School dinners

There was an item on the news last week about a headmaster who had complained about the quality of food supplied to his pupils from outside contract caterers.  It does indeed look disgustingly grey and mushy with hardly a green vegetable in sight and was no doubt shipped in from a distant factory.

Photo from Redbridge Community School

However what shocked me even more than the food quality was the dining hall where pupils were eating from disposable cartons, they looked like polystyrene, with small disposable wooden cutlery.  One pupil said he thought if he added salt and pepper to his wooden fork it might have more flavour than his meal.  

There was no table setting, pupils seemed to park themselves anywhere to eat many wearing their outside coats.  The used utensils would be thrown into bins destined for landfill as they left. What life lesson does that give them.  

I remember the ritual of school dinners when I was at junior school.  We left our classrooms and walked a short distance alongside the village stream to queue outside the canteen, which had its own vegetable garden.  Once the supervising teacher arrived and entered the building we followed to our allotted tables, already set for lunch with cutlery, water and glasses.  The teacher announced the days menu and we all said grace. 

Each table had 9 pupils, one of whom was the server, an older pupil who went to the counter to collect the food, two plates at a time.  There was no choice but it was possible to specify your portion size. The server asked each child what they wanted and had to memorise the order, say a small portion of meat, large of potatoes, medium vegetables, with most probably different portions for the other plate.  Food was served onto plates by the dinner ladies, who were all local, they had cooked everything that morning.

We were not allowed to leave food on our plates, which was never a problem for me as that was the way I was brought up.  Besides the food was fresh and delicious, there was nothing I didn’t like. Puddings especially were excellent, various sponges, treacle, jam, ginger, all with custard, fruit pies or crumbles, rice or semolina. If a child refused to eat they had to sit in front of their plate until they did even if it meant being late back to class.

At my secondary school there was a rota for pupils setting the tables supervised by a teacher.  As we filed into the dining room we each collected our own napkin from our pigeon hole,  a fresh one brought from home each Monday and returned for washing on Friday. The food, again a no choice menu,  was delivered in tureens after grace and dished out by who ever was head of the table usually a prefect.  

At both schools lunch was part of our learning, serving food to others, memorising orders, portion control, the sociability of sitting down to share a meal together.  It’s sad that children today don’t have the benefit of nutritional food or that basic social training 

It’s a testament to the quality of school meals in this town that by mid afternoon leaving time the supermarkets are invaded by hundreds of children buying snacks, to the extent they have to be supervised by security staff and directed to their own checkouts to avoid delaying other shoppers. Kids then wander down the street digging into large bags of crisps, eating full packs of biscuits, bakery items, sweets, fizzy drinks, unhealthy rubbish probably costing more than their school meal.  I was taught that it was ill mannered to eat in the street and I never have, we certainly didn’t expect any snacks once we left school for the day and waited for our evening meal.

The education system is doing children such an injustice, our obesity rate continues to climb while the contract caterers and snack manufacturers are coining it in. School dinners have to be provided within a budget but health and well being don’t seem to be factored into the cost.