Article reprinted from Pure Facts July/August 2005
British parents and educators have learned a lot about school
foods recently and the uproar has reached all the way to 10 Downing
Street.
Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver has put the spotlight on a long-kept
secret - that the food most schools provide for their students is
dreadful, with the Turkey Twizzler being held up as a symbol of all
that is wrong with the lunches.
By the time Oliver began filming a TV series on England's school
kitchens, the government allowance for a child's lunch was less than
half of what was spent on a prisoner's meal and less than half of
what France and Italy spend on feeding their children.
How did things get so bad?
Like school foods in the U.S., British school food programs started
out with the best of intentions. England began a school lunch program
in 1906. Years later the National Health Service promoted nutritious
food for mothers and infants by providing free milk, orange juice
and cod liver oil. School foods were required to follow strict nutritional
standards. When the Thatcher government came to power in the late
1970s, these programs were the victims of cost-cutting. The changes
were hailed under the slogans of "parental choice" and "no
nanny state." The government began awarding contracts to the
lowest bidder, and traditional foods were replaced by Twizzlers, sugary
drinks, fries and chocolate bars. (Scotland, however, banned Twizzlers years
ago.)
Political damage-control
As Chef Oliver was preparing to show up at the Prime Minister's door
with a "Feed Me Better" petition and 271,000 signatures, the
government quickly assembled a package of sweeping reforms and 220
million pounds to fund them. "It's certainly very positive,"
Oliver commented, "Twenty years too late, but we're talking about
the right sort of money."
Despite the hasty government initiatives, change might not come quickly. A
school meals task force is not expected to have nutrition standards
ready until September of 2007. The reforms can be delayed by long-term
contracts many of the schools have with the companies providing the
junky food.
Healthy initiatives
Saint Barnabas School in Worcestershire reported dramatic improvements
in the students after they removed dyes and preservatives from their
school food. Teachers at the Windsor High School in Halesowen have
noticed that the students are calmer after they removed vending machine
junk food.
One nutritionist described a Twizzler
as "full of mechanically reclaimed turkey, every part of the bird
you wouldn't eat if you knew what it was." It has been described
as resembling "the innersole of a shoe, so untextured and so tasteless
that without a good deal of additives it would taste of nothing and
would fall apart at the first touch."
Some schools didn't wait for the Twizzler crisis to peak, but have
made changes and seen positive results. Our Lady of Grace primary
school in London got rid of the chicken nuggets and fries in favor
of lamb casseroles and salads and find that discipline problems are
way down, and test scores way up. Teachers see children who are no
longer sleepy and irritable after lunch. One teacher notes "They
just feel happier rather than uptight."
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