CHILDHOOD OBESITY has tripled in the past 25 years, and parents are becoming increasingly concerned about what their children eat at school. At Robinsfield Primary in northwest London, parents and governors have taken matters into their own hands and called in a newly established team of experts, including Rose Gray from the River Café, to advise them on providing healthy food independently of the council’s caterers.

Gray, who co-founded the River Café with Ruth Rogers, was first drawn to the matter of school dinners when one of her grandchildren said her school food was so disgusting that she refused to eat it.

“I’d heard all the debate about obesity, and about diet being linked to children’s behavioural problems, so I began to take an active interest and visited some school kitchens,” she says. “What I saw confirmed my worst fears.

“When I visited Robinsfield, I discovered that the kitchen was the only domain of the school where the headmistress had no idea what was going on.”

The more Gray investigated, the firmer became her belief that contract caterers were spending their money unwisely. “The money was not spent on food but on paying catering companies to travel great distances between schools. I was also shocked to find that no attention was paid to diet or to the seasonality of food.”

With seven co-founders including a head teacher, a governor, parents and a dietitian, Gray established Cooks in Schools, a charity to educate dinner ladies and to advise schools that want to provide their own meals.

Cooks in Schools will target four more schools next month. Gray hopes to provide them with dietary advice and new recipes, and to show the dinner ladies how to use organic and locally sourced ingredients, as well as how to manage their budget by choosing ingredients according to their seasonality.

“I want dinner ladies to be able to take pleasure and pride in their work, and this is not possible while their work consists of opening packets of Smash,” says Gray.

But improving the food that children eat is not the only objective of Cooks in Schools. “I want to encourage schools to place more emphasis on lunchtime as the social highlight of the day, and to teach children what to expect at mealtimes — tables of a proper height, crockery and cutlery instead of plastic trays and forks,” says Gray. She wants British schools to take a lesson from the Continent, where the rituals surrounding cooking and eating play a more important role in everyday life.

“If good eating habits are instilled at an early age, they become habits of a lifetime.”

It is a timely initiative. The school meals service became a commercially competitive operation in 1994 when contract caterers were brought into school kitchens. As a result, pre-cooked, processed food that was easy and quick to prepare replaced raw ingredients, and fewer skilled kitchen staff were needed. As caterers try to increase their profit margins, it seems that children who are given the choice between chips and a tasteless salad will always opt for chips.

A report by the Soil Association shows that while obesity among children is rising rapidly, school menus are dominated by low-quality, processed foods laden with fat, sugar and salt. It suggests that targets for food should be 30 per cent organic, 50 per cent locally sourced and 75 per cent unprocessed. As a result of the Soil Association’s campaign for better school food, public figures have become involved in its cause. In June the Prince of Wales, its patron, met county council executives and directors of education to discuss new schemes for schools that want to improve the quality of their food.

The television chef Jamie Oliver, whose next series features him cooking in school kitchens, has also criticised the standard of school dinners and attacked catering companies for putting profit before quality.

“It is a serious issue,” Oliver says. “For many kids school lunch is their only hot meal of the day, and too much of the food that gets served is turkey burgers and spicy wings.”

The decision for a school to go it alone is not an easy one, however. It means that it becomes responsible for managing the meals budget, sourcing fresh produce, negotiating with producers and suppliers, devising new menus and improving the skills of catering staff.

This week the Government launched a £5.7 million “Healthy Living Blueprint” to introduce nutritional standards for school meals. Parents and schools will hope that it makes a real difference in turning good intentions into reality.

www.soilassociation.org

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