The Food Our Children Eat: How to Get Children to Like Good Food. Joanna Blythman
school meals were widely axed in favour of cheaper, large-scale outside catering operations. Those that were retained had to match the lowest commercial tender.
Later in the 1980s, cuts in entitlement to free school meals reinforced the damage done by CCT. Fewer children qualified for free meals and this reduced the total demand. Less uptake means fewer economies of scale and makes it even harder to provide wholesome meals on a low budget. While in 1979 some 64 per cent of children ate school meals, by 1996 that figure had dropped to 43 per cent.
The end result is that there is basically no real cooking going on in the vast majority of schools. On the hot front, bought-in, ready-prepared Kievs, pizzas, even baked potatoes are simply reheated. Burgers and sausages are cooked briefly. Everything is ‘portion-controlled’ to eliminate waste and must consist of a single or small number of units of food which can be stored for some time, preferably frozen. Even the apparently healthy and wholesome option of soup is characteristically straight out of the packet – just add water.
In certain areas, local authorities are trying to make school meals more profitable by converting cafeterias into ‘food courts’ which ape fast-food chains. The usual burgers, pizzas and fizzy drinks are served from US-style food counters with illuminated displays of the food on offer – just like high-street chains – by staff wearing baseball caps. These ‘initiatives’ are sponsored by manufacturers of junk food and fizzy drinks whose corporate logos are emblazoned over the eating area, on polystyrene plates and cups and on staff uniforms. This trend means that children get no respite from junk-food advertising even at school.
Other schools now have no hot food whatsoever, a consequence of further local authority budget cuts. They tend to serve only the very worst sort of mass-produced sandwich which even makes its petrol-station forecourt equivalent seem gourmet. Many schools have been told to offer salads because nutritionists advocate these as a healthy choice. Once again, a child will be lucky to see a simple sliced tomato, cucumber disc, carrot baton or lettuce leaf. Instead, it’s plastic tubs filled with bought-in offerings, conspicuously short on vegetables and instead loaded up with starchy, stodgy offerings of rice, corn, pasta, pulses or egg, all slathered in commercial dressings.
Healthy-eating guidelines abound and school catering services can all offer chapter and verse on how they are doing their bit in this regard. But these guidelines are applied within the limits of mass-catering processed foods; they rarely mean that children are given more fresh fruit and vegetables or more wholesome basic ingredients. On the contrary, the most tangible manifestation of healthy-eating guidelines is an increased presence of highly processed items in the form of ‘low-fat’, ‘lite’ and ‘diet’ foods and drinks.
There are different justifications offered for the ‘healthiness’ of these items depending on what they are. The first is that they use margarine or vegetable fat instead of butter or lard. Yet some scientists believe that the trans-fats in the former may be at least as unhealthy as the saturates in the latter. The second is the substitution of skimmed milk for whole milk. However, although it has less fat, experts do not agree over whether skimmed milk is better for children. The third is the substitution of artificial sweeteners for sugar. Sweeteners do contain fewer calories than sugar, but many scientists have reservations over the safety of the former and whether or not they actually result in lower sugar consumption.
So the jury is still out on all these issues. But the current net effect of well-intentioned ‘healthy-eating’ guidelines in schools is that children are eating more heavily processed, technologically altered foods than before, foods that have not been tried and tested over time and whose long-term effect on human health is not yet known.
Processed techno-foods fit in very well with the economics of modern school catering, which boils down to running a cheap, lowest-common-denominator service with as little waste as possible. There is absolutely no slack for experimenting with more natural and nourishing foods which might require more labour, some food education and scope for experimentation.
In fact the prevailing budget pressures on school caterers – whether they are privatised or public sector – mean that they cannot afford to take any risk at all and so instead it’s now customary to major on the sure-fire ‘children’s foods’ such as crisps, fizzy drinks and confectionery because these are guaranteed to sell. These items have a long shelf life too. No surprise, then, when the typical statutory school cafeteria fruit bowl – generally full of the dullest fruits around, such as mealy-textured, bruised apples, shrunken oranges, bright green or wizened black bananas – has few takers.
Children aren’t always very good at describing school food. Here’s a taste of some of the delightful dishes commonly on offer.
A menu of modern school meals classics
For main course:
TURKEY/CHICKEN KIEVS/NUGGETS, SPAGHETTI AND POTATO SHAPES
(Cheap, processed, intensively reared meat in fatty fried crumb coating; sweet, stodgy tinned spaghetti; reconstituted dried potato and additives in fatty coating)
HOT DOG ROLL/SAUSAGE ROLL, BEANS AND POTATO SHAPES
(More cheapest of the cheap meat full of additives and water, stuck in a pappy, over-refined white roll or coated with artery-clogging, fat-laden pastry, with sweet and salty beans, plus spuds as above for added stodge)
VEGETABLE CURRY, MIXED VEG AND RICE
(This more promising-sounding vegetarian alternative consists of frozen ready-cut vegetables defrosted in sweet, starch-thickened catering curry sauce with waterlogged frozen vegetable ‘macedoine’ and gluey white rice)
CHEESE AND BACON/BROCCOLl/SWEETCORN FLAN, TURNIP, POTATOES
(Rubbery Cheddar, miscellaneous ‘savoury’ ingredients and reconstituted dried egg in a greasy layer of under-cooked pastry, with boiled diced turnip – about the cheapest frozen vegetable that can be bought in and about the least likely to appeal to children – with a scoop of rehydrated ‘mashed’ potatoes)
SAVOURY PASTIE, PEAS, CHIPS
(An unidentifiable-by-ingredient mulch combining processed meat such as corned beef or starchy potatoes with industrial fillers and flavourings, encased in lardy pastry; watery peas and reheated chips)
MEAT CASSEROLE, CABBAGE, POTATO
(A small amount of meat, often sausage, in thickened starchy sauce with frozen vegetables; boiled-to-death cabbage and the regulation scoop of rehydrated mash)
ROAST MEAT AND POTATOES, SPROUTS
(Pre-cooked, thinly sliced meat reheated in catering brown sauce, ready-cooked roasted potatoes and sulphurous, over-cooked sprouts)
‘HOME-MADE PIZZA’
(Thin slices of ready-made catering dough topped with watered-down tomato paste and rubbery Cheddar, then baked)
BATTERED FISH WITH TOMATO
(A small amount of desirable white fish dwarfed by its fatty batter, served with unadorned tinned tomatoes)
For pudding:
JELLY WHIP
(Shuddery synthetic dessert containing a litany of additives and no real anything else apart from generous amounts of sugar and gelatine)
DOUGHNUT AND CUSTARD
(Deep-fried, sugary stodge lubricated with extra sugar, colourings and flavourings, plus sugary, additive-laden ‘custard’, usually from a just-add-water mix)