Improving school meals is a classic example. Only last week, Ofsted reported that behaviour in schools had not got better at all over the past eight years, despite a £660 million Government-funded Behaviour Improvement Programme. If just a small slice of that were to be siphoned into providing fresh, unjunky school lunches and reimbursing schools for banning vending machines, teachers would not have to cope with disruptive pupils fired up on caffeine, sugar, fat and E-number highs.
In one episode of Jamie Oliver’s School Dinners, an excellent series running on Channel 4, the TV chef gives a troublesome pupil decent food at lunchtime and then encourages his parents to cook it in the evening. After a week, their children’s behaviour improves dramatically; and when, as an experiment, they go back to eating rubbish, it deteriorates.
We have all watched small children go crazy at birthday parties after having gorged on crisps, chicken nuggets, chocolate and fizzy drinks. So why are we surprised that they behave badly when, at secondary school, they can buy three out of four of those from vending machines and the fourth in the canteen? Most of what passes for food at school — what Oliver calls “horrible scrotum burger and reconstituted, mechanically reclaimed sacks of old fish” — goes straight from the deep freeze to the deep fryer. Dinner ladies are generally trained not to cook, only to unpack processed food and immerse it in sizzling fat.
School lunches seem to have evolved from being inedible and slimy in my day (spam and boiled cabbage) to being unhealthy and greasy now (Turkey Twizzlers and chips). Said Twizzlers, against which Oliver rails, contain just 34 per cent turkey, the rest being made up of water, pork fat, rusk and coating, topped up with additives and flavourings.
Of course children will choose deep-fried, breadcrumb-coated nuggets with chips if these are on offer. Of course they will dose up all day on Coke if they can. These products are like drugs: they are chemically enhanced to hit the spot. But you don’t have to offer them. Nor do you have to allow children out at lunchtime to go to the local chippy instead.
In France, school lunches consist of four courses of really healthy food. They have to meet very strict nutritional standards, and many schools hire their own nutritionist to supervise the menus and liaise with parents. In Italy, a recent law obliges local councils to offer organic and high-quality products on their menus. Experiments in individual schools in Britain have shown that, once children get used to eating proper food, they enjoy it more.
But it’s not just the pupils who need educating; it is often their parents, too. Oliver was astonished to find parents abusing him for replacing rubbish food with decent fare. “It’s crap”, “It’s f***ing shit”, “Put the real food back on the menu”, were some of the insults he faced. A few parents even turned up outside the school at lunchtime with McDonald’s cartons which they slipped through the school railings to their children.
What were these parents thinking of? Ask them if they want the best for their child, and they are bound to answer “yes”. Yet they are bringing their children up to be disgustingly unhealthy, possibly obese and probably to die prematurely — not to speak of the attention deficit problems the children will suffer along the way.
We can’t stop parents serving up Turkey Twizzlers and chips for supper every day. But we can influence the food pupils eat at lunchtime. And if we can convert the children to the virtues of healthier food, they might even persuade their parents, too.
But it can’t realistically be done for 37p per child, the price of a bag of crisps. You could barely feed a dog for that money. The French spend far more, sometimes more than £1 a head. In Italy it is between 70p and 90p per pupil. Oliver reckons that, to produce a varied and nutritionally balanced menu, a school needs to spend at least 70p per child.
Parents could be asked to pay a little more, but the Government needs to stump up, too. Ministers say they want a healthier nation, they want better behaved pupils and they want to curb antisocial behaviour. Here’s a policy that could achieve all those things. It’s a no-brainer, isn’t it?
To support Jamie Oliver’s campaign, sign the petition on: www.feedmebetter.co.uk
Teutonic clarity anyone?
MANY thanks to all those readers who explained to me why the words for “German” are so different in English, French, German and Italian. Apparently it goes something like this:
Germany was a land of scattered tribes with different names. We borrowed Tacitus’s name — Germania — for a large area of land outside the Roman Empire which embraced a number of Teutonic tribes. The word “deutsch” means the language of the (common) people, the “theod”, providing in its earliest form an adjective “thiudisc”, which turned into the modern “deutsch”. We then, in the English form “Dutch” , gave that name not to the German Franks but to those Franks who formed the dominant population of the Netherlands.
The French, meanwhile, took their word “allemand” from the Allemani, the tribe who lived in lands around what is now the Franco-German border: Alsace, Swabia and Switzerland. The Italian “tedesco” originates from the same root as “deutsch”.
What I did not know is that the Slavic word for “German” is different again: “nemetski”, meaning foreigner. The Finns, meanwhile, having come into closest contact with the Saxons, call Germans “saksalainen”. All clear now?
A sense of hope
FOR decades I have been wishing that the women of Northern Ireland could make a difference. Betty Williams and Mairéad Corrigan won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1976, but their Peace People campaign did not even begin to bring an end to the violence. While the women rallied and protested, the (mostly) men continued to kill each other.
When Tony Blair first entered No 10 and had to deal with the actors in Northern Irish politics, he found himself most impressed with a delegation of women from the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition. “They’re so sensible!” he exclaimed to his officials. “Why can’t we deal with them?” The answer came that, in Northern Ireland, there was an inverse correlation between the sensibleness of the protagonists and the power they wielded.
What Robert McCartney’s sisters and fiancée have achieved is to whisk that correlation round. At last sense and power have become intertwined in Northern Ireland. Long may it last.
maryann.sieghart@thetimes.co.uk
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