This week I was more than disturbed to hear of the governments plans to relax the nutritional standards in the food sold and served in over a third of schools in England. This is truly shocking and will only lead us back to a very dark place with the health of our kids and ultimately the country as a whole.
Seven years ago when Jamie Oliver started his campaign to improve school food we were in that same dark place. Sub standard processed food was being fed to the children of this country with horrific consequences to their health. Something that stuck in my head whilst watching the TV shows was the fact that this generation of kids would be the first to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents. Every day, by sending your child to school with their lunch money or their packed lunch full of crisps and chocolate, you were slowly killing them. In my mind, the argument for healthier food in schools was a complete "no brainer" to be honest, but both money and politics did what it always does and caused a whole load of problems. Money is a horrible thing, I would love a world where important things didn't have to be compromised because of profit margins and contract negotiations. The health of our country (the worst in Europe and not too far behind the worst of them all, the U.S.A) has to be one of the most important issues. A quarter of kids under the age of 10 are obese, and a third of all teenagers. This is putting an enormous stress on an already overworked NHS. This costs our economy £4,000,000,000 a year. Diabetes costs our economy £10,000,000,000 a year. If you want to talk about saving money, that's a good place to start. If standards start to go backwards, as the government are pretty much pushing that way, then those figures, which are enormous, will only increase further. They are already predicted to double in the next 15-20 years.
The other shocking thing I learned 7 years ago, was that there were more standards to comply with in producing Dog Food than there were for food served to kids in school. That meant that so called "meat" products could be sold with as low as 20% meat content and 80% anything else. I think we all remember Jamie blitzing up all sorts of nasty stuff in his food processor as a demonstration as to what that 80% was made up of. Processed food is bad news, and Jamie's campaign managed to rid schools of it, take away sweets, crisps and chocolate bars from vending machines and educate kids about food and nutrition at the same time.
I saw a news report from a school in Greenwich the other day, which asked the kids (and remember we are now talking about a new batch of kids who didn't grow up with the turkey twizzlers) about their school dinners. These kids were happy and healthy and statistics also show that they are performing better academically. They enjoyed their healthy food and were not bothered by the lack of the unhealthy stuff. To relax the standards and ask schools to self assess is crazy, and the kids don't even miss it in the first place!
In a perfect world these schools would only serve the healthy meals and kids health would improve, grades would improve and it would be sunny all the time. Unfortunately, it seems that these schools are having pressure heaped upon them to make a return to unhealthy profitable snacks in vending machines and low standard processed products that fall well below the acceptable level. Schools need money, it's a simple truth and the temptations are obvious. Having strict guidelines mean that high standards have to be maintained, and success stories like the one I saw on the news might not have happened without them.
We cannot allow this relaxing of standards to happen. Lots of my friends and family have some fantastic little kids and I want all of them (and mine when we get around to it!) to have fantastic futures . If we take a stand and make some noise, then I have every faith that they will.
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