‘Food Glorious Food’ It Seems Oliver Was Right All Along

Civitas, 3 February 2009

‘Food Glorious Food’ sing fellow inmates of the workhouse in which the young Oliver Twist finds himself incarcerated at the start of Lionel Bart’s musical named after the hero of Dickens’ famous novel similarly named after him. A half a century on, the same startling discovery seems once again to have been made by the tv chef who also bears that same name.

After receiving a £200 million government grant to oversee the production of healthier school meals, a recently published independent study of the effects of the meals that Jamie Oliver devised has seemingly found them to have dramatically improved the performance of children attending the schools which introduced them.
‘Academics [at Essex University] analysed the key stage 2 results of more than 13,000 children in Greenwich from 2002-7 to gauge the impact on performance of Oliver’s healthier meals… and after… adjusting for an upward trend in pass rates, they found the number of pupils reaching level four or five had risen by 8 per cent in science, and six per cent in English. There was also a small improvement in maths results.’
Many schools initially resisted taking part in Oliver’s ‘Feed Me Better’ campaign due to the extra cost of the healthier meals. It seems that their resistance might well have been a false economy. As the head of one participating school explained, ‘Because the children aren’t being stuffed with additives, they’re much less hyper in the afternoons now.’
During the campaign, Oliver hired nutritionists who analysed the nutrients in ordinary school meals and who found that ‘most school meals contained less than half the daily recommended amount of iron, a mineral that improves children’s cognitive development and concentration.’
Since school meals were partly introduced because it was known that, for many children, they are the only square meal they have each day, it seems that Oliver could well have found one part of the solution to engineering a much needed improvement in pupil performance in state schools.
In light of the dramatic improvement Jamie Oliver has seemingly engineered by his culinary innovations, I feel almost tempted to break out into a rendition of ‘If I ruled the world…’