Jamie's school dinners

(I watched the programme too, but only because they used Le Tigre as the background music to one of the trailers. It *did* turn out to be quite interesting, though)

Secondary school was a different story though. Kids bought their lunch every day and were allowed to choose from a wide range of stuff including chips, burgers, sandwiches, a couple of salads, cakes etc. Sandwiches were, however a lot more expensive than the junk food and the salads left a lot to be desired. Plus being 13 year olds the novelty of being able to eat chips every single day never faded.

Jamie's gone up a lot in my books. Once a novelty trendy mockerney posterboy, he's since aged noticeably and is succesfully reinventing himself as a proper bloke who gives a shit about what people eat. More power to that.

i seriously doubt that school dinners are now worse than the ones i had at my second school (1968-72): but that was a bit of an anomaly (the cook was psychotic, so kept his job by brandishing a meat cleaver and threatening to resign at awakward times, while the headmaster had no tastebuds) (literally!) (or anyway they literally didn't work, like the taste equiv of being deaf)
the ones at my first and third schools were tolerable though --- mmm spotted dick

Secondary was a different kettle of fish - we had more choice and there was a salad bar, but the salad was so manky nobody touched it except for the weird music teacher. I ended up taking sandwiches and my mum insisted on giving me hummus at least once a week, which made my bag stink of garlic and didn't increase my circle of friends too much. The best thing my secondary school did was fresh rolls for morning break, which cost 8p each or something. You'd pick off the bottom and it would be all steamy and warming. Really, really, really good. When I started having sandwiches, I told Mum the bus fare had gone up by 8p so I could still have my roll every day.

Anyway, the programme. I thought it was pretty good and yes, Jamie has gone up in my estimations a lot in the last couple of years. Apparently they're still looking for a sponsor to fork out the £20,000 needed to send an information pack/recipe book to every school in the country - headteachers are going mad for it - and they're still trying to get the government to put the cost up to 50p instead of 37p, which is, frankly, ludicrous.

maybe if he started calling it Monsterella like Nora did the kids would be more keen 8)

With Jamie, I was amazed at the little kids being able to have nuggets every day of the week, and chips, if that's what they wanted, because no way in HELL would that have happened in my school - there was one meal for lunch and you ate it. You had a menu up for the whole month so you could avoid stuff you didn't like and this meal always consisted a main, three other items, and milk. Fries/chips/tater tots came in once a week if you were lucky, or with the fish fillet served on the Fridays when Macaroni and Cheese was not.

From 13-18 I got free lunches at my school (which had to be kosher AND fish-on-Friday friendly) so I never brought my own, but we had an open campus with a McDonalds on the doorstep so the high school tried very hard to do its own versions of the McD food, including a superior milkshake for 50 cents. Vegetables were usually that peas/carrots/sweetcorn medley, or just the sweetcorn, or string beans. We ate them because the junior high was strict about plate-clearing. Mashed potatoes were never served without some kind of meat gravy (either turkey or hamburger gravy) and there were often tacos and chile con carne. Italian dishes too: pasta and a vile but popular square pizza. The hot dogs were just like Ikea ones but as this was Minnesota we also got corn dogs about once a month (dipped in cornmeal batter and deep-fried).

Memo to Jamie Oliver: herbs are expensive if supplied in anything other than seed form.

one of the last times my dad was in hospital, breakfast consisted of a mouldy piece of bread, toasted a couple of hours before, with a scraping of marj. he raised quite the ward rebellion, even got his doctor involved.

When I started secondary school - 1989 - we paid about 80p per day for lunch. By the time I left, it had gone up to around £1.

(imagine mcdonalds chips overcooked in month-old unspecific much-used fats till dark crispy brown, left in the larder for another month, then heated up till just tepid)

get the kids to plant and grow their own herbs - one stone, two birds.

in guardian today:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1423807,00.html
"Dinner lady quits over quality of school meals"

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=621878

Equally disgusting is a society so debased by consumption and the fiscal "bottom line" that positive change can only occur on television, and at the messy-haired behest of a Range Rover-driving celebrity chef. As you can probably guess, my admittedly cynical comments were not so much directed at the content, but rather the form.

The problem is so big. On the one hand, a society that is literally tyrannised by children, their monstrous attitudes, their crying. (The "well, if they won't eat it, what can we do" attitude espoused by some of the lunch ladies, parents, etc.) On the other, a society where children are victimized by their brutally reductive, health-destroying diet; total estrangement from food; frazzled, ill-equipped, and equally food-estranged parents.

I think Jamie has achieved some encouraging results. The saddening epitaph at the end of the last episode was the government opting not to ban twizzlers etc., thus undoing the program's efforts. As Jamie said, "while that there's a choice of junk food compared to the cooked food, they will always go for the junk food."

and their asthma

obv this is kind of comprehensible, but it's not for nothing that JO is a) a celeb and b) able to parlay that into something. he has 'traction', he has raised other people's voices. i don't think there's anything 'debased' about that, neither is there a firm causal link between a bottom-line-oriented society (ie britain c. 1500 - date) and the dominance of tv chefs. what the fuck has range rovers got to do with anything?

although jamie himself was in fact in the nearby chippy.

This program, I now forgive him.

When the prog went to air, Amber (three at the time) said about all his friends that he was cooking for: "They all work for him".

Sussed or what?

The fancy new menu at the Rawmarsh School here?

“It’s rubbish,” said Andreas Petrou, an 11th grader. Instead, en route to school recently, he was enjoying a north of England specialty known as a chip butty: a French-fries-and-butter sandwich doused in vinegar.

“We didn’t get a choice,” he said of the school food. “They just told us we were having it.”

The government’s regulations, which took effect in September, have banished from school cafeterias the cheap, instantly gratifying meals that children love by default: the hamburgers, the French fries, the breaded, deep-fried processed meat, the sugary drinks.

Now schools have to provide at least two portions of fresh fruit and vegetables a day for each child, serve fish at least once a week, remove salt from lunchroom tables, limit fried foods to two servings a week and cut out candy, soda and potato chips altogether.