The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Youthful minds need to be fed
What do you remember about school dinners? Ours were often the best part of the day.
They were cooked from scratch each morning by Mrs Kettles in the kitchen at my 30-pupil school in Perthshire.
Main courses and puddings arrived through the hatch in stainless steel trays to be divided up into ample, delicious portions. Great steaming plates of mince and tatties, fish pie, apple sponge and pink custard. Oh the custard.
Everyone had the same thing. We sat at small round tables, passing the water jug, mishandling knives, not talking with our mouths full.
Those lunchtime rituals in the gym hall probably went a long way to creating the semi-civilised, sweettoothed adult human you see before you today.
One time a replacement cook had an unfortunate mix-up with the cinnamon and the pepper. No amount of custard could fix it.
The fact my brother and I still talk about this 40odd years on is an indication of the standard we mini-epicures had come to expect.
So when I saw the photos of school dinners in The Courier this week my heart broke a little for all the pupils whose mouths will never water at the memories of a Mrs Kettles spread.
There isn’t an Instagram filter that could make this lot look appetising.
The plastic trays contained mystery meat, watery potatoes and undercooked pizza.
Perhaps it’s a mercy the portions were so small.
At one point we wondered about presenting them with captions asking readers if they could guess what the food was.
But it felt a bit flippant. We’re talking about feeding children. Some of them might not get another hot meal all day. It’s not a laughing matter.
Tayside Contracts, which supplies six million school dinners a year across Angus, Dundee and Perth in Kinross, says it is reviewing portion sizes, if not standards.
A spokeswoman told us: “Whether or not they are ‘nice’ is, of course, subjective.
“However, they are certainly ‘healthy’ as all Tayside Contracts school meals fully comply with Scottish Government requirements.”
They can comply with all the nutritional requirements they like but if they’re going straight in the bin, no one – from the pupil to the taxpayer – is prospering.
I am absolutely not knocking the people doing their best to prepare these school dinners.
Cost and efficiency are king in council budgets.
And like white dog mess and Jim’ll Fix It, the school cook lovingly preparing 30 dishes a day from fresh ingredients is another part of my childhood that’s not coming back.
Catering staff are doing their best to serve up hundreds of pre-cooked meals made in bulk, frozen and shipped out from a central kitchen under tight budget constraints.
But is this any way to get the best out of growing bodies and minds? And what does it say about our attitude to food that hearty school dinners of the 1970s have shrunk to this?
We famously spend a lower percentage of our household income on food than consumers in other countries.
And our desire for cheap food has seen British farmers and suppliers priced out by lower quality, mass-produced imports from Europe and New Zealand.
Surveys tell us Britons are so clueless about nutrition, half of us don’t eat any fruit or vegetables in a typical week.
Meanwhile poor nutrition in childhood has been shown to affect brain development and put
people at greater risk of diet-related illness such as obesity and diabetes.
If children are skipping school dinners altogether they’re in no state to get the best out of lessons. I know how narky and distracted I get when I haven’t eaten.
And if those children are on free school dinner because of their families’ low incomes, well there’s this little thing called an attainment gap you might have heard of.
Some of the parents I work with were intending to quiz their children harder on what they were getting for school dinners.
Some were wondering whether to send them off with packed lunches.
I’m sure they won’t mind me pointing out the middle-class privilege that gives them that option.
The mum who sent us the photos is on benefits.
Free school meals were a lifeline. But now she’s having to juggle her money that bit more carefully so she can stretch to packed lunches.
Because at least then her daughter will eat.
Free school dinners aren’t a choice for a lot of families. They’re a guarantee their child will get at least one decent meal a day. It’s why Marcus Rashford is better known as a food poverty campaigner than a footballer and we have holiday hunger programmes across Tayside and Fife.
You can sit in judgment on their parents’ lifestyle choices all you like. But they’re not the ones whose menu options are eat crap or starve. We can’t put a Mrs Kettles in every school kitchen but we can at least ask councils to spend a bit more if that’s what it takes to put a decent meal down in front of every child.