’s got increasingly fussy and I’m down to a rotation of about 5 meals he’s guaranteed to eat rather than pick at. Now he’s at school, I find myself selecting the burgers, fish fingers, pizza options just so he doesn’t go hungry. While I don’t want them feeding him junk, my heart sinks when I look at the menu and see nothing he’ll eat (un-coaxed) except jacket potato and beans.

There are some things that drive me nuts though - if I choose him sausages and gravy, I want it served with mash and veg. Instead he chooses plain pasta on the side of everything! If I pick bolognese, they serve a blob of it next to the plain pasta - he completely ignores it. If it was mixed, he’d it both.

I care less about this deep fried rule (I’m not sure they’re making deep fried food anyway) but I wish they’d employ more techniques to combine nutrition with meals most kids will eat.

I just can’t see how - unless children are already eating similar food at home - they are going to just start happily eating more healthily at school. Homes where they learn about food and eating habits - I don’t think schools can turn around a poor diet. I grew up in the UK - I know what the standard British diet is like, I’m reminded every time I go home and see the endless shelves of processed food and teeny tiny bags of salad in Tescos, and the Greggs / chicken shops on every street corner.

I live in France, two kids who’ve gone through the system plus I work in a school. For a start, French kids eat veg and salad as a matter of course, at home, from babyhood. It’s not rocket science, it’s just salad with every meal, reasonable portions including boring old veg and seeing adults eat the same.

School meals are exactly the same as the food that most of them will be have grown up eating. Bowl of salad to start, protein plus veg/carb main, cheese, then a yoghurt or fruit for dessert.

very importantly, there is no other choice. At my school there is the cantine serving a 4-course lunch - or nothing. The idea of going onto a school menu and choosing what my kids will be offered as @Ketryne describes just boggles my brain - there is no way any school in France would think that appropriate, private or not. They all get the same and they are expected to eat, or at least try, it. It gets less strict as they get older, secondary schools are self serve. But I’ve seen the head chef at our school walking around and commenting on the lack of veg a kid has chosen - he sees it as part of his job to nag them.

The cantine does not sell sandwiches or muffins or sausage rolls or cans or chocolate or anything other than a sit-down meal.
There is no tuck shop.
There are no vending machines.
Packed lunches are only allowed with a doctor’s note confirming allergies.
Outside school, there are no chicken shops, no chip shops, no Greggs. Food is generally expensive - even the cheapest takeaways tend to be €10 plus, compared to school lunch at €4.75.

So that whole food environment contributes hugely to why French children will (more or less happily) sit down to a ‘proper’ lunch.

The last lunch I had at school was:

Self-serve salad starter - I think it was fennel/cabbage in vinaigrette, plus green salad. There’s usually at least 4 options.

Main - roast chicken leg, pommes purée and carrots / turnip mix. Usual a choice of two mains, one carb, 1-2 veg.

Dairy - small piece of cheese and bread, or a yoghurt.

Dessert - piece of vanilla cake, or fruit, I think I had a fromage blanc with some red fruit on top.

we get frites maybe three times a year 🤷‍♀️. Pizza ditto (and it’s rubbish). Burgers maybe once a year during a ‘theme’ week.

he at such a variety interesting sounding meals - most of which he roundly rejected when I tried to recreate them at home.

i think this is part of my point: French cantines don’t serve interesting or varied food. They serve what kids have grown up eating at home so it’s completely recognisable to them, it’s just normal food.

I would much rather there was no choice to be made. I think peer pressure would get him eating things he wouldn’t choose for himself if he saw there was no option. At nursery he just ate what he was given. But he had a 9 month break between private nursery and school (at the school pre-school where it was packed lunch only) and he lost the habit of eating to peer pressure.

At the beginning of reception I’d select all sorts of interesting choices for him and he’d come home and tell me he ate a side of plain pasta!

One of the reasons my dc didn’t have school dinners was the appalling quality plus high cost (no free dinners then). No child needs deep fried food and no child needs daily dessert, seems good to me, natural yogurt and fresh fruit is what my dc had for school packed lunch

Non-UPF are not the magic bullet to healthy eating but the brainwashing is working i see.
A Non UPF pudding will contain butter, sugar and flour - all the things we were told to avoid about 75446 fads ago.

@TheLivelyAzureHedgehog

there’s no “standard British diet” some of us scratch cook daily with veg, salad (where appropriate to the meal cooked) fruit and zero desserts unless a special occasion. Yesterday we had risotto and a side salad cooked from scratch, tonight we have Malaysian chicken thighs, brown rice and salad

@TheLivelyAzureHedgehog I remember being absolutely astounded at the quality and variety of food during my French exchange at secondary school.

The following week I was back in England looking at limp salads, stodge and the worst desserts in the world ever (“chopped jelly” - it “goes further” if you chop it up apparently - and home-made donuts that would literally ooze fat and squelched oil when you picked them up.

Clearly there is absolutely no reason we can’t feed our kids properly in the UK.

Primary school is nutritionally ok in my experience - but the quantity is totally inadequate (one small potato, one spoon of veg, one small sausage for example won’t sustain my 7 year old boy who is already 131cm. Running out of rice on curry or chilli days is absurd.)

My DD’s secondary school has a “snack shop” and for speed my dd nearly always eats rubbish. She actually loves healthy food - at home she eats fruit, veg, cuts fat off meat, dislikes cheap pizza etc - but at school she eats the crap because that’s what everyone else eats and she wants to fit in. She refuses to take packed lunch.

This is yet another, "Let's ban X,Y,Z it will be healthier".

In Japan the schools have a nutritionist who I believe is a teacher who has undergone additional training.

Food has to be cooked from fresh every day.

But the Japanese invest in school food and see it as part of education.

This is what we need, investment (not necessarily a nutritionist in every school) and food education in schools, but with a professional not just dumping it on another teacher or canteen worker.
I also think it needs to start early, there is no point trying to get a 16 year old to eat a salad they don't want but infants re a different thing.

I like the French idea of 3 - 4 courses and I bet they learn to use a knife and fork correctly.

Food in British schools is more of an afterthought when it should be part of the curriculum.

Sorry I will get off my soap box before I start ranting about hospital food.

I think you are wrong. Sure, there are non-UPF foods that are unhealthy if eaten in large quantities. But UPF products are usually designed to have an addictively perfect texture, flavour etc. Food producers have research departments that scientifically research and test these products - from the sound the Pringle tube makes when you pop the lid, to the shape of a Pringle in your mouth and the snap it makes. Everything has been tailored to be extremely convenient, delicious and highly addictive.

Not many people get addicted to eating a home made Victoria sponge cake.

Non-processed food is often - but not always - more plain/less tasty, less attractive, less pleasant to eat (smell, sound, texture). It is harder to train a toddler to like vegetable barley soup than a pack of soup noodles.

For the working adults: It is harder than ever to find the time to make the vegetable barley soup when both parents and all the grandparents are out at work all day.

For the parents that are out of work, they often have no clue how to make cheap healthy food. Fewer people do any gardening - they live in flats, or pay to pave over their land so they can park a car.

We already have a generation of adults who don’t know what plain decent food is supposed to taste like. And a commercialised/supermarket-led food industry with a vested interest in keeping it this way, So I think it’s hopeless.

That’s partly my point.

There’s no standard, so kids like yours grow up eating good diets - but others grow up eating very differently. The French are very conservative (small c) overall, most of the country still eats the same dishes that their grandparents and great grandparents ate. The British tendency to adopt and adapt different cuisines doesn’t happen here to anything like the same extent.

So while lot of kids in Britain will NOT have been offered brown rice growing up, pretty much every French child will recognise pommes purée.

The Secondary school that DS attends sell a lot of grab and go crap. I have no idea what the actual meals consist of, there's no time to queue up and eat one, except for the 25% of pupils on FSM. Lunch time has been cut to 35 minutes to stop fighting. ( not sure that's happened).
The Junior School used to have a reasonable choice of healthy meals, but they've been changed to very beige options, plus a roast and fish and chips. Meals now have to be ordered weekly, so I presume that cuts down on waste.
DS takes a packed lunch as I can make it better quality than the school offering.

This would be lovely, but there is not enough space for all the children to sit having a leisurely meal. The food and catering staff is usually provided by an external agency, and they want to make as much profit as possible. Schools cannot pay megabucks so there is not enough staff to deal with plated meals.

Kids don't prefer to be outside all the time, with their mates - many of them hate it, but it is where they are sent because schools do not have the space for them inside unless they use classrooms. That is not ideal as then they need more staff to supervise. Outside a few teachers supervise a big area with a lot of kids. Ensuring everything gets cleaned up at the end of lunch would be a big job too. The outside areas are disgusting after lunchtime and site team have to litter pick several times a day. Even then, we have a seagull and red kite problem over the playing fields as it is basically a buffet for them. Sigh sigh.

Lunch breaks are often 30 mins because they are a pressure point for bad behaviour in the school day. Kids with nothing to do and nowhere to really go. Schools do try to provide places but with 1500+ kids vs 80ish staff in a small area, it is extremely difficult.

As a pp said, it does come down to inadequate funding. Schools are trimming not just the fat, but down to the bone as it is

I think it’s good to do something about the health of our children but I honestly think some better solutions would be to

1. extend meal times in school and allow children and teachers proper breaks
2. give children extra time outside playing and moving around and/or extra PE lessons (I also think this would drastically improve things for ND children who need some sensory stimulation and movement to be able to concentrate, and would improve behaviour across the board)
3. to accomodate the above changes, make the standard school day longer which then also supports parents to work more easily without the need for breakfast clubs
4. teach more home economics- not just cooking but also first aid, basic DIY, gardening (to help their capability and self-esteem leading to healthier minds)

ETA - of course all of this would require additional funding, more staff and reforming the curriculum.

I think it's going to cause me no end of trouble, and likewise for parents of kids who aren't that interested in being at school.

DD2 was unhappy abut having to go back to school today, but said it was 'ok' because it's pizza day. She also likes Friday as it's fish day. I have enough trouble getting her to even eat as it is, so changing school meals to remove kid's favourites while not actually providing the budget needed for decent veg heavy meals that kids want, just isn't helpful.

It's also going to make life impossible for our local secondaries, as there are too many kids for a sit down meal, so food is provided in two 'breaks' and comes in the form of paninis and similar that you can carry with you.

The DofE hasn't engaged with the reality of school lunch times or thought through the cost implications.

It's also going to make life impossible for our local secondaries, as there are too many kids for a sit down meal, so food is provided in two 'breaks' and comes in the form of paninis and similar that you can carry with you.

wow that just wouldn’t fly at all in France! there was a complete stooshie when they introduced the ‘self’ in our primary rather than table service.

some lycées have introduced a ‘café’ option where older students can get a coffee and panini, but it’s expensive compared to the cantine.

our school doesn’t have a lunch break as such: it’s staggered over three periods over mid day and timetables are adjusted to allow students to eat. They get 50 minutes, which gives them time to queue and eat.

To change things, this is what they need to get to the bottom of. Why do so many British people have such a poor attitude towards food, won't eat vegetables and will only eat beige and crap pizza? Schools could serve well cooked meals such as in French, Japanese or Italian schools, only charge a token amount for it and we'd be back to parents pushing burgers through the fence.

It's nothing to do with money, time or skills, a lot of the meals eaten in countries with much better food cultures are eating food that costs very little and can be made quickly without skills or specialist equipment.

Yet in the UK, cooking and an interest in good food is seen as unattainably aspirational to many.