Food for Thought

Anastasia De Waal, 18 January 2010

As the greasy smell of soggy chips and nondescript chicken wafts around the overflowing bin full of mangled newspaper, you may mistake the entrance to my classroom for the local kebab shop.  And that’s only for starters.  For many pupils, a greasy-fingered session of identifying nouns is promptly followed by feast of lurid, sugary snacks.

The drive to improve nutritional standards in the dining hall by focussing, seemingly exclusively, on school canteen meals was a half-baked idea.  Approximately 50% of British school children bring their own packed lunch, of which only 1% meets the nutritional standards set for school meals in England.  The research, revealed earlier this month in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, prompts many questions—perhaps the most obvious of which is the role schools should play in the design of these a la carte menus.  Should unhealthy snacks be actively discouraged? And if so, how should this practice be implemented?

Though regimental lunchbox monitoring doesn’t make for easy digestion, break time requires a degree of intervention from supervisors.  The attempts of some conscientious parents to provide a balanced, nutritious diet are often defeated by the ritualised swapping of snacks. The break-time bell signals the beginning of a fierce auctioning-off of unwanted goods.  These days a can of fizzy drink, a half-eaten Mars Bar and a handful of penny sweets can fetch a Petit Filous fromage frais and 10 minutes on the latest Nintendo game.

Clearly, the solution to this problem starts in the kitchen at home and requires a collective response from all parents, supported by the school.  Despite the prevalent warnings of child obesity and the common knowledge that regardless of age a diet of fatty, sugary foods leads to dangerous weight gain, parents need to be equipped with the skills to cope with the demands of children who are naturally drawn to the glossy packaging of these food types and don’t understand the long term implications of unhealthy eating habits.

By Annaliese Briggs