"Let them eat pizza" - the Jamie Oliver campaign isn't working

[Maninadirndl]

According to BBC Breakfast the School Food Trust project set up years ago has failed to make a significant change in children's eating habits.

As someone who took up this eating "thing" and who feels like the only one interested in eating good food around me - I also grow my own veg, fruit and herbs - I found this depressing news that the children still eat fish and chips. I know people who eat awful food and whose idea of a great day out for the kids is with Ronald McD.

Has the eating better food thing changed around you?

Hey Jesus - ice-cream in the school yard - we did too
cherrybrandy lollies... yum!

Ahem - back to the thread. Saying any food is bad is, well, bad. Everything in moderation I say.
Last night we had pizza from the freezer (because I only logged off from work late) but it was served with salad from the garden.

Most of my cooking is done from scratch - can't recall the last time I bought a jar of sauce (why would you - very easy and much tastier to make your own); I bake my own bread; bake cakes occasionally.

our school dinners are not nice, dry (no sauce) pasta that all sticks together, overcooked unexciting veg, unidentifiable meat. I wouldnt eat it! And they dont let the children mix at all, eg when there is lasagne, pasta and sauce...garlic bread. You can only have the garlic bread if you have the lasagne. Silly

Why dont they do lovely looking pasta bakes, homemade wedges with homemade fish gougons in wholemeal breadcrumbs, tasty curry and jewelled rice...etc etc

I have my sons school dinner menu sitting next to me, it is all really balanced and healthy you will be gladt to know and its cheap.

I heart JO

throckenholt - not all schools, but where DW works is an open site and they cannot stop them. I'm a bit about this, but there you are.

I agree with UQD too. We weren't allowed out of school at lunchtime until we were about 16. And I don't remember then flocking to the chip shop either (in fact, I don't think there even was a chip shop open at that time of day back in those days ).

What I object to is the underlying "the healthy menus aren't working, so we'll have to change them back" message in the media over this story. Err, no, sorry, either healthy eating for kids is important or it isn't. I agree that it will take longer for a real sea-change to be seen.

We wernt allowed out of school, we had a canteen that sold all sorts of greasy crap or we took packed lunches.

(or if you were me you would saveyour lunch money for fags and scab off your mates)

I think it is working, like i say DS's school dinners are fab and affordable and they have a few restrictions on lunchboxes but nothing drastic, just no fizzy drinks or chocolate bars but homemade cakes and crisps are ok. They also hve in each classroom a snack table that is availiable to all children all day with fruit or veg in it.

I believe the problem is not down to the choices schools/parents/kids make so much, as the fact that the options we have to choose between are likely to be crap limited at best.

When all you can buy in your local shop is sliced bread, when fruit and salad cost a fortune, when you are bombarded with sneaky advertising and huge displays of chocolate sweets and snacks everywhere you go (I mean chocy machines in the sports centre!) it is unsurprising that people make bad choices, particularly our kids.

And the whole thing is cyclical, parents who can't/don't provide healthy appetizing food to dcs, dcs don't know how to make good choices, schools offer good food that is too costly or unknown territory for many kids so kids choose the pizza again

i agree 5 years is not long enough for the radical shift in attitudes and behaviour needed to make Britain healthier. As for my dcs at school, I'm sure the school are providing healthy options at lunchtime. However, I do not trust my ds to make the best choices (age 6) so I make them for him and send him a healthy varied packed lunch. Hopefully when he is a bit older all these years of indoctrination guidance will have paid off and my dcs will be healthy, slim and fit with a good attitude to food.

I think the government needs to have a serious rethink of where our food is coming from as a nation - increasing amounts coming out of a food tech lab rather than out of the ground, everything processed, no support for local producers and vendors. No food culture at all realy.

I think it's also a problem that these services have been outsourced to private companies whose aim is to make a profit. And if the way to make a profit is to give kids what they want (and let's face it, most teenagers would probably want to eat crap fairly often, although that's not to say they should be allowed to), then they will probably try to do that.

The thing that upsets me most about J~O's campaign was that no-one ever seems to talk about the fact that the better diet improved HEALTH and CONCENTRATION - 2 really fundamental things. The kids who ate the improved menu had previously all been going to a lunchtime clinic DAILY because almost all the children had asthma, after a week (I think) of the diet very few of them needed to go to the clinic and teachers reported vastly improved concentration after lunchtime. I just feel so enraged that there is such concrete evidence that a better diet means kids feel better and learn better and will obviously save the government money (paying for staff, asthma clinic and drugs required surely must cost a fortune!!) I will never forget how astounded Jamie was by this extraordinary physical change in the kids and I will never understand why politicians don't make this their top priority. Makes me want to cry.

That's exactly the point. We started eating home grown food and were almost never ill. Our neighbours steady clients of McDonalds are almost always ill.

When I stopped eating fresh stuff in winter boy did my health drop!

Well my allotment is producing stuff in spite of the Bavarian rain and I made a tasty broccoli and kohl rabi gratin (rabi from the allotment) with a home grown salad thrown in.