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.)
lol, not just me then:
http://rafahpundits.com/2005/03/british-band-of-dinners.html
Cheers for the linkage. Yeah, it’s amazing – that constipation thing left me gobsmacked. Incredible.
Loving your rafahpundits work, btw 🙂
I’m with you on the school dinners thing. Its increadbly important to get kids eating good ( by which I mean nutritious balanced etc) food as young as possible. Not just from a growing children point of view. It may sound nit picky, but its all a big part of what you could call the infantalism of British culture (the nostalga for nursery foods as evidence), adults eating with the same bland palate they had as children (salt, sugar and fat), then they pass it on to their kids in turn.
Think I’ll stop typling now before I rant anymore!
Morgue wrote: “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.”
And Then
“It is not right for society to rely on parents. That leaves the state carrying the can.”
Are you seriously advocating that the state should take over childrearing? Have you really thought about this? Have you looked at states where this happens and seen that it’s a good thing? Look at the Taliban for example.
This is a very slippery slope. Sure parents fail, I know that better thanm most people because I am one. But I know with even more certainty that there is no way the state could even do the simplest thing in childrearing, like ensuring a balanced diet. How would this work? A social worker or nutritionist in each home? I don’t think so.
For someone with supposedly liberal ideas this is a very conservative, right wing, paternalistic approach to take to the problem of parenting choices.
I’ll tell you a horror story, and I’ll tell you why the state could do nothing about it before the event. I was at a summer camp in the states. After the traditional camps we did a two week “Burn Camp” for kids from Washington DC. Most of these kids were victims of abuse. I remember one kid as clear as day. His name was Lorenzo, but everyone called him “Huggy” because he was the guy that always helped others and cheered them up. He had third degree burns across 90% of his body. He was missing several fingers on each hand and, after years of plastic surgury and stuff, still looked like he had melted.
He got his burns when his dad punished him for breaking a window by pouring petrol on him and setting him alight.
His dad is now in prison.
The stae could never have prevented this crime. Why? Because the state is no in every persons home all the time. The state is not there assessing behaviour every minute of every day.
And really. Would you want it to be? One day morgue you’ll have kids (and I think you’ll make a great dad). Would you want to be told how to feed them? Would you want to be told how to teach them? Would you want to be told what they should believe? Right now the arguements you are using are being used to tell people that they are not allowed to teach their kids to beleive in God. Is that right? Since when should the state interfere with what people believe?
Do you really want to live in the world you are advocating? I think not. Do youw ant to pay the taxes it would require to make this work on any scale (I use work in ther loosest sense)? I think not.
What you offer is not a viable, practical or even desirable solution. I agree there is a huge problem here, but there is no way the state can fix it in the way that I think you mean.
We should work on other problems. Poverty, education. Help the parents to help themselves. You say parents are often misinformed. What makes you think the satet is any better informed. I can think of numerous examples of states implementing poor policy based on poor information.
I am surprised. I really am. You cannot legislate good parenting, and even if you could, you cannot effectively uplhold those laws.
The are other solutions, but they aren’t as simply as saying: “parents are not good at parenting lets get the state to do it instead.” They are about increasing funding to school canteens. Helping schools develop better policies regarding food served etc. They are about teaching parents about this stuff. They are about getting over the pill popping culture we have and looking at long term solutions. They are about working to allieviate the things that cause the poverty cycle. They are about all the stuff you normally talk about. That’s why I am surprised that you offer this non-solution.
Hey, Matt. I haven’t been clear.
Parents are and should be free to do as they will outside school (within criminal limits of course) but I believe that the state has a responsibility to provide a safety net in terms of childhood nutrition through the medium of school dinners.
It isn’t enough for the state to say “we don’t need to deliver nutritional requirements at school – that’s the parent’s job” thus opening the way to turkey twizzlers and lunches of crisps and chocolate.
The state has to acknowledge that part of its responsibility to children is ensuring they are adequately fed, as well as adequately educated – this is not to interfere in parenting, but to act as a safety net in cases where parents are failing. (And it is clear that failure in the area of nutrition is usually due to some level of poverty and confusion, not any kind of neglect.)
This doesn’t endanger or interfere with parenting any more than compulsory schooling does (and that too has its opt-out mechanisms, if we want to get technical).
Apologies if I gave a different impression.
(On another note, I trust you’ve heard that Karen and Nige are parents now? Not that I know any more than that.)
Heard about Karen and Nige, great news, though don’t know much more at this stage. I suspect they are convalescing.
I wasn’t sure if you meant what you implied, but it certainly came across to me as a fairly strong paternalistic statement.
And, as an aside, I know plenty oif parents who object to what the state teaches in the curriculum.
Inevitably the state expresses a particular political and underlying philosophical viewpoint and this influences policy.
I personally object the the massive emphasis that the NZ curriculum places on post modern relativism without ever considering other ways of understanding truth or morality. I will endevour to counter the government curriculum in my own teaching of my kids.
I can certainly understand why some parents choose to homeschool children, not that I would. But I can understand the position.
I have to go but I’ll finish in a later post.