If your children have school dinners...(asking a favour here, pretty please!)

[marthamoo]

Can you please ask them what kind of things they have? Since the blessed Jamie O stuck his finger in the big school dinner pie ds1 has been having more and more bizarre meal combinations - so much so that I'm inclined to switch him back to packed lunches) Some examples over the last week:

pasta and baked beans (as in a pile of plain pasta, a pile of baked beans), chocolate chip cookie for dessert.

shepherd's pie, with sliced potato topping, with roast potatoes and peas (not too bad - but potatoes and potatoes)

tuna pasta bake and croquette potatoes (I thought they weren't to have potato 'products' any more unless home made - I am slightly sceptical at them moulding weeny piles of mash into cylinder shapes and coating them in breadcrumbs - for hundreds of children),

pasta and baked beans (seems a bit of a fave this - twice in one week) but this time with carrots

And today - I think the best so far - croquette potatoes (again), cabbage ...and a pile of grated cheese.

I don't even think he's eating many of the vegetables ie., he loves cabbage but said he couldn't eat this as it was "slimey and watery" - seems to be a common theme, both school sweetcorn and school peas are "not like the ones you give me, Mum" - ie., school's are cheap, rather than Green Giant and Bird's Eye

I'm paying £1.60 a day for this weird and wonderful fare! Is anyone else's child having such off-the-wall meals?

What I wonder about school meals is whether the meat is reformed and whether the roast meat is that horrible plastic meat that comes in plastic wrapping?

I know that at dd's school the roasts are proper joints cooked on the premises. They don't use reformed meat products either. They've really gone to town to make sure that their meals are good, fresh and healthy.

I wondered about the cost of school dinners on the Jamie Oliver thing. We pay 1.50 a day for dinners, I don't think that it unreasonable, but I'm not quite sure what it goes on. ds occasionally tells me what he had for lunch, and we get one of those repeating menus every now and then (not sure where it's gone tbh). It's not fantastic, but he has a good breakfast and tea, and his fruit portion at fruit time. He seems to eat a lot of vegetables, and a lot of cakes, flapjacks etc. However my ds is the skinniest kid you have ever seen, and very energetic, so I'm mostly just happy he is having a filling meal to keep him going. Also he told me his favourite school dinner was baked potato with coleslaw, so I reckon he has quite healthy tastes! dd on the other hand is on compulsary packed lunches (they eat in their classroom until half term in reception). I am looking forward to her having school dinners, but know that she will eat oddly. At nursery she had a very restricted diet because there are so many things she won't touch. I'm hoping that she will be better at school!

We pay £1.55 (in Scotland) and a scheme called 'Hungry for Success' has been running for around 3 years now. I belive the spend up here is around 60/70p on food.

A coloured tray system operates (Red, Green or Blue) with a common soup & pudding. The middle is then made up from a meat course or a veg/fish course or a sandwich/wrap. Fresh breads are freely available. Pudding can be swapped for fruit or formage frais. Water or fruit juice is available to drink. Upto 3 items from the salad bar can also be added. Packed lunches can also be supplied on request which consist of sandwich/roll, yoghurt or homebaking, fresh fruit milk, water or fruit juice.

Example menu:
Soup : HM Minestrone with crusty bread
Main: Lasagne with garlic bread OR Vegetable Couscous with garlic bread OR Cheese & Coleslaw Baguette or Turkey Sandwich
Pudding : Meringue Nests with Cream & Fruit.

Quality is v. good.

HTH

i had a school dinner with my child on wednesday and it was really quite nice. I think ds2 just makes weird choices as his dinners all sound very odd like that too.
I just try to make sure he has a good meal when he gets home.
for my dinner it was lamb casserole, mash, dumpling, cabbage and gravy.

wigwambam, are you in the Rochdale area?

DD's school:

MOnday - Chicken Pie, Pasta Bolognaise, Mushroom & Spinach Lasagne, boiled potatoes, peas, sweet corn. Melting moments nad custard

Tuesday - Roast beef and yorkshire pud, cheese omelette, battered mushrooms, roast pots, broccoli, carrots. Arctic roll

Wed - Chicken fillet, cottage pie, vegetable crumble, creamed pots, coutntry veg, sweet corn, syrup sponge

Thurs - bacon chop and pineapple, tomato and cheese pasta bake, veg stir fry in a wrap, new pots, spaghetti hoops, green beans. . Strawberry shortbread and custard

Fri - breaded cod, sausage roll, golden whales, vegetable rolls, chips or jkt pot, peas, baked beans. Choc crunch with choc sauce

In addition jacket potatoes with cheese or tuna, sandwiches and salads are available each day (the last two only from Y2+ I think).

Also fresh fruit, cheese and biscuits, yoghurt, fresh fruit salad also available every day.

The meat (pork, beef, lamb) is bought in from a local butcher with an extremely good reputation - parents pretty much gasp when they hear! Peas, sweet corn, green beans delivered frozen. All other fruit and veg delivered fresh daily. Sausages, pork pies, scotch eggs, delivered fresh daily. Dry/tinned goods delivered twice weekly. All food prepared on site daily by trained chefs and catering assitants but also proper systems in place to ensure that food not eaten is chilled, stored and re-heated properly.

I eat school meals every day and whilst I don't always make the 'right' choice i.e. one I really enjoy, I can't dispute that on the whole the quality is great.

BTW, below is Week 2 of a 4-week menu

mugface, no - I'm in Sutton Coldfield.

Message withdrawn

We get a menu from the school, every Wednesday is a roadt- chicken, turkey, lamb or baked sausage. Then there is salads, curries, quiches, sausages, chicken grills, pasta.. a good variety. Every day there is also a veggie option (eg cheese and tomato pizza, veg casserole) and a Halal option. All the kids have the option of this, and there is always cheese and biscuits available as a stan by.

Just put my two on sandwiches as the dinners were getting expensive- if I could've paid monthly maybe, but finsding 2 X £1.50 every day in exact change was a pain especially at the end of the month. And we were very aware that ds3 is only two years away from it oo. They preferred school dinners tho.

Thanks ever so much to everyone who's taken so much trouble in posting menus etc. - it is much appreciated. Some of these meals sound fabulous! I'm definitely going to ask for a menu.

Of course the other thing to remember is how incredibly bad school dinners used to be. I have memories of truly disgusting meals where dinner ladies would stand over you and force you to eat. I'd rather my children had half way decent school dinners and I give them lots of fruit and veg in the morning/evening than dread lunch time as I did. Some of you sound like your kids have really excellent stuff and I don't think my two have anything like that standard.

How much do you think you spend on each packed lunch. I think I spend at least the price of school lunch. And what do you pack? One of my kids is very dull in her food choices..

We have a meeting with dinner providers on Monday so I'm finding all this very interesting.

When the kids choose pack lunches our shopping bill goes up considerably (maybe by £20 or so). Also I think dd eats more when it's a cooked meal. In winter I prefer them to have something hot and substantial at lunch time.

My dd isn't eating school dinners any more as the meal combinations were awful, the amount of money (out of the £1.35 daily meal cost - it has now been raised to £1.45) wasn't known but generally I understand that most of the cost is on staff time to prepare, cook and clean away rather than on quality ingredients, the portions were quite small and the chances of being able to have seconds if wanted or needed were very small. Meals have now improved and I ate a school lunch at school recently at the request of the headmaster. 6 names of children who currently take packed lunches were pulled out of a hat and I was one of the 6. We had spagetti bolognese with peas, cheese and garlic bread. There was crumble with custard to follow. It was better than I would have expected but then that's only one mealtime and they chose the day so it wasn't truly representative. Of the 6 of us invited to the school, only 3 came. I hardly knew the other 2 but we all found that we had one thing in common and that each child was a slow eater and was less slow when given a packed lunch. At home, dd is often still eating when we've finished our main course and pudding and have cleared away the plates! Ds and dd eat about 75% of the meal size that we do and I doubt that school dinner would fill them up. There's also the difficulty of feeding them at tea time when I don't know what they have had at school at lunchtime when they are on school dinners. We used to have a seasonal menu but it was only a guide and bore no relation to the meals they were actually being given. They also used to have mashed potato several times a week and this would be one of three items available and you couldn't have more of one of the other 2 to make up the amount if you were unable to eat it as ds is. At home it's fine as you just take his potato out of the pan before you mash but I didn't feel I could ask the school to do this. They don't offer any choices either as it's a small school. Ds is now in secondary school and was looking forward to a good hot lunch but the choice is appalling due to a change in catering company. He is a good eater but is now back on packed lunches most of the time. The cold food option isn't great, either. The pasta option in school is pasta with a cheese or tomato topping which is £1, a ham roll is £1.20, a fruit bag (a couple of slices of apple, a couple of orange and a few grapes) is 50p. The canteen is open at breakfast time but a plain roll is 35p and I think a pat of butter is 10p. I was having to give him slightly more than £2 a day and we decided it just wasn't worth it. Friends who have children in another secondary school said that their eldest children went without any food at lunchtime at the beginning of term as the canteen ran out of food. It's not unheard of in big schools apparently. This doesn't make for cheering reading I know, but I hope it helps a bit!

This week ds has had:

Chicken pie with gravey/vegetable Cobbler with potatoes, broccoli and leeks. Ice-cream, friut or yoghurt.

Low fat, low salt sauages in a savoury sauce/vegetarian lasagne with garlic bread or mash and sweetcorn and peas. Pear flan and custard, fruit or yoghurt.

Roast chicken with stuffing and gravey/home-made red bean burger with potatoes, cabbage and mixed roast veg. Iced sponge with sauce, fruit or yoghurt.

BBQ pork casserole/cheese and tomato pizza with rice, carrotts and oriental salad. Natural yoghurt with honey and a cookie, friut or yoghurt.

Fish with tomatoe sauce/baked bean filled jacket potato with chips or bread and peas and beans. Chocolate coconut square with sauce, fruit or yoghurt.

All the parents are asked if they would like to go to luch either on a regular basis or just once in a while to help with the children. I have been and the school dinners are lovely. They cost £1.50 a day.

Don't even mention bloody Jamie Oliver to me. After last week's thread ds1's teacher had managed to get him eating an alternative (gluten free spaghetti hoops and crisps sandwich!!! but I was stunned - spaghetti hoops are slimy) and now- yep you've guessed it spaghetti hoops have been banned. Received an exasperated note in the home school book yesterday and they're back to feeding him yoghurt off fingers

So no help I'm afraid. But a shared grrrrr.

But to be fair Baka,trying to improve school dinners is going to be of benefit to most kids isn't it??

Do you think your ds would continue to refuse food to the detriment of his health if you continued to offer it and no alternative. (Not meant to be inflammatory btw,am genuinely interested.)

I wonder how picky kids with ASD are in other cultures??

I also really worry about some of the children with ASD I know who eat food which really can't be doing them any good (although I accept the point you made some time ago re your ds thriving on his limited diet.)

In their packed munches the kids get:

A roll, ham, cheese and pickle- that sort of thing
Fruit
A humzinger for one, scone or similar for other (won'r eat humzingers)
A small yoghurt (and a spoon!! never hear end of it if I forget that!)
A carton of fruit juice, often as not the savers brand but always pure juice.

At snack time I send a piece of fruit, school provides a drink for the princely sum of 30p a week.

It doesn't seem to affect the shopping bill: I think I buy the same amount of fruit regardless, it's just that it all gets eaten in school rather than at home.

My dd's school charges £1.77 a day for lunches, which seems a little higher than most of the others on this thread. I might be able to make her up a lunchbox at less cost, but it would cost me more in terms of time, and I think it would be difficult to get the same nutritional balance and value as the meals she's getting (I'm aware that her school meals are better than most). I also prefer her to have a more substantial meal at lunchtime than sandwiches - and I would be guaranteed to forget to put a spoon in!

moondog- if offered food outside his acceptable range he won't eat. If he doesn't eat he produces ketones, gets a migraine, throws up for 2 days then refuses food he previously ate (believe me I've been in that situation enough times one job these days is to ensure that he eats enough each day- which means finger feeding him basically).

We have spent hours on his eating (and the sensory problems that go with it) and have made small amounts of progress.

School has as well. They work on his diet almost more than anything else. They're not getting anywhere fast either.

There is one clinic specialising in sensory problems with food and food refusal (GOSH) and no chance of an appointment - even if we did there's no way he could go (where could we stay?) I've followed advice they have given (allowing children to explore food, playing with food, getting children to touch food and desensitise to those textures before even beginning to try and get them to eat it).

I've tried ABA with it. Tiny piece of food offered with reinforcement. We cannot find a reinforcer that is strong enough for him to do the task. He'd rather not have the reinforcer than eat the food.

The problem may be one of associations eg one dodgy apple (maybe not crunchy enough=all apples are bad). One bad experience eating chicken nuggets (at his crappy nursery- told off for not using his spoon and fork) at age 22 months= all meat and fish products refused for the next 4 years. ie it's inbuilt into ASD- he tends to make dodgy incorrect associations often (eg went upstairs in friend's house once- something upset him- no idea what - although I was with him- and followed by a refusal to go upstairs in all houses except ours and my parents that lasted for over a year).

Of course eating healthily is laudable, but I think their should be leeway in special schools (actually I thik there should be leeway in all schools- but particularly special) so that teachers on the ground, dealing with the situation should have final say.

Moondog I think you have a tendency to forget about the sensory issues in autism- food refusal is far more than behavioural, which is why it can be resistant to behavioural techniques.

sorry for the thread hijack
Moondog
had a browse (only quickly) can't find anything in the literature about other cultures, but did find this 2004 study from the states. It's by Schreck et al Journal of autism and developmental disorders.

abstract:
Although clinicians typically assume that feeding problems co-exist with a diagnosis of autism, no previous research has compared the eating behavior of children with autism to typically developing children. This study compared caregiver report of eating problems of children with and without autism on a standardized questionnaire. The questionnaire included items pertaining to food refusal and acceptance patterns as well as food presentation requirements. Caregivers were also asked to complete a food inventory that indicated the number of foods eaten within each food group for both the child and the family. Results indicated children with autism have significantly more feeding problems and eat a significantly narrower range of foods than children without autism."

There was depressingly little on treatment and we've tried everything suggested unfortunately.

Thanks for that baka,very interesting and a little depressing.
No don't forget that there are sensory issues-just like to have illustrated examples to remind me of how bloody complex it all is from authoritative people such as yourself.