Glasgow's school meals boss calls for flexibility on healthy food rules

21st May 2010, 12:04pm

The head of the company which provides school meals in Glasgow, called for “flexibility” on increasingly strict healthy-eating rules which he says are “chasing kids into the hands of fast food shops, chippies and snack vans” outside school gates.

In Fergus Chamber's talk, he said that the Scottish Government's healthy eating guidelines are "a good thing", but that some flexibility must be allowed on schools meals content as pupils were voting with their stomachs by rejecting school food which by law now must include only minimal levels of fat, salt and sugar.

He said that instead they are making a "100-metre dash" at lunchtime to the nearest fast food outlets which were "only too willing to cash in", to fill up on food loaded with all three of the offending ingredients.

At the conference run by the University of Glasgow's Faculty of Medicine, subtitled "Bringing lasting change to Scotland's diet", Mr Chambers told a packed audience of health professionals, policy makers and academics that school meals uptake in Glasgow secondary schools has fallen to an average of 38%, with some schools as low as 24%.

He commented: "I absolutely appreciate and accept that the Scottish diet, with its high levels of fat, salt and sugar, had to be addressed and that the Food Standards Agency Scotland has been moving in the right direction.

 "But I also now believe that the most recent rules, which allow no flexibility to those providing school meals, have fallen victim to the Law of Unintended Consequences – which states that an intervention in a complex system invariably creates unanticipated and often undesirable outcomes."

"We are attempting to compete with the lunchtime fast food industry with at least one hand tied behind our backs. The school meals service has become a punchball for the Scottish diet.

"We need a lasting solution which is practical to avoid the 100 metre dash. That could involve keeping kids in the playground at lunchtime, using licensing laws to clamp down on shops selling unhealthy food to children or banning food vans within a large radius of school gates."

The conference was held in the city's Hilton Grosvenor Hotel on Monday 17 May.

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