Are you watching Jamie Oliver's school dinners?

[MunchedTooManyMarsLady]

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

Oh no! I'm going to be in the minority and say that I didn't like the programme and it's partly because of JO.

He seems to get these ideas and runs with them without putting any proper thought into the process. He's no experience of mass catering or canteens and he really thought he could waltz into a school kitchen and run it successfully and produce restaurant style menus for 30 odd pence per person. Didn't he know the budget beforehand? Didn't he do any forward planning? The fact that he didn't leads me to think of him as very arrogant.

There are a mass of school cooks and schools around the country who have already turned around their school dinner service and who now buy local produce and manage to cook everything from scratch on the premises. In yet this programme gives JO martyr status as if he is revolutionising school dinners for the nation.

The high profile he is giving the cause is obviously good but I don't like the way he gets in strop when things aren't going right, says he's not getting paid to do this (er, book sales!!) and that he is neglecting his family for this good cause. Oh, what a martyr!

Plus, he can't just flount the seducation health and saftey rules (like kissing the bread and adding the salt) just because of who HE is.

I agree that the state of school dinners in most schools is dreadful though and that includes independent schools. I worked in an independent school, meals contracted to Sodhexo, and the quality of the food was appalling.

Now I've had my little rant I can get on happily with my day

I agree with you Beatie it isn't really realistic for mass catering when they have a time schedule e.t.c. I can see what he is trying to achieve but not sure if it will work in the long run. In the 80's when I was at senior school we ate shite for dinner too but whenwe got home mum always cooked as a good balanced meal for the evening.

Sorry forgot to add have two ds's one only 12 months but other in reception and their budget is slightly higher then the oone JO had to deal with. Because they are only little and have no choice in what they eat they have to eat a bowl of salad or veg before their dinner then they have their dinner then they can have a pudding. I do cook a balanced meal for him and baby when the evening comes. I hope JO succeeds but teenagers are quite hard to retrain if that is what they are used to eating at school and have done for years. It was quite shocking what the food lacked in once it got broken down. The government keeps trapping on about having healthier school dinners they should give the schools more money to provide the good food our children need.

I half watched (had to keep going to see DS, who was having a coughing fit ) I think the idea is a great one and should be addressed, what they were eating really was poor. I couldn't believe the only veg was half a vat of peas which Nora said she couldn't even give away. Something has to be done and fairplay to JO for trying.

DS goes to a private school nursey 2 days a week and has a fresh cooked meal there. There is only one thing on the menu, (not quite sure what they do for vegetarians - maybe there arn't any?) The food is fresh delivered to the school every morning. When he starts reception at hopefully our local primary in September, I think the parents get asked in for tasters. I'll let you know......

His swearing annoys me too. If her doesn't swear like that around his children (and I hope he doesn't) then he shouldn't presume it is okay to do so in front of dinner ladies.

I too agree that it is very hard to retrain teenagers. It is probably best to feed them what they know but with better quality ingredents and a few hidden healthy bits inside... say like burgers made with proper minced beef but some ground up grains and veggies added too. I don't think I would have eaten the focaccia(sp?) with courgettes on the top. That's got to be about the greenest looking and greenest tasting vegetable around. ;)

That budget is terribly low though. I think other schools which have turned their meals around for the better have had to up their budget. Argh.... isn't the government listening!

Beatie I agree that he did seem to lack planning skills! I was slightly sceptical about that, as surely he has to have all those skills to run a successful restaurant?

For anyone whose interested, Woman's Hour is on now on Radio 4 and Jenni Murray is going to do an interview with a dinner lady adviser to Jamie Oliver.

Beatie .. agreed but it makes good telly having a celebrity chef doesn't it?

who would be interested in televising how a normal school cook turned round their school dinners

the most important thing is that he's bringing this issue to the forefront of the political agenda in a very gripping way

good on him and his campaign

and as a mum of pre-schoolers I hope the government listens .. if they don't they'll lose another vote here

got loads to say on this issue
I thought JO was crap. He doesnt know the 1st thing about mass catering and isnt up to the job IMO. He needs to learn to plan and shedule so the job gets done on time not an easy thing to learn at all (I should know cos I cant either)
Nora was great. As she pointed out shes not a chef just a cook and very poorly paid and not trained but still manages to run an efficent kitchen. Given training and proper help (not Jamie shouting 'do this do that' shed do a brilliant job. She made some brillaint points to JO about his lack of planning and the fact that she wont be able to reproduce his stuff if he doesnt write it down.
My dss does food science at school but from what hes told me they have done no work on nutrition at all and not cooked anything decent. Last time I spoke to him about it they were cooking chocolate pizza WTF????? Bought pizza bases with chocolate spread and marshmallows on top. What happened to learning to cook real food????
Last point is that we have a free canteen at work and all most people want is a pizza and chips etc. which we had yeaterday (yuck). so if taht what the adults want what hope for the kids????

It wouldn't make half as entertaining television if an organised more, er, 'professional' chef was involved in this campaign - you are right.

I have vowed not to give it viewing figures next week. Now, who believes me?

I enjoyed it, but I was wondering about the dishes JO prepared for them...
isn't it asking a bit much of the pupils to go from cr** burgers to foccaccia (sp?).
Why not try to make really simple dishes but in a healthy way - ie pasta and tomato sauce, pizza with veg in the tomato sauce, stew, shepherds pie...

am I being naive to think that more pupils would go for them then?

No not naive at all. You've got to start simply if the children are only used to eating chips and 'burgers' (if you can call them that)

This is where I feel JO is misguided. He lives in his own little world surrounded by expensive, good food and wasn't aware of the reality of what some children will and won't eat. It doesn't suprise me that there are some teenagers out there unable to identify the names of common vegetables - in yet it suprised JO that these kids chose burgers and chips or courgette-laced foccacia.

Like I said, I believe his intentions are good but don't believe he possesses the brains or common sense to be the best person for this job. I know he has succeeded but with a lot of trial and error by the looks of it.

He was the same with the Jamie's Kitchen programme. Good intentions but misguided. He took on unemployed 16/17 year olds who he believed were passionate about food and had burning ambitions to be chefs but were too underprivileged to fulfil this dream. wouldn't 16/17 year olds who fit into this category either be enrolled in a 6th form college or working in a pub kitchen as a Kitchen Porter?

Emkana... I think jamie did end up doing something like that. The budget is daft though!

Jamie Oliver cannot save school meals for the nation, so you can't expect him to work miracles - but he's passionate about what he does and I don't think anyone else would have had the balls to take the subject on like he had. Good luck to him! Who else would have been able to generate the type of publicity this has raised? have you read the papers or listened to the radio for the past 2 weeks? You can't get away from the subject! If it makes people more aware of good food then that's great. And if jamie makes a few more million out of it, good luck to him. His cookbooks are fantastic.

I remember reading an article by AA Gill years ago in the Sunday Times about how we get crap food because we refuse to pay for good stuff. My MIL (RIP) used to boast about paying £1.50 for a huge bag of frozen chicken portions. When we tried to point out WHY it was £1.50 - ie pumped fukl of water, chemicals, factory farmed etc, she said "I don't care!" She can be excused cos she was in her 70's and on a pension and, tbh, just didn't want to know about anything other than cost, but I don't think it's enough for schools to use that argument. ASK the parents if they would pay more for good stuff. I would!!

Good for him for getting people talking about it. Child nutrition is a big and complex issue but really starts with educating parents - and of course those kids at school are the parents of the future who need to know much much more about food in order to make better choices for their children in the future. It makes me terribly sad when I see really small children in buggies with a packet of crisps as a snack - obviously they will grow up expecting food to taste 'fatty' (more tasty) and salty and strongly flavoured. There is just no need to introduce crap foods to under 5s. IMO parenting is a big responsibility and maybe the most important aspect of that responsibility is for our children's health. And the single best way to influence good health in a child is through what they are fed.

Why on earth did he have to swear quite so much?
The children in that school will obviously have wanted to watch that programme last night - what an example to hear him effing and blinding every five minutes!

I agree that the school meals were appalling and need a radical change but I personally would rather my DDs ate a couple of crap lunches now and then, balanced out by good meals at home, rather than have a foul mouth like JO. He really let himself down I thought.

That's what educating the parents means though Issymum - changing their priorities.

I also find it difficult to believe that you can live in the 21st century with full access even to just TV and not know that a diet of chips and burgers is crap. Of course (nearly) everyone knows this, however pig-ignorant, but it's educating them to do something about it. Part of it is educating parents to understand that sending children to bed hungry is no more harmful than sending them to bed with a belly full of chips and doughnuts.

Sandyballs... yes the swearing was the one thing I found a bit offputting. But I doubt if it's anything the kids haven't heard before and it was on after 9.00pm. Beeping it would have drawn attention to it ut I'm surprised the headteacher/production staff didn't have a word in his ear. Maybe they did and he told them to F* off!

but burger & chips (homemade, including keeping skins on potatoes and spraying them with olive oil to bake in oven) can be healthy, so i thought it was a bit pointless for him to try and change their diet so radically. surely opting for something which was at least recognisable for these kids would have been a wiser strategy.

Yep - he could have started off with home made burgers and home made oven chips. He went very radical very quickly. I wonder if that was editing speeding things up?

just trying to be clever/poncey, imo. I ate at 15 the other week, btw, it was v nice, but definitely more than 37p.

I have a lot of respect for JO. Whatever happens, this will push the issue into the public eye.

He also has dyslexia, which is why I suspect he tries to avoid writing stuff down.

I do feel sorry for Mrs JO, then again if Jamie does the kids one evening a week that's more than I get!

'Kissing the bread' and making an 'obsence model' of the 'male gentials' was enough to put me off...did his mom never tell him 'its rude to play with food'.... sorry but 'big dogs knob' to him and his programme....totally gone off him now..

Disagree Issymum, it would have made good Tv if they had liked it. The programme obviously has an agenda to promote healthy food (and, yes, jamie's books) but I think it's probably just as much a learning process for Jamie as it is for the staff and kids.

Doubt if it will be giving too much away to note that, in the end, the kids all love the new food!