Are you watching Jamie Oliver's school dinners?

[MunchedTooManyMarsLady]

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

I agree it has to be a bit of both. Extend their range of food but also show that their junk food doesn't have to be off the agenda forever. I guess I am hoping that once you have a taste for a well-seasoned, 100% real beefburger - which looks and tastes nothing like a McDonalds burger - that the kids will no longer enjoy the crap burgers.

I suppose the burgers and pizzas and homemade potato wedges/chips could be restricted to one day per week and then other options introduced on other days. For most of us it is second nature to give our children pasta with vegetables, fishpies, chicken casserole.

You only have to watch 'You are What you eat' to realise that people DO think it is acceptable to eat chips and fried crap every single day.

It is insulting that the school just gave into that and served it every single day and perhaps Nora is to blame a bit. I'm sure there are other processed foods available to schools like lasagne, curry and rice, potato hotpot etc...etc.... Whilst they may not have contained a much greater proportion of vegetables or nutrtion, at least it is variety.

There should at least be guidelines in place which say only chips one day per week, no fizzy drinks for sale.

It seems to me that schools start off with good intentions in the primary sector but then leave the teenagers to eat whatever. At my mum's primary school chocolate and crisps have been banned from packed lunches and only healthy snacks are allowed. The parents actually like the rule. The children are only allowed to drink water or milk and have those sports water bottles which they can access all day long. Who knows what state the school dinners are in though.

Am I the only person who remembers school dinners in the early 1970s, as quite spectacularly horrible and arguably lacking in nutrition? We had to be forced to eat quite revolting meals, devoid of fresh veg. I still shudder at the memory. No golden age there.

Sustain is pressing for a children's food bill, but the government isn't keen. The food industries have masses of money and exert a lot of pressure, the fruit and veg producers have a lot less.

There are some good initiatives, not just in schools, to get kids aware of food and eating - as well as the companies like Lets Do Lunch which are providing better school dinners. I did a piece on this a while ago; it was both fascinating, and quite heartening actually.

I dotn think that comparing chefs in a restaurant with school cooks is fair as chefs are well trained have a reasonable budget and are preparing food to order whereas school cooks are not trained have a pathetic budget and have to produce vast quantities of food in a short space of time. It would be better to compare them with staff canteens where in my experience the food can range from just as bad asthese school dinners to brilliant but the budgets are generally much higher.

Also bring teaching children how to cook and about nutrition in general would help

Money is really the issue isn't it?

Isnt it always Beatie

this is a very interesting story

And it's not the only one. I was dead chuffed to discover.

In my day at school (I left 22 (yikes!!) years ago) The teachers used to eat the same as us and when it changed to the canteen type lunches, the teachers had the same choice. I wonder what the teachers there ate? Probably don't have to think to hard about that one! Surely the Head should have had a bit more clout with the menu and must have known and approved that this type of rubbery crap was being served.

I don't know cos DS is too young (starts reception in September) But how much these days do parents have to pay for school dinners?

Motherinferior I agree on the school dinners of the 70s. Vile they were. I vividly remember one child choking quite seriously on the gristle laden meat they served up. It's given me a lifelong horror of cabbage and manchester tart.

It is a question of money I think. It would be nice if this programme and campaign sparked a manifesto commitment from one of the main parties.

My friend who teaches in JO'd primary school says the post lunch behaviour of the children has improved drastically.

She said that at first they were reluctant to eat the food but now 16 weeks in, they are eating it quite happily.

She does say that the lack of a proper pudding is leaving the children a little hungry. The school is in a very deprived area and for many of the children this meal will be their only hot meal of the day, for a smaller number still, it may well be their only meal

Furball our school dinners are £1.35. I'd willingly pay double for a good quality meal for ds.

My DCs are at private school and we pay £3 a day for lunch, but they are still crap

Not chips every day but still way too much processed stuff like smiley faces and chicken o's and turkey dinosaurs!

Although that sounds cheap Puddle. If you paid double that that would be £13.50 a week on dinners and over £50 a month. Can we honestly expect anyone to be able to afford that, when you could quite easily send them in with a packed lunch that you know exactly what is in it.

and when I said 'you' puddle - I didn't mean you personally

Funnily enough furball I am just about to start DS on packed lunches and have another thread going for ideas! I know what you are saying and maybe I didn't mean exactly twice the amount, which as you say soon adds up. But I would pay more than I am paying at the moment for ds to have a nutritious hot meal in the middle of the day, rather than sandwiches etc.

I wouldn't.

I like the idea of him having a good hot meal in the middle of the day, but at £30 a month, I can't afford that, so he has it maybe twice a week. No problem because he gets good food at home (most of the time!), but lots of kids wouldn't - they'd go home to chips again!

School dinners here are £7 per week. If 37 pence of that is for food, doubling the food budget would "only" mean increasing the price per week by £1.85.

That's a good point. You don't have to double what the parents pay - just double what is spent on ingredients. The parents won't be paying too much more and the school/company/LEA/whoever will still make their profit or cover their overheads.

I didn't have school dinners at primary school - I went home for lunch. No-one seems to do that any more, do they? I vividly remember (when my Mum was supply teaching at my school so I had to stay for lunch - took sandwiches though) a child throwing up on the table because a vile dinner lady "forced" him to eat something he didn't want. You weren't allowed to say you didn't want something and you had to try and clear your plate.

I had school dinners at secondary school - canteen style - and, yes, I think I had chips every day.

At Uni I lived in catered halls of residence in my first year and the food was grim. LOL @ Puddle remembering Manchester Tart, that always caused much hilarity when it was on the menu at Uni - me being from Manchester (oh, ha ha ha). For those who have never experienced this culinary delight here is a recipe, along with Manchester Pudding and Manchester Cake, neither of which I have ever heard of.

My Mum was a dinner lady in the seventies, so we had packed lunches!

Just a quick post to Stupid Girl

Children are taught in year 7 and 8 and 9 what makes up a healthy diet. I have spent hours trying to educate kids about the things that they need to eat.

They can all say what is good for you and then they go and eat all the crap that they can get their hands on. Often they are given money by their parents to get breakfast in the local Asdas, they will buy a Mars bar and a can of Coke. They are fed crap at home and advertised crap all day.

Trust me some of us try very hard to get the point over, and it is part of the NC at KS2 and KS3. The sad thing is that we have to do it with a budget of a few quit while the crap sellers have advertising budgits of millions. Is it any wonder, then, that they know they need vitamins, but think that Sunny D is 'healthy'

Furball, in the school I work in taechers eat the same food as the kids and we all pay the going rate. We could get the food for nothing but we all pay and the money raised goes back into school funds. There is always good quality food on offer, casseroles, fresh fruit and veg, salads, a wonderful homemade quicheetc. There is also crap and the kids most often go for the crap.

Ds (3.5) goes to a brilliant but very ordinary nursery school - its in a sort of not particularly big nissan hut with a single small cooker in the corner. They do cooking every week and talk about what goes into food. What I think is brilliant is that the cooking is not only sticky sweet things - sure they do make chocolate crispy cakes and ice plain biscuits, but they do lots of savoury things - cheese scones, stuffed tomatoes, homemade pizzas with lots of vegetables. They also talk about their bodies and what they need to give them energy (with the unfortunate result that DS currently has a bit of a fixation about his skeleton!). He likes sieving anything, cracking and beating eggs and peeling and chopping carrots. Compare this to my brothers who have never had a single cookery lesson in their life and me who did cookery for 1 year at the age of 11 before having it withdrawn and only offered going forward to the bottom streams (because of course people with lots of O levels won't need to cook). I seriously think you have to catch them at this age with basic food and nutrition and to keep it up - you then wouldn't have 14 year olds not recognising basic vegetables.

Thanks happymerryberries Sounds like your school dinners are better than the school from last night. I don't think there was a choice apart from rubberised processed rubbish. I wonder why your school also serves crap as well?