A new report has urged headteachers to ban packed lunches and I’m somewhat enraged. Yes, how unlike me. Apparently the days of the turkey twizzler are well gone but some aspects of the report show it’s authors are living in cloud cuckoo land. Ban packed lunches whilst lowering the prices of school dinners? How terribly naive. Ban packed lunches and make a few quid more on selling school dinners more like. If you have a captive audience, you have them by the balls.
I have several actual issues with this though, mostly focused on the food rather than the ker-ching opportunities for schools or catering organisations. Firstly the school dinner portions at our kids primary school are far too small for our kids appetites. When the boy used to have a school dinner as he started reception, he came home afterwards and immediately had a second lunch. And there is no option for a second helping (not even employing Oliver Twist style please sir can I have some more tactics). Neither of our school aged kids are tubby but they are very active and burn a lot of energy. They walk or scoot to and from school, and trips in the car only tend to be taken when necessary. They often cover two or three miles a day easily.
Secondly, looking at the menu for the final 3 weeks of term, the kids can have jacket potato 10 out of the 15 days, with pizza & hotdogs filling up 2 of the remaining 5 days. That’s hardly inspiring and whilst the kind of healthy pack lunch wifey prepares probably costs as much as the £2 school dinner, at least we know where the meat has come from. Horsemeat was found in a few school dinners up in Lancashire, so the quality is not as great as the song and dance has suggested, even given the massive improvement in the quality of school dinners in the last few years.
Looking again at the menu, there is too much reliance on chicken and turkey, which can be raised very cheaply if you’re not adverse to a bit of animal cruelty. We only eat chicken when we’re happy of the ethical provenance of the fowl.
Rob Rees, chairman of the Children’s Food Trust, said his own children preferred school dinners, but added some parents feel they are expensive. He said, “They absolutely love it. It’s not the school meals of the past. It’s wonderful fish pies, bologneses, lasagnes.” No mention of the fish fingers, turkey burgers, sausage rolls or hotdogs there.
I think a much better approach is to police what goes into a packed lunch if the government are worried about the quality of food kids are having for lunch. It’s something our kids school does and it shouldn’t take too much common sense to implement something like this. We’re lucky in a way, at our kids school the packed lunch kids get to go in first, so they don’t spend half their lunch queuing for a school dinner. This means the boy wants to have a packed lunch and Fifi has just announced she wants the same.