Register

To receive our newsletter, click below…

Raising the profile of school meals

3rd April 2009, 2:50pm

In its past three issues Cost Sector Catering has followed the build-up to The School Food Summit by offering a say to all the parties involved – from children to heads, parents to kitchen staff and caterers themselves. On the following pages you can read about what happened on the day. Reports by David Foad and Clare Riley.

Early risers turning on their radios on March 25th might have noticed a fairly unrelenting theme running through the news bulletins and current affairs stories that day – school meals.

It was the same on television, with LACA chairman Neil Porter slipping comfortably onto the sofa in the GMTV studio to offer his thoughts; and if you had time you could find the topic being taken up on the BBC website and in the pages of many daily newspapers.

If LACA's plan was to put the school meals service at the centre of the nation's attention – then March 25th was the day it succeeded.

So what was all the fuss about? On the face of it the introduction of some highly technical nutrient specifications in September of this year is not exactly the sort of topic to get the pulses racing.

The new nutrient-based standards are simply the continuation of a policy of getting junk food off school menus and training the appetites of the nation's youngsters to more readily accept healthier food.

Everyone who remembers the feeling of national outrage that greeted Jamie Oliver's televised foray into the school kitchen will agree in principle on the need to improve the quality of school meals.

The Turkey Twizzler he so successfully held up to ridicule still stands as a motif for all that was wrong with school food at the time.

When it was combined with figures highlighting the alarming growth in childhood obesity and diseases related to it, there was a groundswell of opinion in favour of change and school meals was identified by the Government as the vehicle to drive it.

In the early stages more money was found for the school meals service and food-based standards were introduced, both moves that have been more or less unanimously accepted as a good thing.

But even while this positive action was taking place the warning lights were starting to flash in some places as older pupils, in particular, went off site at lunch time in search of the burger and chips they were now denied at school.

For secondary school catering operators these days, selling fewer meals is not simply a matter to be shrugged off with the consolation that the numbers may be replenished by next September's new intake.

With local authorities demanding that catering services at least break even and ideally make a profit, a drop in uptake threatens the very future of the service.

Now, of course, the heat is really being turned up as services juggle with computer software to produce the sort of nutrient analysis that the standards are happy with.

And they fear that the closer they get to complying with the nutrient demands, the farther their meals move from anything that might be acceptable to picky teenagers.