What happens if a society decides to significantly improve the quality and healthfulness of meals served to students at school? It sounds like a nirvana for the produce industry, right?
Well in the UK, this is what happened a few years after celebrity chef Jamie Oliver launched an initiative to improve foodservice in British schools:
School meals are in danger of being scrapped because children are rejecting healthy Jamie Oliver-style menus, caterers warned.
Instead of buying the new lunches made from fresh ingredients, youngsters are relying on cheap takeaways and snack food to get them through the day.
The Local Authority Caterers Association told a conference in Birmingham: “In 2007, the picture is one of considerable concern over the future viability of the school meals service, particularly in secondary schools.”
Oliver’s award-winning TV series three years ago, called Jamie’s School Dinners, exposed the poor quality of the meals and found as little as 56p was spent on ingredients.
As a result, the Government announced a £220 million cash injection over three years followed by a further £240 million until 2011 to improve catering facilities and subsidize the cost of meals.
Schools were ordered to cut down on fried food such as chips and burgers made from reconstituted meat and offer more nutritional alternatives.
But since then some schools have seen a 30 per cent reduction in takings from lunches and vending machines, which have been filled with water, juice and milk instead of pop. Two thirds of local authorities in England report that they are making a loss on school lunches, the LACA said.
In primary schools, the average cost of the food for a meal has gone up from 40p in 2004 to 60p, while in secondary schools it has risen from 56p to 74p.
The switch from ready meals to cooking from scratch has also put up the bill for training and pay, which has been reflected in the price of meals.
An average school lunch now costs £1.64, up by almost 20 per cent from £1.37 in three years.
Sandra Russell, chairman of the association, said pupils had voted with their feet and taken their money elsewhere.
“We cannot expect to reverse an embedded eating culture overnight nor can we convert teenagers to a healthier regime by force,” she said.
“We are in danger of the secondary school meal service fragmenting or dying altogether if we are not careful.”
Last year, mothers in Rotherham staged a rebellion outside Rawmarsh Comprehensive School against the imposition of healthy meals.
Instead of backing the drive for low fat dinners, they offered to collect fish and chips, hamburgers and fizzy drinks for children and were taking up to 60 orders a day.
Chris Wainwright, of the School Food Trust which was set up by the Government to help implement changes to school meals, said: “Our view is that the situation is not as doom and gloom as it sounds, but it is a serious issue and we are not underestimating the challenges at all.
“The difficulty with secondary schools in particular is that pupils can leave the premises and it is difficult to convince teenagers of the benefits of a healthy diet.
“We are working hard with parents to ensure they sign their children up to school meals and fully understand the benefits of healthy meals.”
A spokesman said Oliver was on holiday and unavailable for comment.
The study by the Local Authorities Caterers Association (LACA) also shows that there has been a 20 per cent drop since Jamie’s School Dinners first aired two years ago.
In real life you rarely get the kind of controlled experiments the Pundit likes to see. Here, changes in meals, even though more heavily subsidized by the government, coincided with increased prices, and those who favor the reforms blame the price rises for the drop in demand.
Perhaps. We certainly would have preferred a controlled study. The first rule of which is you only test one variable at a time — not quality and price together — you test either price or quality.
Still, when you take a vending machine that was filled with soda and replace that with water and milk and sales drop by 30%, you have to be a little stubborn to think that this tells us the water is priced too high.
But these “health advocates” are stubborn, they are beyond stubborn, they are a little bit authoritarian. What does this mean:
Chris Wainwright, of the School Food Trust which was set up by the Government to help implement changes to school meals, said: “Our view is that the situation is not as doom and gloom as it sounds, but it is a serious issue and we are not underestimating the challenges at all.
“The difficulty with secondary schools in particular is that pupils can leave the premises and it is difficult to convince teenagers of the benefits of a healthy diet.”
Imagine that! The teenagers in the U.K. have some freedom and they reject what they are being served. If we could only imprison them, then we could make sure they eat properly!
This is the voice of the food police. Arrogant in the certainty that they know what is best for everyone and certain that in a decent society they would be given the power to force everyone to do what they want.
This is not the path to success for the produce industry. All it will do is make certain that the day these children are released from “food prison” and are free to make decisions on their own, they will stay as far from produce as they possibly can.
Here is a shocker: We have to offer products that people — including teenagers — want to buy. If they don’t want to buy our products, we have to make new ones. It is our job to persuade them to buy our products.
That they can go elsewhere is not a problem. It is called capitalism.
