How to really improve our kids' school meals

From Unfocusgroup.org

Jamie Oliver's crusade against turkey twizzlers in 2005 was seemingly well-intentioned, but I don't feel that it achieved much good. Kids still want to eat burgers, so much so that parents were witnessed smuggling burgers through the school gates - which they were vilified for, of course. There were also financial implications, reflected in the increased cost of the school meals and the loss of revenue through the closure of the tuck shop.

A better strategy would have been to work out how to improve the nutritional content of the food that kids eat. This includes the snacks in the tuck shop. Kids will always want chocolate bars and turkey twizzlers, and school canteen staff cannot be expected to be chefs. It's a bourgeois dream that our kids will want to eat locally-produced haute-cuisine, freshly-cooked by expert chefs in the school canteen. What we really need is healthy, nutritious food that is cheap to produce and that the kids actually want to eat.

It's well-established that freezing is one of the most effective methods of food preservation, and that frozen food retains a very high nutritional content. Furthermore, food that is frozen early on in the supply chain can be picked more ripely and preserved much more quickly than food that is transported freshly. This means that farmers can concentrate on nutritional factors rather than longevity.

It seems noble to want to "educate" our kids into understanding food and to have an appreciation for fine cooking. But there is no room on the curriculum for cultural brainwashing. I do also question the motives of the programme-makers.

Why not try to create a better burger, a better turkey twizzler, a better chocolate bar? By producing food that is easy to re-heat from frozen, nutritious and is fun to eat, we would have offended the purists but found a more practical way to improve the health of our children.

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