Are you watching Jamie Oliver's school dinners?

[MunchedTooManyMarsLady]

Jamie's being given a run for his money. Loving it!!!!!!!!!!!!!

JO for Prime Minister is all I can say

Have just been to Tesco's - would you believe they have the dreaded turkey twizzlers buy one get one free??? What on earth can be done to persuade parents to stop feeding their children such utter crap?

My other burning issue is about teaching children to cook. I'm a good cook because my mother taught me, and she, in turn, was bought up during WWII and taught to cook well and economically by my grandmother. If we don't teach our children to cook properly and be interested in food, they probably won't be taught in the same way at school, so how on earth are they going to teach our grandchildren how to cook and stop the downward spiral of disinterest in good food?

I wondered if they put a dead still feathered turkey on one table and bowl of pasta and salad on the other table.
what the kids would choose?
Tee hee
I only watched the one last night as DH always watches something else, but last night I put my foot down
I totally agree with banning the total shit that is reconstituted floor scrapings and processed food in school dinners, I would happily pay for the privilege of decent meals.
Ds had not a school dinner since yr 2 when I finally got to go and visit the lunch hall - this was to see the improvements FFS! It was dire.

It's good to see parental pressure can help change things, but what can you do if your school doesn't even have a kitchen? (it's quite a new building, lovely in every other way.)Everything is made/reheated somewhere else (where??? don't know!) and then bussed in I suppose.

It's DS's first parent's evening next week. I will certainly be asking a few questions - just feel sorry for the poor teachers as they are probably going to be bombarded by questions about food from JO-obsessed mums like me when they want to talk about the classroom and what our kids are actually learning!

Yesterday I asked DS what he had eaten for lunch (the menu had said there was lamb hot pot and we had agreed beforehand he would eat that.) He said, "Errr. smiley faces!!! And snakes and ladders!!"

What the F... are snakes and ladders? Anyone know? DS hazarded a guess it was fish, but then he calls any meat 'chicken' so I wouldn't put my money on it.

call me naive but I'm still shocked that such stuff is allowed in schools anyway. In the end, the catering companies expect to make a profit, so the real villains are those signing contracts with the caterers. Someone's got to be accountable and that's both local and national politicians. It goes against common sense - how much would the government save on ASBOs etc. if they managed to keep kids from literally climbing the walls by giving them decent food?

I too agree that it would probably be money well spent and money saved in other areas - especially the NHS.

BL, I said exactly that to my dh yesterday. Wouldn't it be great if JO ran the country, at least if he decides something is a good idea he gets on and does something about it. I haven't heard him mention a '10 year plan' or 'phasing out' turkey twizzlers! He just says 'ban them' full stop.

It's taken me a couple of days to get back to this as I've been in shock.

Chatting about all this with dh over dinner the other evening it suddenly occured to me to ask ds1 the question...

"Ds1...do you know what a turkey twizzler is?"

"Yeah, we have them at school..."

"...I don't like them though, so I have the other thing when it's them."

My next sentence? "Sweetheart, any time you want to switch back to a packed lunch, it's fine with me."

I've just emailed Tesco:

I wonder whether Tesco are interested in contributing to the health of the nation (and children in particular) by banning special offers on such processed food as turkey twizzlers.

Why not have BOGOFs on e.g. organic free range chicken breasts?

I am impressed with Tesco's organic ranges - they beat Sainsbury's hands down - but I think that far more can be done by supermarkets to change the way people think about food - and as market leader, Tesco should lead the way.

Why not offer cookery classes to children in-store with proper ingredients, sponsor a cookery roadshow that goes to schools and teaches cookery to children, a 'my mum/dad cooks the best food'-type prize that encourages parents to give their children decent food cooked from scratch?

I'd be really interested to hear what you think of these ideas.

The recent Sudan 1 episode should have made people realise that they and their children are better off eating food that's been prepared from scratch on the premises (inc their own home) than buying prepared meals.

I work in the catering department of a school which has around 1100 pupils from nursery to 6th form. AFAIK, we've not heard a dicky bird about school meals prompted by JO's prog but then our meat, poultry and veg are all delivered fresh daily. It's by no means perfect - we do use some frozen veg e.g. peas, sweetcorn and green beans and there are sometimes smiley faces and potato waffles and pizza and pasties and once a week we have chips - on Fridays, with battered fish. But every child is also offered the choice of a jacket potato on Fridays too. Our trained chefs and cooks prepare meat pie from scratch using braising steak, also making pastry from scratch.

A choice of three hot dishes or salad or sandwiches is available to junior school pupils each day - which is prob too much, IMO, as they do sometimes have a bit of a problem choosing so opt for the most familiar (chicken nuggets/ teddies if available!).

SueW - don't have any problems with frozen veg - it's better to have that than some stuff that's been hanging round for days I reckon.

Your school sounds fantastic!

Nothing wrong with frozen peas at all - I'd be lost without them!

There is only one way to improve what children eat in school. Allow the school canteen to cook proper food with vegitables and fruit, and don't offer them the choice of eating a crappy option.

If you give children a choice the vast majority, whatever they eat in the home will go for crap if it is on offer. We are the adults and we know best. Don't give them a choice. Fund schools so that they can pay enough dinner ladies to make sure that packed lunches don't contain sweets and chocolates. At my kids (private) school no one is allowed to bring anything other than fresh frout and veg for a snack. This is the only way to improven standards.

I also think that schools should be funded to have breakfast clubs so that kids can have a proper meal at the start of the day, not the coke and a mars bar that most of the kids I teach seem to have.

On the way into our school canteen there are two huge posters explaining that you should eat 5 portions of friut and veg a day. They show what a portion is. Inside the canteen the kids have made posters that show a healthy diet. These kids know what they should be eating but are too young to do what is good for them (and they are teenagers). We have to be the adults and tell them what they need to do.

Just like we need to on school uniform and other aspects of behaviour (and on tis I know that other mners would disagree with me!)

Watched this for the first time last night. JO seems to be obsessed with chicken- everything I saw him cook (didn't see whole prog thanks to dog!) involved chicken. Trust there are no veggie families at these schools?!

My kids couldn't have identified rhubarb... I don't like it, so we don't have it! (similarly gooseberries & apricots, both of which DH will not touch so I don't buy). Also have never bought avocado since I shared one with a friend at 16 & we both thought it was disgusting!

I was brought up on fresh veg & meals cooked from scratch but at secondary school I chose crap... it isn't necessarily the parents fault once kids get to that age. Or I'd keep the dinner money & go & buy chocolate or crisps or cakes

My eldest 2 kids didn't get to do cookery at school, & the younger 2 do "food tech" which seems more geared to designing packaging than making actual food. Not all parents have the time, energy or knowhow to teach cooking, so to take away the practical side of school cookery lessons seems daft.

I can remember visiting children turning up their noses at our meals & ending up with bread- seems to be a common theme of this thread. When my kids used to go to tea with people we always got the "oh dear, you're vegetarian aren't you. What can we feed him/her?"

Marthamoo, at your thuds! Hmb, I totally agree with you, remove choice, give them healthy choices or nothing and they HAVE to eat something decent. That's the situation in my house anyway.

That's the (theoretical) situation in my house too. But it doesn't work - my kids just don't eat anything, or they eat bread and butter only. My routine is to insist that they at least taste a little bit of everything on the plate, and as long as they taste it, if they don't like it, they can have bread and butter.

So they have bread and butter at least three times a week!

It's taken me ages to accept this and not feel bad about it. I know rationally that it's better they eat nothing than eat crap, but at a gut level (ha ha) it's still very difficult to allow your kids to eat 2 spoonfuls of something for dinner and then give up.

The upside is, at least they're hungry so want the apple and banana for dessert!

Tallulah, interesting comments on the cookery lessons> Even when I was at secondary school, nearly 30 years ago ( that it was that long ago!!!) I started off doing home economics which was your general cookery thing, then it suddenly turned into 'food and nutrition' when I did it for O level (failed!!) and seemed to consist mainly of the science of food and how it was digested by the body. We certainly weren't taught anything about 'nutrition'.

That happened at our school, wordsmith - home economics turned into food technology (wtf?!) which was less about cooking and more about designing bloody pizza boxes and working out what you'd eat on a desert island.

Yep. Even when it was cookery, all we did was make cakes and chelsea buns. The teacher was a real cow as well, caught me reading 'Jackie' 5 second after the bell went and never let me forget it. I never knew how to cook veg until I started college and lived with a girl who was a really good cook. She taught me how to cook proper food!!

I think we made mini pizzas and cakes, so yes, home ec wasn't much cop either!

Ooh, and chocolate ginger cheesecake with minty cheesecake filling. It was disgusting. Still I suppose they had to give us something to make that we could carry home in those twee shopping baskets with gingham covers.

Chocolate, ginger and mint?! Were your teachers on drugs?!

That's how I remember it at least. It may have been different, but it was a long time ago....

Just having flashbacks to home ec lessons now - I seem to recall lots of arguments about how much we had to pay if we didn't remember to bring ingredients (they had weevilly flour we could use - lucky us!).

And have just remembered the gratin-topped ham and white sauce concoction we were taught to cook too. Like ham sick really.

FWIW DS2 (in Y7) has made fresh fruit salad, spag bol, burgers, Victoria Sandwich, pizza and one or two other things in food tech this year; has enjoyed it all and voluntarily repeated some of them at home. So it's not all hopeless.

That's fab, Jan - just wish it wasn't called food tech Sounds like robots make it - and reminds me that so much food is made using machinery these days.