Back at one of my old schools, I used to do dinner duty 4 out of 5 days a week. The deal was I’d get a little bit of extra pay and a free lunch. But honestly, I never actually took the free meal. Instead, I’d grab five bottles of water and stash them in my classroom cupboard so my form group could have them in the morning.
I could have taken the lunches. It would’ve saved me time making a packed lunch, saved a bit of money too. But the thing is, I had something a lot of the kids didn’t. Choice.
For so many of them, there wasn’t any real choice about what they ate. In a school where a high number of students were on free school meals, that lunch wasn’t just a meal, it may have been their only meal of the day.
I used to chat with a colleague all the time about the state of the food, just thinking… how is this okay? Every week it was the same beige, bland stuff on repeat. Nothing fresh, nothing exciting. I even asked my form one day what they’d want to see in the canteen, and they came up with loads of ideas. They wanted better food! But nothing really changed while I was there.
And don’t even get me started on the contradictions… kids weren’t allowed to bring in fizzy drinks—no Lucozade, no Coke, all that banned. But then you’d walk into the canteen and… they’re selling fizzy drinks anyway?? Make it make sense.
And this isn’t even a new problem. I remember watching Jamie Oliver and the Turkey Twizzler tales 25 years ago. One of the most insane facts to come from that documentary was ‘pet food actually had clearer nutritional standards than school meals did’ Not that pet food was somehow “better,” but at least it had rules about what had to go into it. Meanwhile, what we were serving kids?
Hopefully with the new legislation there will be some significant changes happening in schools and health is made a priority instead of learning about trigonometry.
I’ll leave that rant for another day.