Deep-fried food will be banned, high-sugar items restricted and desserts will have to contain at least 50% fruit under plans to overhaul school dinners.
Schools will no longer be allowed to offer unhealthy “grab-and-go” options like sausage rolls and pizza every day but not everyone is convinced it’s a good idea.
‘Innocent pleasures’
“What a loss!” said Ysenda Maxtone Graham in The Telegraph. Treacle sponge – or “or ‘stodge’ as it was known”, did “give me the fuel I needed to get through the gruelling 90 minutes of being screamed at by the hockey mistress”.
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Typically, this government is “trying to force us to be more healthy”, but in doing so is “imposing a blanket rule” that denies us “some of life’s greatest, and surely quite innocent, pleasures”.
There is much “hysteria about spiking childhood obesity”, said William Atkinson in The Spectator. “But even if our little darlings were rapidly becoming larger darlings, taking the fun out of school dinners is no way to solve the problem”.
Look at the French. They have guidelines too but they ban vending machines, so unlike our schools where lunches are “too often topped up by tuck from shops or machines”, the French “put time and emphasis on lunch” to make sure pupils “aren’t supplementing their diets with what they can acquire outside the canteen”. So “jam roly-poly and chicken nuggets are perfectly fine if pupils aren’t also gorging on crisps, pop and Kit-Kats”.
When I was at school I had a “diet limited to around half-a-dozen ‘safe’ foods” and I would have been “branded a ‘fussy eater’”, said Victoria Richards in The Independent. Decades later “I discovered I was neurodivergent” and had a “need for safety and predictability”, particularly with “consistency of taste and texture”.
My nine-year-old son “is also Send” (special educational needs and disabilities) and when “safe foods” aren’t available for a neurodivergent child they “don’t eat at all”. The government’s plans are “upsetting for parents like me” because they might become “another way Send kids can be demonised, stigmatised and singled out”. It’s “not as simple” as saying “if they’re hungry, they’ll eat” for Send kids, who number 1.7 million in England – one in five of all pupils.
Horror stories
The plans “don’t go far enough”, said Rosie Taylor in The i Paper, and they are “unlikely to make a difference when school caterers so often seem to fail to meet the basic standards of cooking food properly”. My son had a burger that was “overcooked” and there are “plenty of other horror stories of raw, stuck together pasta and hard jacket potatoes”.
The government’s aims are “laudable” and the Unison union supports them, said Leigh Powell, Unison’s national officer for private contractors. But members working in school kitchens fear that the new standards “will be imposed on hard-working kitchen staff without tackling the systemic problems”.
Too many schools have contracted out food services to private companies, which are “laser-focused on ensuring that profit margins are healthy, rather than the food they serve”. Resources have been “cut to the bone”, so it’s important that school kitchen staff, who will be “most affected by these changes”, have their “views recognised”.
Schools “aren’t responsible” for obesity and the poor dental health of our children, said Darren Lewis in The Mirror. “Healthy eating” has been the policy at my children’s school “for many years”, but at home many parents have “a choice between heating or eating”.
Hopefully the new rules will “steer children” towards a “healthier weight and better teeth”, said The Times. “Slices of melon and bowls of berries make a fine pudding”, but some “joy” may be lost and “school memories” may be a “little less rich” without treacle tart.