School food fights

Kevin Harcombe hopes that children’s experience of school dinners doesn’t drive them to a life of crime just to get a decent meal...

School dinners – what a quaint, nostalgic world that phrase conjures up. The noisy queues to the canteen, the all-pervading aroma of boiled cabbage, unsmiling dinner ladies, lumpy custard, bland gravy that belies its liquid origins. In my own schooldays, sometime post-Mrs.

Beeton but pre-Jamie Oliver, we had a teaching priest who used to get very excited about the puddings, specifically ‘spotted dick,’ which caused much mirth amongst the teenaged boys, and this before national scandals about clerical sex abuse.

Parents complain, of course – even if at least two of the recent complainants haven’t actually paid for school dinners since Year 2, despite being threatened with the bailiffs. “The food is not hot,” or “the food is not organic”.

“The meat is gristly,” “the vegetables are raw,” “the gravy is congealed and tasteless and, what’s more, there isn’t enough of it”. Mustafa’s dad – a chef in a local restaurant – and Sian’s mum, recently approached me with gathered protests about the allegedly poor fare on offer. I patiently explain the situation.

“We are a school. Our prime purpose is teaching and learning.

We are not some swanky eatery like ‘The Ivy’. We are not even ‘Dave’s Caff’.” And then, less patiently, because I feel I’m on a roll – n“Do you know, more is spent on prison dinners than school ones? Yet another example of the low esteem in which primary education is held, by the way. Do you realise children are starving in the Third World and would be grateful for our school dinners?!

“Hmmm? Possibly not so grateful on Thursdays,” quipped Mustafa’s dad, whose son is on the able child register, seeing through my bluster. I promise to look into it. “Also,” persists Sian’s mum, sweetly reasonable, “Sian didn’t get the choice she ordered last Monday.”

This is the perennial gripe and hardly surprising. Statistically, and following extensive personal research, it appears you have more chance of winning the lottery jackpot than getting the school dinner you chose, despite the fact there are only two choices – a yellow and a red. Like older people (i.e. me) young children suffer from short-term memory loss and choosing yellow at nine o’clock does not mean they won’t claim red at noon. We have tried issuing children with coloured tokens and wrist bands to identify their choice, all to no avail, and now I am seriously considering a computer chip injected subcutaneously, like vets use to track lost cats and dogs. The dinner ladies could then simply scan each child and a bleeping screen would reveal whether they were the ‘locally-sourced sausage’ or the ‘veggie surprise’.

Collating the choices and passing them to the cook in good time to prepare them is a timeconsuming job and so, when we found ourselves short-staffed in the office, I mucked in. It was more complex than I thought, but I ploughed on regardless with the result that, come the final sitting, I was sternly informed by an assistant cook – her approach to my office heralded by an aroma of boiled cabbage – that 16 children who had ordered roast were going to be disappointed. I enquired nonchalantly what the substitute dish was and received the reply that because all the totals were wrong (this said with an accusing look, I thought) there was no hot alternative, but the cook might be able to rustle up some cheese rolls – providing the cheese was sliced very thinly. I scurry to the hall to see the despondent diners, no doubt to go down in parental legend as ‘The Redlands 16’, and heartsinkingly identify Mustafa and Sian amongst their number.

I try to put a cheery gloss on the situation. ‘My, but those cheese rolls look yummy! Would you like gravy with yours? It doesn’t taste of much but there’s plenty of it!’