July 12th, 2010 by 
It’s hard not to think about your family’s nutrition when new health minister Andrew Lansley’s lambasting Labour for the way they tackled child obesity on the back of Jamie Oliver’s TV campaign to improve school dinners; stories like: “UK kids getting fatter at twice the rate of Americans” are making headlines and then there’s Satan in saccharin (the ice cream van) parked outside your house.
Not only that, my lack of parental resourcefulness has led me to offer rewards from the sweetie jar in return for good behaviour.
But seriously, I am concerned. My eldest boy starts primary school in September and I’ve got decisions to make: Do I go down the packed lunch route, ensuring he gets healthy chow on a daily basis OR do I opt for school dinners: mass-produced stodge, which will guarantee he’s stuffed to the marrow if not nutritionally satiated?
And here I make my first mistake – a knee-jerk reaction to Mr Lansley’s comments, which he made to Doctors at the British Medical Association.
While I disagree with the coalition government’s policy that improving diet “would be driven by evidence of what worked” with little regard, it seems, for common sense, I do agree with his comments that: “If you are bringing packed lunches, that’s OK but we’ve got to determine what’s in your packed lunches, we’ve got to decide what’s in them”. School meals are moderated, packed lunches are not.
A report from the School Food Trust revealed evidence that, compared to packed lunches, the food quality and the nutritional intake of primary and secondary school children are superior when school lunches are eaten.
I knew that kids bartered with their lunch boxes, did it myself – ‘swapsies a marmite cream cracker for a Jammie Dodger’ – but I hadn’t considered that, on the whole, school meals were more nutritionally balanced than the everyday packed lunch.
After Jamie Oliver’s TV campaign to revolutionise school dinners the number of children eating them dropped. My guess is that conscientious parents thought they were going for the healthy option, keen to ensure no Turkey Twizzlers would pass junior’s lips, but it looks like we may have been doing our kids a disservice.
I am having to re-evaluate my opinion of packed lunches and admit that I know very little about school dinners.
A primary school food survey from 2009 found: “Of the 84% of pupils bringing packed lunches that had sandwiches, 51% had savoury fillings without salad, 13% with salad, and a further 20% had sandwiches with a sweet filling (jam, chocolate spread, etc.), whereas 35% of pupils taking school lunches had vegetables in mixed dishes. In contrast, more packed lunch pupils ate dairy products (e.g. cheese, yogurt, milk, milky drinks), and a higher percentage ate fruit or fruit-based desserts.”
And research from Datamonitor revealed Britain’s children are getting fatter at twice the rate of America’s. It shows that in an average year children in the UK spend about £372 on sweets and chocolate, compared with £150 spent by American kids. I’m cutting out pocket money…
What we need is information. Lansley’s gaffe has at least put school dinners back on the menu and we mustn’t forget he agrees that Jamie Oliver was right to want to improve school meals.
My mind still isn’t made up about the coalition government but I agree with Lansley: “We have to understand that this is a behaviour-change programme we’re engaged in and if behaviour doesn’t change, our likelihood is that we will fail.” It’s about us, as parents, taking responsibility for ourselves. (Now who’s lecturing?!)
While it’s up to me to ensure I give my children tasty, healthy meals they won’t want to swap, it is possible for individual schools to feed their children locally sourced, healthy meals. The money is there, if only they had the time to find it.
I want my little boy to have the lunchtime privileges the children at Charles Dickens Primary School in south London have. For starters they have a kitchen on site, where food can be freshly prepared. But they are also privileged to have had the bar for nutritional excellence set by the school’s former headmistress, Liz Owens, who believed there was a link between her children’s concentration, behaviour and food intake.
Mrs Owens “worked with the Food Commission and Soil Association, brought in locally-sourced fish, organic fruit, salad, vegetables and meat, insisted the food was cooked from scratch in school rather than processed in a factory, and had fresh produce delivered daily”.
This drive, coupled with the services of an excellent school cook meant that the children (over a third of whom qualified for free school meals), would have at least one good meal a day. Consequently she was named Teacher of The Year at the Pride of Britain Awards in 2005; her award was given to her by Jamie Oliver.
In my opinion Jamie Oliver is a national hero. But maybe it’s time he had a little coalition of his own and I suggest Michelle Obama. When we’re faced with facts like one in six of children in England were classed as obese in 2008, while only 20 percent were eating the recommended five pieces of fruit and vegetables a day, it’s time to bring in the heavies, so to speak. Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move campaign (‘America’s Move To Raise A Healthier Generation Of Kids’) www.letsmove.gov is big in the US and appears to be having more of an impact than any current British campaign. It’s time to stop chewing the fat – we need more than a slim chance of keeping our kids healthy.
We are responsible for feeding our kids sensibly but that’s not the only solution – they also need to able to exercise more than just their digits; so whip away the DS and send them out playing in the parks where they can interact and burn-off all those sedentary calories. But that’s just one solution… what do you suggest?
