Buying stuff in supermarkets for packed lunches

meer53

If my 12 year old daughter ate school lunches every day , it would cost me £10 per week.

She takes a packed lunch 4 days out of 5 as i just can't face paying £40 a month for a slice of pizza and some chips. She likes lunch on a Friday because it's fish and chips !

I'm a single parent who works part time so not entitled to free school meals. I can get a whole weeks shopping for £40 !

A._Badger

There is a wider issue here. By what right does a school (or a government) decide that parents should not be allowed to feed their own children?

Whatever the current concerns about obesity, this is a dangerous step.

Edwardia

A. Badger the link at the beginning of the thread is the current advice to schools from Dept of Education.

I can see your concern from the choice and parental responsibility angle, but it's going to take years before the kids being taught to cook nutritious meals are out in the world raising kids of their own.

If you've seen one of the numerous TV programmes about obesity, or something like Can't Cook Won't Cook, you'll have seen that there are millions of people out there who have no idea what a cow looks like. They can't cook, and don't particularly want to, because they can eat KFC (other fast foods are available) out of the box in front of the TV.

In the UK somehow we got disconnected from being proud of good honest food made with local ingredients at home into pseudo foreign industrialised muck.

Findus beef lasagne, horsemeat aside, is nothing like Italian lasagne. In fact the British version of most of these dishes, would have locals in Italy and India scratching their heads in confusion.

So if the parents are Not Bovvered (and there are many on MSE saying horsemeat so what) and there's an obesity epidemic, maybe a few emergency measures are justified ?

building_with_lego

I teach cookery to the Y1 children (aged 5 and 6) in my kid's school. May I quietly report that a good number of them do recognise ingredients such as cheese, basil, a variety of fruit and veg which we use on our 4-week 'course', eggs, yogurt and cinnamon (from the smell)? Granted, there are some children who are obese/overweight and some who are pale and drawn, but I was gratified to find such enthusiasm among them for food and cooking. All is not entirely lost

Fire_Fox

A._Badger wrote: »

There is a wider issue here. By what right does a school (or a government) decide that parents should not be allowed to feed their own children?

Whatever the current concerns about obesity, this is a dangerous step.

Nutrition is a far wider issue than 'merely' obesity - which is a HUGE issue in and of itself - or even the numerous other lifestyle diseases (cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, cancer, various inflammatory conditions). It affects behaviour, concentration and learning, asthma attacks, hay fever, immune function so spread of viral infection, general absenteeism. Seriously go and read some of the published research, I was absolutely blown away when I was studying for my last degree by the ability of simple healthy eating to prevent, treat and even 'cure' a raft of health complaints.

I don't see this aspect of Public Health as any different to controlling smoking, alcohol, drugs or any number of other deeply unhealthy habits. Should we sell cannabis and alcohol in school vending machines and let parents decide if their kids buy it? As a nation we simply cannot afford the predicted costs in terms of healthcare, absenteeism or state benefits of health problems and disability (mental or physical) as a result of poor lifestyle choices, it's crippling our economy now just as much as any recession.

As a nation we don't meet even the basic (minimum/ maximum not optimal) healthy eating guidelines, averaging three servings of fruit and veg a day and one third of a serving of oily fish a week for example. Plenty eat none at all, I almost never see clients that hit all the targets most don't even know what they are. We should not need to tell parents to feed their children properly and not smoke at home or in the car, but too few behave responsibly.

Do you have a better idea? Let's be honest, our namby pamby health promotion messages are not working. In fact I think they are part of the problem, many people see five a day as some sort of holy grail instead of being the absolute minimum to reduce health risks (the message is AT LEAST five, most other countries advocate between seven and ten).

Working in healthcare for the last twenty something years, currently in lifestyle, I honestly believe Public Health is a wider issue than freedom for people to waste money poisoning themselves and their children. It has been argued some diets are tantamount to child abuse or neglect, so is the average UK diet just 'minor' abuse or neglect?

This is the official World Health Organisation definition, so what the state and parents are charged with striving for
"Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity."

A._Badger

Edwardia wrote: »

A. Badger the link at the beginning of the thread is the current advice to schools from Dept of Education.

I do take your point and I think we are in complete agreement about the over-reliance on processed foods and the appalling lack of knowledge about food and cooking in general.

For that reason, I'm very happy to see cookery being taught in schools (and it must be taught to boys as well as girls).

But I draw the line at banning packed lunches. The government's 'healthy eating' guidelines, as is becoming clearer by the month, are coming under serious fire from researchers and there remain many unanswered questions. I, for one, wouldn't want any child of mine stuffed full of pizza because of faddy junk science about carbs, or fed refined processed vegetable oils in place of the animal fats we have evolved to eat.

But even if that weren't the case, this is a dangerous step along a road which is already being designed and planned by health Nazis - whereby what we all eat is governed by what orthodoxy happens to dictate at a given point in time.

I don't think that is somewhere we, as a society, really want to go.

blackandwhitebunny

Own_My_Own wrote: »

I know this is slightly off the main subject, but I am glad my kids are too old for this.

When money is tight there is nothing worse than the dreaded Home Ec shopping list being bought home.

It can cost a fortune, if it is something you don't normally eat at home. Or they need one stick of celery.

Fortunately dds last cookery teacher had some sense. She would send the list home with the option of buying some of the ingredients from the school (you needed to fill the form in the week before). You could buy the pinch of turmeric or the clove of garlic for a couple of pence. I think she had more kids participating after she introduced it.

That's my say, you can carry on about school dinners now.

I do this for the pupils that I teach, we often have practical sessions were the pupils bring in 50p and I get the main ingredients, they just bring in the extra's such as dried fruit or choc chips etc. If anyone turns up without the 50p they cook anyway and bring it later or I 'forget' about it.
There was a lot of noise earlier about the government providing money for ingredients for pupils on FSM's and some benefits for ingredients but I've never seen any, My head teacher claims not to have seen it either.
The proposed curriculum from 2014 is clear about pupils also learning to cook meal type dishes and not just baking, I'm just wondering if they'll also insist on us having lessons long enough to make anything reasonable. There's a limit to what you can do with 20 twelve years olds in an hour. Interestingly it also includes 'horticulture' in the Design and technology curriculum.
Re: packed lunches, we have pupils (this is secondary school) who bring in a packet of biscuits and a two litre bottle of coke or two energy drinks, a packet of crisps and a bag of harib* sweets. And people wonder why they struggle academically.

VfM4meplse

Dori2o started a similar thread on DT.

IMO it's the kids with clueless parents who will suffer...the inverse care law in action.

A._Badger

Fire_Fox wrote: »

I don't see this aspect of Public Health as any different to controlling smoking, alcohol, drugs or any number of other deeply unhealthy habits. Should we sell cannabis and alcohol in school vending machines and let parents decide if their kids buy it? As a nation we simply cannot afford the predicted costs in terms of healthcare, absenteeism or state benefits of health problems and disability (mental or physical) as a result of poor lifestyle choices, it's crippling our economy now just as much as any recession.

Frankly, Fire Fox, I really can't be bothered to argue with you. Your version of what is healthy is based on some very questionable data (you keep repeating the 'five a day' mantra as if you have read nothing at all in recent years about the challenges to the perceived role of antioxidants). This is worrying and your willingness to condone compulsion, using socialised medicine and its costs as an excuse is, frankly, chilling. That, though, is not an argument for this forum, as I'm sure our very keen-eyed mod will soon remind us.

If only for the sake of not boring other readers into a coma, I'm not going to enter into a debate with you. I will just hope that readers keep up to date with the rapidly changing state of knowledge and don't take on trust anything they are told by governments.It is usually, at best, several years out of date.

rachbc

The minister responsible categorically denied they are even considering banning packed lunches on R4 this morning so the Daily Mail brigade can go back to wailing and knashing teeth about some other perceived injustice