Are nutrient compliant menus feasible?

3rd April 2009, 3:00pm

Independent consultant and former LACA chair Pat Fellows has her doubts about the practicality of the new nutrient-based standards, as she told delegates to the summit. David Foad reports.

'Is it possible to produce compliant menus? The short answer is definitely 'yes', according to Pat Fellows.

But she warns that there is a world of difference between possibility and practicality.

And that difference could ultimately cost the school meals service its viability and its future.

"The nutrient standards are so complicated it takes sophisticated computer software to be able to check on the nutrient analysis of any meal you draw up.

"And then you find that any small change you make to comply in one regard has an impact elsewhere.

"For example, I devised a menu of lasagne, garlic bread and salad – very tasty and nutritious you might think, but when it was analysed it was found to contain too much fat, so the cheese came out.

"Now the problem was that it didn't have enough protein, and so the problem continues.

"Not only that, but two different software analysis programmes gave different sets of figures, further adding to the sense of confusion."

She told Summit delegates that the existing food-based standards provided all the guidance caterers needed to produce tasty, healthy meals that have markedly less salt, fat and sugar than menus of the recent past.

"All we needed to do was introduce proper cooking and high quality ingredients, not competitive tendering, and work to the food based standards. With that we could achieve an awful lot.

"This government started by doing a lot of really good things but now they have too many advisors. Even Jamie Oliver's menus wouldn't reach the standards," she said.

"I'm passionate about school meals, but they should have made the standards guidance, not law.

"If the whole thing is flawed and impossible to achieve without fiddling, what's the point of it? The amount of time and money spent on it is ridiculous. If you take an authority like Birmingham where they've got around 50 secondary schools and nearly every school has different ethnic groups, they need different menus," she points out.

"It's so disappointing that at last money is coming in and it's a high profile issue, and home economics is coming back onto the curriculum, and it had the possibility to save millions of pounds in health bills, and it's all being messed up by the nutrient standards.

"The money should be going on the food on the plate. Let's buy fresh vegetables and prepare them. Let's encourage the children to go back to school meals."

It was at the 2008 LACA Conference last summer that Pat Fellows grabbed a slot in the conference programme to give her own views on the new nutrient-based standards.

The reaction that presentation drew and the volume of concern raised by members to the issue were among the important drivers that prompted LACA to fund the School Food Summit.

The electronic polling available at the conference showed in a snap poll 88% of delegates believed it was impossible to produce food that met the new requirements and yet was appealing to secondary age pupils.

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