And yet more proof that Big Brother busybodies know less than ever.
After four years of “campaigns for healthy school meals”, expenditure of hundreds of millions of pounds and the creation of a vast new bureaucracy in the form of the School Meals Trust – more kids dislike school food than ever before.
"In primary schools, take-up rose by 2.3% to 43.6% in the year to April, after a 1% fall in the previous 12 months. But secondary school pupils continue to turn down school meals, although the decline slowed last year. The survey was carried out by caterers and the School Food Trust - set up in 2005 to promote healthier school meals. At secondary level in 2007/8, there was a 0.5% fall in take up of school meals, which followed a 5% fall in the year to April 2007. The last time take up of school meals increased in England was in 2004 - the year before TV chef Jamie Oliver began his campaign for better quality school dinners." http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7497948.stmIn 2004, pupils at British schools were reasonably happy with meals and more pupils had lunch in school canteens than in the previous year.
Then … Jamie Oliver happened. The no-nothing, fat-tongued, potato-peeler was given his own television show on Channel 4 to “make school meals healthy” and promptly turned tens of thousands of kids off school meals.
Why are school meals so unpopular? Take a look at the Board of the School Meals Trust. If you want to change something you enlist the help of people with imagination: people who can look at evidence, people who do their homework, people who listen to what’s gone wrong in the past and can be adaptable in finding solutions.
The Board of the School Meals Trust is a prime collection of numbnut pencil-pushers, vested- interests and conspiracy theorists. Of the 15 members, five have links to the organic food industry – which relies on myth and superstition instead of evidence (e.g. using homeopathy to “treat” animals); four are long-time education service bureaucrats; three are trade union or employer association bureaucrats and three are in some sort of food/catering consultancy business.
You could not get a group of people less likely to achieve anything important or worthwhile.
But this government was so insecure of its own ability to run anything that it was panicked into “doing something” in response to the “Jamie’s School Dinners” programme. If any members of the government had watched it they could have spotted that:
1. Jamie Oliver is not a chef. He was spotted peeling vegetables in the River Café by a BBC producer who thought he would make good front man for a “yoof” TV cookery series. “The Naked Chef” was concocted so older women could fancy him without being sexually threatened and his bloke-ishness would be OK with men. He made quick meals on TV with minimum of fuss so most of the programme could follow his “celebrity lifestyle” with model-girlfriend. Because he did not work his way up in the restaurant business he had no mistakes to learn from – he became a “celebrity chef” before he’d even learnt to cook. His next venture, the restaurant 15 was part of another TV series.
2. Oliver was equally ignorant about catering - despite going to Catering College. He could not devise a menu, order raw food or ingredients or run a kitchen. In “Jamie’s School Dinners” it was embarrassing when he set out to design a pizza on his own – it turned into a pile of green slime on a pizza base made of rock.
3. Oliver did not understand nutrition, food preparation or children. He cooked an organic chicken then got angry when none of the kids would eat it. Just as well – at this time the Food Standards Agency (FSA) was warning parents against giving children and old people organic poultry because of the high risk of infection with the gastro-intestinal pathogens Salmonella and Campylobacter. If one of the kids had eaten it and become sick the whole programme would have been cancelled. After he tried to force one young girl to eat the chicken and she burst into tears, he promised he would not make her eat it if she lied to her friends, told them it was delicious and then got them to eat it! (Pass the poison!)
No doubt egged on by the Soil Association he made extravagant claims about children being unhealthier than ever and suffering from cancers and all sorts of nasty diseases because of the food they eat – none of which are true. Children are healthier than ever before in human history.
His programmes directed parents and viewers to Soil Association leaflets full of propaganda for organic food. The whole thing was less about school dinners than a PR exercise for organic farming. It became very clear that Oliver was just a front man for the Soil Association, which is the certification and marketing wing of the organic food business. As an “independent expert” he made claims for organic food that the Soil Association could no longer say – it was disciplined by the Advertising Standards Authority for claiming that organic food was healthier and kinder to animals.
But, instead of deciding this was all the most fantastic waste of time, our timid government gave in to press hysteria and called Oliver a hero.
Sadly, they created the School Meals Trust and spent all that money before they’d done any research. Only a couple of years later did we discover that the main reason kids don’t take school meals is the crush of people in the canteen, long queues, then a scramble to stuff it all down before classes started again.
In fact, the “promising” results claimed for the early campaign were actually the result of fewer children in the canteen at lunchtime – so they had a better “dining experience” hence the improved score they gave to the food. And with fewer kids taking school meals, the schools were able to spend more of their budget on each meal and the quality improved a little.
So, in short: the “success” of the last four years has been due to fewer children using the meals service so canteens are less crowded and the meals can have slightly more spent on them. Naturally, the School Meals Trust cannot comprehend anything so counterintuitive so it is full of self-congratulation - thinking that its briefing papers, Facts & Myths, expensive website, dozens of staff and extensive stakeholder consultations have actually worked.
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