I’ve never had a school meal in my life and still, at the age of 60, I feel deprived. I can never quite forgive my mother for it. It meant walking miles to and from school an extra twice a day instead of staying for lunch and messing about with the other kids. I suppose it was mostly because we couldn’t afford it.

Plenty of the children got free meals but she’d have preferred to gnaw off her arm than admit that money was a bit short that week. Working-class pride was a powerful force. Or maybe she just thought her own cooking was better than the muck they served up in school. She was probably right about that. She’d be even more right about it if she were still alive today.

To judge by the smells from the school kitchen, they did at least serve lots of cabbage then. And at least they did their own cooking. Nowadays most meals arrive in shiny metal boxes delivered by some big catering company. The food is usually rubbish. Worse than that, it is unhealthy rubbish.

The Soil Association published a report on school meals last week and there was much outrage. They produced an interesting comparison. If you mug an old lady and get banged up for six months you will get better food than if you’ve committed the crime of being a six-year-old with a normal appetite.

The average price of the ingredients in a meal for a guest of Her Majesty is 60p. The average in a primary school is 31p. Try it. Try popping into your local supermarket, spending 31p and then preparing a tasty, nutritious meal with what you’ve bought. Let’s even allow a little leeway for buying in bulk. It still can’t be done. Not unless you have baked beans every day.

But that is not what they have. What they mostly have is highly processed pap stuffed full of saturated fats, salt and sugar. Its single virtue is that it is cheap. What it will not be is nutritious. This is a national scandal. There ought to be a law about it. There was once.

In 1950 a law was passed setting down the minimum nutritional standards that had to be met for school meals. It was the state as nanny. Every meal had to provide a set amount of protein, vitamins and even minerals.

Thirty years later, in the war against the nanny state, all that was thrown out. These things were best left to the market to provide. Hence the 1980 Education Act. Not only did it lift the obligation from schools to provide meals, it got rid of the standards required if they chose to continue doing so.

The rules now are so vague as to be meaningless. They must, for instance, offer a serving of fish once a week. It is very likely to be a so-called “fishy penguin”. The fish content is a miserly 20%. I think we can safely assume that the 20% is not the finest sea bass caught fresh that morning. But it’s cheap. And the child doesn’t have to eat it anyway.

It is difficult to be more precise about the nutritional content because there is almost nobody keeping a regulatory eye on it. A county with 600 primary schools might have one person working a day a week, setting the menus and theoretically monitoring quality. But if the catering companies choose not to disclose exactly what is in those delicious chicken nuggets that appear on so many plates, there is nothing she can do to make them.

It is hardly surprising that the nation’s middle-class mums who spend so much time worrying about their offspring’s health have given up on school meals. They send them off in the mornings with nice healthy meals in their own little lunch boxes. Except that, once again, they are not healthy. The Food Standards Agency reported last month that nine out of 10 of these lunch boxes are too high in (guess what) saturated fats, salt and sugar. Which takes us back to the Soil Association report.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of it is the reaction there has been. It’s the same thing that interested Sherlock Holmes in Silver Blaze: the dog that did not bark.

The big catering companies did not deny the whole thing and demand a retraction. Neither did the government. You can see why.

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