Growing up in New Zealand, I never really understood school dinners. Food came from home; everyone packed a lunch. Not the case over here, where the majority of kids in primary and secondary schools trudge into the canteen each day for their meal.
The meals are crap.
There’s been a series on the telly, Jamie Oliver’s School Dinners. I believe Mr Oliver’s fame has spread far and wide. What respect I lost for him for adding Heinz Baked Beans to his swank restaurant’s menu in return for a secret payoff (which, in fairness, was used to subsidise the training of new chefs) he’s regained and then some with this series, which is all on his own initiative. He’s clearly appalled at the state of school dinners, and passionate about changing them. Sample Jamie: “Lets be honesty here, my kids aren’t going to a state school, are they? I’m not sending them to a state school. But there’s a lot of kids that don’t have that.” The show also spends a lot of time showing him looking pale and sad as he realises just how poor children’s nutrition has become.
I often tell of how, on my second day in the UK, I thought I’d buy a sandwich from a supermarket for lunch. The average sandwich cost 2.50 or so. A packet of crisps and a chocolate bar, on the other hand, cost a cool 70p. I was stunned. No wonder people here have problems with nutrition. It is hard to find food that isn’t full of crap – and when you do find it, you are made to pay for the privilege.
I believe the single most important change in the lifestyle of members of Western society in the last few decades is our food. It has changed, massively. The amount of garbage and strange chemicals and processed fats and sugers eaten by your average person today must dwarf the equivalent twenty years ago, let alone forty years ago.
Nutrition has a direct impact on our experience of life. This is no secret, but the extent of this effect can be startling. Look at Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me experience, and that of the family on Jamie’s show who cut out junky food for a week – massive changes in well-being in both cases, happening with surprising quickness.
Poor nutrition leads (apart from stunted physical development) to an inability to concentrate, a lack of focus, peaks and troughs in energy, depression, and all the fallout that comes from these things. These are exactly the problems we point to in youth.
We know they are undernourished; we know they are restless; we know one leads to the other – but there is a terrible reluctance to draw that simple line of causality. Misbehaving and underachieving young people are treated with anti-social behaviour orders and prozac or ritalin. We are medicating and criminalising people for the effects of their poor nutrition.
Another documentary fairly recently featured a Tory MP going to live on the dole for a week, to experience life on that incredibly tight budget. The scariest thing to him, and to me, was the amount of medication in use in the society. The vast majority of adults and children were on some behaviour-management medication like ritalin or prozac. The prevalence of these drugs was incredible – “everyone I know has a prescription”, one of the mothers said.
This isn’t a co-incidence.
Props to Jamie for trying to do something about, harnessing kid’s interest and showing them that simple, good food can be a pleasure to eat. Now, his changes aren’t sustainable as-is – novelty wears off fast for kids, and most weeks there won’t be a TV celebrity dancing around in a corn costume exhorting them to eat healthy food. They’ll want the quick fix of junk food soon enough. Older children than primary age are an exponentially tougher sell – the preview for next weeks episode showed some pupils staging an anti-Jamie demonstration. But for all these limitations it’s a start, it’s a demonstration of the viability of healthy food on tight budgets, and its a call to arms.
The responsibility for children’s health is, in the first instance, the parent’s – but we can’t rely on this. Parents are human – often ill-informed, often resistant to change, usually stubborn. Absolute love for their children doesn’t mean they aren’t doing them harm, as any given ‘kids gone wild’ talk show episode/reality show expose will demonstrate. Some parents will screw up their kids and fiercely defend their right to do so.
It is not right for society to rely on parents. That leaves the state carrying the can. I believe schools have a duty of care to their pupils – they are the only direct intersection of the state with its youngest members, the only time they are all reachable.
School dinners sounds like a silly, small topic – but really what we’re talking about is the nutrition and health of the entire next generation. It really is that scale of issue. It must be taken seriously. I hope Jamie’s series gets more people talking and brings about more changes. It’s a start.
(One of Charles Clarke’s schemes for the government, talked about without great seriousness, was transforming the role of schools to make them the centre of their communities – adding childcare facilities, health clinics, adult education classes, community law offices, etc etc – a one-stop shop for community well-being. I love this notion. It would mean a huge transition in the meaning of ‘school’, but that transition is already underway. But that’s a whole big issue to itself…)
(I also liked where Jamie snubbed meeting Bill Clinton because he was pissed that the guy and entourage had turned up in his restaurant, having approved the menu two weeks in advance, and then decided they wanted something else entirely that wasn’t on the menu. Hee hee hee.)