Like I said, I don’t have an issue with it, but there’s not many 5 to 7 year olds I know of who would eat curry or fish cakes, or butter pie for that matter.
I don’t believe I’ve said anything like this.
In fact:
If the food was truly healthy and appealing I wouldn’t have a problem with the policy. That’s how schools in France work and we all know how many books have been written praising the interaction of the French with their food, recently.
However, this is a different culture, and I’d been extremely skeptical for several reasons.
- Americans love freedom and choice, so the policy would tick a lot of people off. Seems like a policy that’s doomed to create bad feeling.
- My daughter isn’t in school yet but I understand that lunch periods are getting shorter and shorter. Are the children being given enough time to eat this healthy food in a sane, civilized manner? I understand that some school systems have “lunch hours” as short as 10-15 minutes. That wouldn’t fly.
- Finally, I don’t trust the school to provide food that is actually healthy and actually appealing. It never happened when I was a child, and I ate meals from more than one cafeteria system. The entrees were uniformly heavy and greasy, the fruit and vegetables uniformly tired and underripe, and the sides uniformly straight out of a can. Nobody liked the school food, and for good reason. The sample menu given earlier in this thread does nothing to make me feel better. Many of the entrees sound like things that are hard for a skilled home cook to make well and healthily, never mind a careless large-scale bureaucracy.
My grade-school-aged self would’ve starved. Hell, I can’t eat any of that now. Some of us are picky eaters because certain tastes and textures make us gag, not just because we ‘don’t want that’.
I would probably personally avail myself of the program (well, the kids anyway) but I don’t think it’s a good policy to make it mandatory. I think just making it available free of direct charge would be sufficient to make most parents take advantage of it without starting a fight over who can bring a PB&J.
The potential for peanut allergies has prevented my kids from ever being able to bring in a PB&J. Every snack had to be peanut-free too.
I wonder if this might actually be a mistake for the kids it’s supposed to be most help for; yes it might help kids get one decent meal a day, but without involving the people who are feeding them the rest of the time. Surely it would be better to focus on helping parents provide decent food (free cooking/nutrition classes? Food vouchers?) than trying to make 5 meals a week, term time only, patch up an inadequate diet? I can see it could make some parents feed their kids even more crap, because after all, if they’re forced to eat horrible food at school, they deserve a treat at home, right?
Maybe for the odd child with thoroughly resistant parents, a packed lunch ban and compulsory school dinners would be the best option, but I just can’t see that being a long term solution, or even generally useful. I was technically qualified for free school dinners (at my first school), but my parents decided they would prefer to make mine. I would have preferred the school ones, in fairness.
My second primary school was a tiny village one, and had neither a kitchen nor outside catering; they do exist. They simply checked lunches, and contacted parents when they were unacceptable (the only time that happened that I recall was when my Grandpa was looking after me for a few days, and sent me in with a box of basically pure sugar, and they were quite understanding about it). They also did occasional ‘healthy dinner’ contests, to encourage the competitive kids to ask for healthier food.
Free and healthy are two of the three necessary components for me to approve of this policy. The third is appealing.
In the US there’s a major push to reduce refined carbohydrates, fat, sugar, and salt in school lunches, which is all to the good. But fat and salt are major flavor enahncers, and sweetness is an all-around way to make food more appealing. If you reduce fat, salt, and sugar to very low levels, you have to be an above-average cook to make food delicious, and you have to be working with above-average ingredients. Without casting any aspersions on school cafeteria cooks, few of them are trained through culinary programs; and tight budgets mean that cafeteria managers can’t afford to buy superior ingredients.
My school has a wonderful, hardworking, enthusiastic, intelligent cafeteria manager. I can’t say enough good things about her. Occasionally she’s set out some chicken biscuits for teachers, like on testing days or such. They’re TERRIBLE. Not because she’s a bad cook, but because the biscuits are low-salt low-fat whole-wheat biscuits (i.e., mushy wheat flour discs), and the chicken is frozen low-fat low-salt breaded chicken patties.
My daughter, a somewhat finicky eater, starts kindergarten in a couple of months. She’s perfectly willing to skip lunch despite our best efforts. There’s no way I’ll require her to eat school lunches, unless they become healthy and appealing.
I recently attended a three day parent orientation at my daughter’s chosen college and took my meals in the school’s cafeterias. I was very surprised at how good the food was. The college makes all the food from scratch, fresh, every day and has many, many signs asking students to take what they wish, but eat what they take and not waste any food.
My daughter’s primary school lunches were provided by Ara.mark (name broken so they don’t hunt me down and sue me).
The food was terrible all 12 years. She actually stopped eating in the cafeterias there in 3rd grade and still has money left in her lunch account since then. That year, she said her “chicken nuggets were pink in the middle and smelled like mold,” and started packing her lunch. I still recall how good the food was in my elementary school- they made fresh food. I loved chicken fried steak day- fresh mashed potatoes, fresh yeast rolls…
So, if these schools were willing to really put some real effort into their meals, I think requiring students to eat there could be a great idea. If those same schools were going to buy a bunch of processed, sugar and preservative laden, heat-and-eat “Meat (flavor) Patties” type food, then no, I couldn’t get behind such a plan.
20 School Lunches From Around the World: What School Lunches Look Like In 20 Countries Around The World
The 'Murican in me bristles at the thought. The realist in me sighs and thinks that parents today do largely suck at this stuff, and like Driver’s Ed and Sex Ed, when parents refuse to do a decent job, the schools pick up the slack.
CPS (Chicago Public Schools) just announced that free lunches will be available to all students next year, as there are so many kids who qualify for free or reduced price lunches already, the USDA is just like, “feed 'em all”. The article doesn’t say, but I suspect this is expected to lower administrative costs considerably.
I like *offering *to all because I’ve seen some of the other students’ lunches and they’re scary, and I like not singling out some kids as obviously poor in the lunchline. But we’ll still eat breakfast at home and send packed lunches because even if the meals were identical (which they’re not - the school breakfasts are all high in refined flour and sugar, the lunches prepacked, microwaved on site and unappetizing), my kid’s more likely to eat what she packs, and I want to teach her how to pack healthy food for herself anyhow.
First response nailed it, I think. I voted option 3 in the poll (though our baby is a few years off school yet), because I don’t necessarily think it’s a good or a bad idea. As has been pointed out, the money for this does come from taxes, ultimately. But it has to be cheaper overall than making your own, due to economies of scale. I wouldn’t be against sending our kid to a school with such a policy.
So you don’t think it could help normal children too once in a while? I think it could. I like the idea of the program but like you not a mandatory thing. Still, if we start stigmatizing the kids who use it then the voluntary system would pretty much fail. That’s all I’m saying.
When I was in grade school, the kitchen routinely cranked out inedible institutional swill. I found it consistently revolting. My parents had paid up for hot lunches for my first year there, so I was stuck with it, but thereafter throughout all the remaining years I brought peanut butter and jelly from home. Every single day. And I was perfectly happy with that. My kids are grown up now, but I would happily pack lunches for my grandsons if they preferred it. Hopefully the food is better in their school than mine ever was.
The school in the OP is in England, so these foods are normally eaten by most people. Chicken tikka masala is the most common, or one of the most common, curries eaten by Brits.
I think the beauty of it is that if a 5 year old offered this for lunch has a decent chance of becoming a 7 year old who would cheerfully eat that for lunch. I would actually love it if someone came over to my house and cooked that for my child to eat.
I voted for the “I’m a parent and I don’t like it” choice, but it’s not an extreme dislike. I wouldn’t like it because I’m the kind of parent who believes what I would pack in a lunch is healthier and better suited for my kid than even a healthy institution-provided lunch, simply because the school lunch has to be something that can be produced in bulk at a reasonable cost.
However, I would go along with mandatory lunches if, in the actual school my actual child is attending, there was an overall issue with parents being unable to provide healthy lunches for their kids. This is an area where the needs of the many would definitely outweigh my personal preference.
If I were a parent, I’d want to see the argument for making the school lunches mandatory before I took a position. But it would have to be a damned good argument.
“Who wants a banger in the mouth?” – Mrs. Featherbottom
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Depending on how strictly a Jewish family keeps kosher, it may be impossible for the school to accommodate them. A school saying, “Hey, what, there’s no ham in it!” to a kid whose parents have two completely separate ovens in their kitchen is going to fall far short.
The menu looks OK to me. I’ll stick with “I’m a parent and I think it’s a good idea” I mean, I give my daugher healthy packed lunches now, but if the government wanted to do that, and it helped the kids whose parents didn’t, then I’m for it.
Maybe it’s because I come from a place where a hell of a lot of kids used to come to school so hungry they couldn’t concentrate properly.
My comment wasn’t meant to imply you did. It wa a general comment as previous similar threads have made the points I referred to.
As a parent, if my kid’s school offered a free wholesome lunch, my kid would be eating that. Hey, I don’t want to be packing a lunch every day!
But I think it’s odd to require kids to eat it, and I wouldn’t support that. There’d be some weird dietary issue some kid had, or a parent who wanted to pack a cupcake to celebrate a birthday, or I dunno, something.
Although, one of the interesting things described in “Bringing Up Bebe” (a recent book comparing child rearing in France to the US, written by an American expat in Paris) was the lunch program at the school her kids went to. Lunch was exciting and highly varied and considered part of the children’s education, They learned to eat all sorts of foods at that school. And the lunches sounded delicious.