INTO THE MOUTHS OF BABES AND SUCKLINGS

The health of British children is increasingly at risk from the restoration of standards in school meals

Nearly a decade after the removal of a national nutritional standard for school meals (in Mark Carlisle's now notorious 1980 Education Act), what British children eat is a matter of increasing public concern. A recent DHSS study of the eating habits of 3,285 British schoolchildren leaked in 1986 found their diets contained large amounts of chips, crisps, potato tag snacks', cakes, biscuits and soft drinks. Young teenage girls in particular who ate midday meals at cafes, fast-food outlets and take-away restaurants chose food low in nutrients, particularly iron. In the past ten years, the diets of very young children have also deteriorated. In January 1985 the Health Visitor magazine published some sample menus for children under five in a survey carried out in the north of England. The following pattern of eating for toddlers is described as 'not unusual':

Child one 8.20 Tea, digestive biscuits 10.00 Milky coffee, toast (white bread), margarine 12.30 Egg sandwich (white bread), crisps 3.00 Coffee, biscuits 4.00 Sausage, chips, tea 6.00 10p mixed sweets Child two 7.30 Cola 9.00 Cream biscuits 12.00 Cheese and onion pasty, chips, milky coffee 3.00 10p mixed sweets 4.00 Crisps 5.00 Pop 6.00 Crisps

Although it is customary to blame ignor- ant and poor mothers for feeding their children in this way, such food standards are also considered perfectly acceptable by local education authorities in the so-called `Thatcherite shires'. Since 1980 local education authorities have had a statutory duty only to make 'such provision . . . as appears to the authority to be requisite' for children entitled to free meals. In Tighten- ing Belts (the London Food Commission, 1986) Isobel Cole-Hamilton and Tim Lang refer, for example, to typical school `meals' in Lincolnshire. On the day two food researchers visited one Lincolnshire school, each child was given a roll filled with a cold sausage, a small Kit-Kat and a small por- tion of jam tart. It is rather ironic that in a county feather-bedded with massive public sub- sidies for agriculture, such trash is considered to be an adequate mid- day meal for children of the rural poor, perhaps bussed ten miles on a cold winter's day. Since then, social security leg- islation this year has re- moved the right to free school meals for a furth- er half a million children from families on low earnings.

Throughout the past 25 years, the power of mothers to deter- mine what their families eat has significant- ly declined. At the very moment responsi- ble mothers increasingly depend on schools to provide an attractive, well-balanced principal meal of the day, this lynch-pin of child welfare has been undermined. In- stead, with no government regard for the consequences, children have been directly exposed as 'consumers' to Britain's badly regulated processed-food industry. As Tim Lang, the school meals expert at the London Food Commission, remarked, the purpose of the 1980 Act was 'merely to remove a major legal block on the food industry's penetration . . . of the £800 mil- lion school pupil market'. A few days ago I sat at the side of a large self-service dining-room in Nunnery Wood High School, Worcester, to see what some of its 1,500 children now eat in a county Which was among the first completely to privatise school meals. In 1982, Hereford and Worcester Education Authority closed the kitchens of 257 primary schools and auctioned the equipment. All that 'free- school-mealers' in the primary sector are now offered is a 'frozen sandwich' distri- buted for local assembly from a cook-chill unit in Malvern. Other `sandwich-in-a-taxi' local authorities who feed young children in this way are Buckinghamshire, Merton, Lincolnshire, Dorset and Cheshire.

At Nunnery Wood, as in most of the county's secondary schools, some warm food is available. Along one side of the room luxuriant potted plants filtered the bright winter sunlight onto the waiting formica tables, while behind the hatch Mrs Gwillam and Mrs Hughes of Two-Cooks Catering set out food for an oddly timed morning break at 11.25. On offer were light white baps filled with grated cheese, onion, pickle or salad; shop sausage rolls, Pasties and steak and kidney pies (known as 'snake and pygmy') which had been heated up; trays of cream buns topped with Chocolate icing; home-made cakes, boxes of Mars bars and Kit-Kats and neat rows of fizzy drinks. Although there is an EEC subsidy available, no milk in any form was on sale.

As the children in their distinctive bottle-green uniforms settled down at the tables ('we always make them wear blazers in the dining-room') I noted what for many of them was breakfast. Four little Indian boys aged ten or eleven bought between them three cans of Coca-Cola, three cream buns, two bags of crisps and a packet of sweet biscuits. Breakfast for a girl of 12 was a bag of crisps, a Cadbury': Flake and home-made jam tart. At the table next to her two more girls began on Cherry Coke, Pineapple Lilt, two bags of crisps and a Kit-Kat. Cans of soft drinks and chocolate Wrappers glinted across the room. 'The Cheese baps haven't gone very well today,' said the school meals supervisor as the Children drifted away. Lunch at Nunnery Wood is served at 12.55. Behind the hatch the Two-Cooks team went on to prepare a home-made chicken curry and white rice and a home- made steak and kidney pie with two vegetables for 55p. Half a big brown baked Potato topped with cheese would be Offered for 35p and Mrs Gwillam plunged a grid of ready-frozen chips into the fryer rather crossly as I asked her why the dining-room sold so much Coke. The home-made quiches (made with white flour) and ham salad looked very appetis- ing, but my impression was that to the Children the good items on offer were swamped by chocolate, buns and soft drinks, supplied by the caterers to tempt the children in ('we only make a living and nothing more). The idea that good quality school catering can be done without public subsidy is economic nonsense. As with all privatised school-catering companies the monthly cash-flow of Two-Cooks Catering is provided by 'the free school dinner money'.

Working under a rather dismal local authority, Two-Cooks Catering is run by nice motherly women doing their best. As I left, a catering assistant began setting out the room for lunch. Beside the self-service cutlery tray she carefully placed cartons of Lilt, Coke and chocolate bars — the supermarket technique of encouraging the last-minute impulse buy.

One new and unpleasant factor in Brit ish children's diets is the aggressive targeting of children as consumers by the junk food industry. This was quite explicitly set out by McCain Foods (the Canadian 'frozen potato' international) in a September num- ber of The Grocer: 'The marketing of frozen food aimed specifically at children is an under-developed area, but we are work- ing on a new look to take advantage of the great potential which exists for new chil- dren's products.' Soon McCain will be spending £1.3 million to promote frozen potato novelties specially aimed at chil- dren. These are Moon Waffles (wheel- shaped potato waffles 'in crispy batter') and Mega Monsters (vaguely dinosaur- shaped lumps of the same thing). The packets of some sugary breakfast cereals have been deliberately designed since the Sixties to appeal to children's love of cartoon characters. There is Tony the Tiger ('they're Gr-r-reat') on Kellogg's Frosties; the deep-voiced Coco-Pops monkey who plays bongo drums on televi- sion and Eddy, the Elvis-like 'bendy man' on Ready Brek. But new areas of child targeting in supermarkets are rapidly being opened up. One of these is the tinned-soggy-spaghetti-or-beans-in-tomato- gloop market. A few days ago, as my three-year-old daughter raced towards a chilled cabinet to look for a cartoon hippopotamus on sweetened yogurt cartons, I noticed the new tomato-gloop products. From Crosse & Blackwell came 'Fred Bear's Baked Beans and Spaghetti Bears' (a bright yel- low label carries a short story and shows a cartoon bear fishing). Then came 'Heinz Bean Street Kids' Beans & Burgerbites' (an update of the Beano's Bash Street Kids); 'Space Invaders' (pasta bits shaped like spacecraft); and Heinz's 'Haunted House Spaghetti Shapes'. Here a dark blue label is struck with lightning and reads: 'Experience a world of spooky spaghetti shapes immersed in terrifying tomato sauce.' Even more alarming is the use of aggressive television advertising using popular cartoon characters to promote food of low nutritional value. Columbia Picture Industries Inc has just produced The Real Ghostbusters, 'spaghetti shapes' which are 'based on the incredibly popular TV series'. As the children's food expert Tim Lobstein remarks in his new book, Fast Food Facts (Camden Press, 1988), 'Parents can justifiably feel angry . . . such food is not sold as food in itself but as "an edible part of the entertainment indus- try".'

New food industry irresponsibility to- wards children's food and drink is most clearly seen in 'Jump Cola' manufactured by David Lloyd Marketing using the slo- gan, `So bad, it's evil'. This soft drink was given the very high caffeine content of 195 mg per litre. It was reduced to 170 mg per litre after public protest and currently awaits a Ministry of Agriculture decision on whether or not a level of 125 mg per litre should be imposed on the caffeine content of all soft drinks.

Very recently, despite straitened means, some local authorities have joined forces to try to reverse the downward spiral of British children's nutrition. Founded by two county catering officers, Arnold Fewell from North Yorkshire and Wally Taylor from Surrey, Feast (Fab Eating At School Today) has voluntarily adopted the new nutritional standard for school meals which should have been introduced in 1980 (low fat, sugar and salt and high fibre). A Private Member's Bill sponsored by Tony Lloyd, the Labour MP for Stretford, tried but failed to introduce the new nutritional standard last year.

On a bright wintry morning warming up after a heavy frost, I arrived at Hempland Junior School, York, to see an example of the school meals which this year won a 'Catey' (Industrial Caterer of the Year). In a spacious dining-room dotted with octa- gonal tables in blue, yellow and red, the headmaster Gordon Bradley watched with the cook-in-charge Mrs Margaret Poole as the children filed in after hand inspection to say grace. Mr Bradley always eats with the children. ('We like the social aspect of children sitting down at a table and having a meal together as a family.') Junior schools in North Yorkshire have a set two-course meal for 72p (upper schools' cost 82p). Today it was a baked potato, a very meaty burger topped with grated cheddar cheese, a green salad of lettuce, green peppers and cucumber, and cole- slaw. Wholemeal sponge with lemon sauce followed and a metal jug of cold water was placed in the centre of each table.

In the adjoining dining-room, where there is 'family service' for the very young children, the head of the Hempland Infant School, Mrs Catherine Caddell, worried like all good teachers about the 45 per cent or so of children in the room who sat down with coloured plastic lunch-boxes brought from home. 'That's the first time that child has had meat in her sandwich in over a year . . . They need something warm in- side them in the middle of the day . . . the brain has to be fed as well as the body. I feel some children would do better academically if they had something nourishing inside them. . . . If local au- thorities are providing school meals, all children should have them. I never mince my words when it comes to school meals. I think packed !undies are an abomination.' At one table a little girl of six or seven to whom Mrs Caddell had given a free lunch in the past looked round longingly at the hot food. Every day for over a year, her lunch box has contained two small sand- wiches filled with cream cheese, and a chocolate biscuit.

When convenience foods were intro- duced in North Yorkshire schools in 1980 after deregulation, meal uptake fell to 20 per cent, including free meals. Now 551/2 per cent of the county's 100,000 pupils take up the meal, and next year's target is 65 per cent. After establishing the new healthy food standard, Arnold Fewell achieved this by introducing benign marketing techni- ques within the schools. Three life-size characters were developed — Herbie, a friendly carrot with tufty green hair, who stands for Healthy Eating Really Better In Every Way; Rockie (a huge stick of pink rock who is a villain to teeth) and Sam Swede (Strong and Muscular). Catering staff dress up in these costumes to present nutritional morality plays and Herbie pre- sents prizes in the frequent 'healthy eating' competitions involving essays, poems and paintings. This breaking down of the 'hatchway' philosophy in school kitchens means that good school meals can become part of preventive health education.

This extract from an essay by Benjamin Goldsworthy (aged eight) is one example from a Herbie competition run within North Yorkshire schools. It is decorated with blue-winged Sugar Demons carrying a pick-axe in one hand and a drill in the other:

One day Mum said, 'Amy is going to the dentist for a filling. Are you going to come and watch?' I said, 'Yes'. I thought it would be fun. When we got to the dentist's, Amy got on the chair. She was terrified. I was laughing my head off. I was still laughing when the dentist had done. Then the dentist said, 'Benjamin next', and I stopped laughing.

In the upper schools benign marketing also takes the form of 'sophisticated' decor — bright screw-down plastic furniture and background pop music to simulate the fast-food rivals. (At Fulford School, York, for example, the Milk Marketing Board has sponsored the Bottle Stop, a bar with bright blue plastic furniture in which milk drinks are served along with the wholefood buffet.) Despite all this effort, originality and achievement, the North Yorkshire catering team faces August 1990 when, as a direct labour organisation, it may be undercut when the local authority is compelled to introduce competitive tendering. ('We don't want Joe Bloggs in with his marma- lade butties again.') A very tight specifica- tion with emphasis on nutritional stan- dards, raising uptake and promoting health education seems to be the answer.

In 1979 parents paid 30p towards the cost of each state school meal with 24p coming from general taxation. Such sup- port for children's meals is now more necessary than ever. As Britain's food supply becomes increasingly corrupted, attractive high-quality school meals at a price all parents can readily afford is more important than ever in repairing and im- proving the nation's health. Another ques- tion parents should be asking is why state children have been allowed by government to be a captive audience for Britain's junk food industry? In terms of child nutrition and health education the privatisation of school meals has been a disaster. To paraphrase St Francis' words as used by Mrs Thatcher, where there was milk, let there be Lilt.

Further information can be obtained from Feast, 40 Grimwood Road, Twick- enham, Middlesex. Tel: 01-892 5012.