At schools’ PTA meetings across the country as the term draws to a close,
parents and teachers are talking about little else. School dinners: Jamie’s
School Dinners. Did you know that the schools spend only 37p per meal? Did
you see the boy throw up? What do they feed our children? What are we going
to do about it? In the four-part television series which finished last week
Jamie Oliver, the celebrity chef, went into a run-down comprehensive in
southeast London and attempted to wean 1,400 teenagers off junk food in
favour of something more nutritious — such as a slow-cooked balsamic beef
stew with tomato and basil salad.
He also appalled the children by demonstrating that their much loved chicken
nuggets are made of a pulp of, literally, skin and bones. Greenwich, the
local borough council, has been shocked into promising a meals revolution.
This is not just a local issue, however, or even simply good television. A
hot political potato has been plonked on the plates of government and
opposition alike while they were studying a menu of immigration, terrorism
and hospital queues.
Oliver believes the issue could have a big effect on the election. “I’ve been
so touched to see the response we’ve had,” he said after the series ended.
“This cause has hit a nerve, not just for a few but for a massive portion of
the country who want to see change. It’s what our kids deserve.”
Oliver urges more parents to visit schools to see for themselves what their
children eat — and, if they are unimpressed, to do what they can to effect
change. He believes that the television series makes this easier for them.
“Most parents wouldn’t think it’s appropriate to look around the kitchen and
ask about the food,” he said. “To be honest, they probably never even
thought about it. And maybe, in an English way, they were worried that they
would seem like a smartarse. Well, now they can say to schools that they
don’t want to be a pain but they watched this programme and can you tell me
more, please.”
Parents should also lobby MPs, he says, and his website (www.feedmebetter.com)
shows how to do that. One parent who followed the advice reports that his
own MP responded quickly, “but he tells us that we’re the first parents to
raise this issue with him in eight years”.
At the heart of Oliver’s exposé is the obesity epidemic. Sir Liam Donaldson,
the chief medical officer, recently described obesity as “a time bomb”.
Today, one in 12 six-year-olds is obese. Among older children the proportion
is even higher: here the figure is one in seven 15-year-olds.
As one paediatrician told Oliver: “This is the first generation of kids who
will die before their parents.”
The meals that children eat at school, which make up about one-fifth of their
diet, are bolstering obesity. Typically, school meals contain no fruit or
vegetables, almost no vitamin C and only a third of the required iron
ration. What they lack in nutrition they make up for in fat.
Jamie’s School Dinners exposed a variety of horrors that have not previously
captured public attention. Most memorably, Oliver revealed that the national
average expenditure on each child’s lunch is 37p — roughly half the amount
that the French spend, while the daily fare for prison inmates costs four
times as much. (This 37p is the average, so in some schools the expenditure
is lower.) Thanks to Oliver, more people are now aware of that scandalous
figure than could probably tell you the price of a pint of milk.
Additionally, he showed that 13-year-olds are unable to identify ordinary
vegetables. One girl mistook a stick of rhubarb for an onion. During the
series he accumulated considerable satiric effect by curling his lip at
items routinely served up in our schools. In particular: the turkey
twizzler, a specimen of reconstituted meat that, after cooking, still
contains 21.2% fat.
Among the many horrified parents contacting the programme’s website, a mother
from Harrogate wrote: “I must admit I had a bag of turkey twizzlers in my
freezer. I assumed that as they were aimed at kids they were healthy.”
An online petition has amassed 100,000 subscribers — considerably more than
Oliver expected. “Every few seconds there’s 10 more,” he told me.
Another viewer, from Islington, north London, suggested picketing the offices
of Scholarest, the company that supplies many schools with meals. It is a
division of Compass, the catering giant.
Even before the series finished it produced results. Greenwich announced it
was raising the amount of money allocated to school meals to 50p per child.
Processed food has already come off the menu in 25 schools in the borough
and will disappear from the rest by the end of the school year. ()
Other schools have also acted. Yvonne Ryle, head of Eden community primary
school in Peterlee, Durham, decided to use in-house catering to improve food
from September, after pulling out of a contract with Scholarest. Her
decision was motivated by parents shocked at how little was spent on meals.
“They were up in arms when they found out,” said Ryle. “They turned up at the
school gates and let their feelings be known.” She plans to boost spending
per child to more than 50p.
But how did we end up allowing our children to be fed such rubbish in the
first place?
SCHOOL meals first became a national issue in 1906 when the Liberal government
introduced the Provision of Meals Act. The meals remained nutritious — if
unimaginative and often unpalatable — for most of the 20th century until the
1980 Education Act dropped standards. Catering was put out to tender and
crisps, chips and fizzy drinks entered the school menu. Since 1994 up to
£154m a year has been cut from meal budgets to fund other areas of
education.
Responsibility for school meals has tended to fall between two government
departments, health and education. Since making his programmes, Oliver has
met officials from both. He was told they do not know where to get the money
to make the changes he recommends.
“I don’t give a f***,” he said last week. “Maybe it’s an education issue,
maybe it’s health. Maybe the two of them should get into bed, have a
kerfuffle and sort it out.”
School meals, like much else, are overseen by local authorities. The result is
that in some parts of the country schools serve decent food while others —
the great majority — serve up rubbish.
“I had never pictured so much s*** being cooked every day for so many kids,”
said Oliver. “If this was Tesco or Starbucks someone would be looking at the
big picture. There would be consistency. But there’s nobody saying, ‘Okay,
this council is run like a sack of s*** and this one is run by geniuses’.
They should be looking for the good people and headhunting them.”
Those “good people” would have to include Pam Shipperbottom and Laura Illsley.
At Lethbridge primary in Swindon in 2003, only 40 pupils out of 500 were
eating the meals supplied by a contracted caterer. The cost each term was
£7,500.
Shipperbottom and Illsley — both mothers with children at the school, neither
of them from a catering background — formed a company, Let’s Do Lunch, and
took over the meals. As Oliver found in Greenwich, the kitchens lacked even
elementary cooking utensils such as knives and chopping boards, because
staff had simply been heating pre-cooked food.
Now, helped by four kitchen staff, the two women are feeding fresh food to
more than 250 children. At first they charged £1.75 a day, as the local
authority had. Then they raised the price to £2 — and the number of diners
went up.
“Parents can do a lot,” said Shipperbottom. “Even if they don’t want to do
what we have done, they can find out who is providing the meals and press
for change. They can ask for the school to be part of the Soil Association’s
Food For Life programme.”
Oliver is not the first well known chef to work with schools on improving
meals. Rose Gray employed him at the River Cafe in west London, where he was
discovered by a television producer and groomed for stardom. She has done
it, too. After spending a day cooking in a school, Gray set up Cooks in
Schools, a body devoted to improving school meals.
Private schools, she found, are not necessarily better than their counterparts
in the state sector: her own 15-year-old granddaughter first piqued her
interest in the subject by saying that the food at her boarding school was
practically inedible.
Caroline Waldegrave, who runs Leiths School of Food and Wine, is married to
William Waldegrave, one of the few former health ministers who actually
looked into the issue of school dinners, albeit without persuading his
cabinet colleagues to make it a priority. She, too, has gone into schools
and is impressed by Oliver’s achievement: “He’s been fantastically useful.
You hear people talking about this everywhere.”
Tim Lang, professor of food policies at City University, London, sat on a
government nutrition taskforce looking into school meals in the early 1990s.
“For 20 years,” he said, “the evidence has been building up about the bad
state of children’s diets. And for 15 years we have had evidence about how
school food has the potential to make a difference.” Yet it took a
television series to make people notice. Who is to blame? “Well, catering
companies have been saying for some time that they want to do the right
thing,” said Lang. “But with so little money, what can they do? It’s not
like cooking for a hospital, where they do three meals a day, 365 days a
year. In schools they do one meal 200 days a year — so the overheads are
proportionally higher.” ()
Certainly school meals are not a money-spinner. Compass recently issued a
warning to shareholders after negotiating a deal with particularly tight
margins. Stephen Thorns, director at Sodexho, reckons Oliver has shown that
catering companies are not to blame.
“Fewer people are pointing the finger at us now,” he said. “We provide
whatever the client wants but we have to work within the budget.
“The programme has definitely made an impact. I can think of several clients
and prospective clients who have mentioned it. They’re talking about raising
the meal price by 5p or even 10p — which may not sound like much, but we’re
talking about meals that cost 45p per person, so it’s a big percentage.”
It is, of course, a commentary on the times we live in that it took a
“reality” television show to expose the reality of our children’s lives. Not
that anybody has ever doubted that children perform better when they have
eaten well or that nutritionally poor meals can lead to bad behaviour.
Even the education and skills department acknowledges, in ghastly civil
service prose, that “evidence-based research points to a correlation between
a healthy diet and educational performance”.
As Lang pointed out: “Just because there is good evidence for something, that
doesn’t mean the policies change. But Oliver has brought together issues
such as health and price and cooking and the role of the state. He’s done a
very good job. His manifesto is spot-on. Just ask my colleagues on the old
school meals campaign.
“We used to despair of getting anyone in the education department to even
address the issue. The department, in its various incarnations, has walked
away from any responsibility for food. But this is a body that spends all
its time either castigating or encouraging parents and teachers and children
about raising standards. Oliver has put it in the spotlight.”
The politicians’ responses have been predictable. Tony Blair, for whom Oliver
has cooked at official summits, said: “What Jamie Oliver has done is
invaluable.” Ruth Kelly, the education secretary, promised that her
department would make healthy eating part of the Ofsted inspection process
and introduce tougher nutritional standards.
The Conservatives do not seem to have school dinners flagged up yet in their
spanking new election war room. Oliver told The Sunday Times recently that
he might vote Tory next time. “But the Conservatives don’t seem very
interested, to be honest,” he said last week.
As for the Liberal Democrats, Phil Willis, their education spokesman, wondered
hotly why there was not “a single mention” of school dinners in last week’s
budget. Well, it is hard to imagine the puritanical chancellor halting his
labours to watch an Essex-born Tory wield the balsamic vinegar. But perhaps
when young John Brown is old enough to go to school . . .
To be fair, some MPs are interested in school meals. But even Debra Shipley,
Labour MP for Stourbridge and who has introduced a children’s food bill,
seemed not to have grasped the impact of the programme when I spoke to her.
Her bill seeks to improve the standard of school meals by imposing maximum
levels of fat, sugar and salt, and controls on additives. Nearly 250 MPs
signed an early day motion in 2004 to demonstrate their support and it is
backed by bodies including the British Medical Association, the National
Union of Teachers and the Women’s Institute. Yet it hasn’t exactly hit the
public eye, has it? I asked Shipley if Jamie’s School Dinners had boosted
her campaign. She was dismissively patronising, saying: “What Jamie Oliver
has done is give a fillip to what is already a high-profile campaign. We
have parliamentary support for the bill and support from the general public,
and now we have a celebrity, too.”
Behind this sniffiness may lie a suspicion that the brilliantly self-promoting
young chef is simply in it for himself. After all, it is not the first time
he has caused a stir combining social policy with showbiz.
In 2002 Oliver advertised for 15 jobless applicants to become chefs in his
restaurant, Fifteen, and put £1.3m into the venture, remortgaging his own
home to raise the cash.
Filmed for television, it proved compelling. Hollywood talked about turning
Fifteen into a film: Brad Pitt, for whom Oliver cooked at a birthday party,
was said to be thinking of playing him.
Then the backlash began. People started to dislike the manner of speech that
originally drew them to him: “bish bosh”, “pukka”, “lovely jubbly”. Even his
tongue has offended viewers: “It’s so big it hardly fits in his mouth,”
somebody complained on one of the many websites devoted to demonising him.
“I’d like to serve it on a bed of vegetables roasted in extra virgin olive
oil.” Why do people dislike him? In his own opinion: “I’ve gone from being
the underdog to that little s*** in the Rich List.”
Critics damned Fifteen as overpriced and exploitative and attacked Oliver for
signing a multi-million-pound promotional deal with Sainsbury’s. They even
questioned his kitchen credentials.
Fay Maschler, the restaurant critic, believes he has been traduced. “He’s a
good chef,” she said. “And what he has done is really worthwhile. I just
don’t understand why people have been critical, saying he earns a lot of
money. That’s not the point. I’m very moved by the way he has done this.”
The fact is that well meaning people have tried to improve school meals
without fanfare — and have failed. Jamie’s School Dinners has succeeded
precisely because it is the work of a natural showman.
Certainly Sainsbury’s cannot have failed to notice. This month, addressing a
Royal College of Physicians debate, Oliver criticised the supermarket chain
for continuing to sell those infamous turkey twizzlers. Sainsbury’s was
reported to be considering terminating his contract on the grounds that it
might not be worth the money. Paradoxically, his outspoken campaigning —
especially at the supermarket’s expense — makes him a more valuable frontman
than ever.
Jamie's checklist: what parents can do
- Monitor your school’s meals. Ask what nutritional
value they have. Is there anything green on your child’s plate?
- Offer to help out at lunchtime and improve the meals
- Get the school to set up a school council, if there isn’t one already,
and to make catering a subject for regular discussion
- Talk to other parents and parent-teacher groups to increase pressure and
share ideas
- Cook with the children at home. Teach them about new foods and flavours
- Sit down to eat together at mealtimes. Some children don’t know how to
lay a table or to use a knife and fork
To find out more, see www.feedmebetter.com
