School dinners

Forget the Easter bunny. All the excitement in our house this week has been created by a single sheet of glossy A4 – the new school dinner menu…

At first glance, things don’t seem to have changed much. There’s plenty for the traditionally minded – roast pork with apple sauce, chicken pie, fish and chips, chocolate sponge with chocolate sauce. All familiar enough. But look closely and there are lots of exotic sounding delights – jerk chicken fajita, creamy vegetable plait or Devon split with milkshake anyone? The picture of the beanie hotpot’s causing particular excitement although we’re not sure why!

In our area nearly half the kids (46% to be exact) eat school dinners each day – either choosing a ‘traditional’ main meal, vegetarian option or a packed lunch. According to the menu, each meal provides at least two of their ‘five a day’ fruit or veg plus each week choices are designed to give kids more than 100% of their RDA for calcium, vitamin A, folic acid and vitamin C. Not bad for just £1.75 a pop.

Plus they state they’ve attempted to source the food locally where they can – all the beef, for example, comes from a local farmers’ consortium with suppliers actively participating in a food miles reduction scheme. The apple juice is made from locally grown apples, the chicken breasts are British and the pork patties made from British pork.

All good stuff. But why isn’t the pork in the roast pork dinner British? Or the ham, the sausages, the gammon? Why’s the chicken in the chicken pie not British? And why does the milk for the cheese come from Somerset, more than 200 miles away, when there are plenty of dairies nearby?

It’s a tall order – we want these meals to be healthy, tasty and cheap. Plus we want them to protect the environment and help our farmers and food producers – particularly those local to us – to survive the recession. Is it too much to ask?

Enjoy 4Food’s school dinners-made-delicious recipes

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