School Food Trust safe

Despite the rumours about the culling of quangos the School Food Trust is still with us. There has been a cut to its budget of £1 million, (about 11% of its budget). Not ideal, but could have been worse. You can read what Caterer have to say here

Incidentally the school food trust website has had a redesign. It is now much easier to use and looks much better. What do you think?

Future of the School Food Trust ?

I need to declare an interest here as I am a board member for the School Food Trust, but I am a huge fan. I think the Trust has achieved an amazing amount in the short time it has been set up. It has put in place nutritional standards that mean the substandard school meals we use to get pre 2005 are now illegal. It has helped schools realise they have a clear responsibility to provide decent school lunches. It has made the case in a scientifially robust manner that children who eat well perform better in the afternoons. The "Let's Get Cooking" programme has allowed thousands of some of the most deprived schools to run terrific cookery clubs - passing on the message that well prepared fruit and veggies can be tasty.

Yete despite these achievements it's work is not yet done. The number of school meals sold needs to rise. We know that school meals contain significantly more fruit and veg than the majority of packed lunches. Getting more children to switch from packed lunches to school meals would be an easy way to improve children's diet. School meals will only be economically viable if the majority of children choose to eat them. Economy of scale would mean that caterers could use their greater buying power to get great deals and keep costs down. Good school meals really act as a challenge to our poor food culture that allows kids to be fed crisps and sweets for lunch.

Waiting to find out what the future will now hold.NB The views expressed here are entirely personal and are not in my capacity as a board member.

Keep Campies school meals!

Thanks to the power of twitter I havbe just heard about Campie school who are being told that school dinners are too expensive. It is a school in Scotland where school lunches have been provided for free. However this is about to end yet parents are not prepared to take it lying down. I am waiting to hear what shape their protest will take but it looks like once again it is left to parents to stand up for childrens school meals. You can read more about it here
It may look like a soft cut but in the long run poor child health is going to cost us dear.

Merton Parent's For Better Food in School AGM

We are holding an AGM this Wednesday, 29 April 2010 at Poplar Primary School,Poplar Rd South, Merton Park. (2 mins walk from Morden tube) Everyone welcome!

More school pics from before Easter

Todays ruling from Advertising Standards Agency on Kellogg's

You may remember a while back I was jumping up and down about the horrible coco pop advert on the bus stop opposite the school I teach at. I was particularly incensed because the cartoon monkey was in school uniform and the strap line was encouraging kids to eat even more of the sugary cereal than they usually do by encouraging them to eat it after school.

The Children's Food Campaign got lots of emails about this ad and so we decided to complain to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). It is worth bearing in mind that this particular cereal is over one third sugar, so unhealthy is is banned from schools and not allowed to be advertised on children's TV. We thought that given Coco Pops is heavily marketed as a breakfast cereal the advert was clearly designed to encourage children to eat an additional bowl. The ASA disagreed and have said that Kellogg's are not being "socially irresponsible". You can see their ruling here

I was invited on to the Today programme to discuss this and have also written a blog for the Guardian, "comment is free" website. It is creating a lively debate. Not for the first time my parenting skills have been called into question!

One of the points that I have yet to get across it the fact that Kellogg's claim a bowl of Coco pops is a "moderate" snack that is comparable to a banana or a yoghurt. However they base this on a 30 g serving. A 30 g serving is tiny - most kids and parents routinely pour much larger servings. My own son when asked to estimate 30 g poured out a helping of 72 g which didn't look especially huge when in the bowl.

Thankfully the Department of Health appear to be taking this more seriously. They have told us that will be meeting Kellogg's to discuss our concerns with them. It is vital for the sucess of Change4Life that commericial partners are not allowed to undermine the importance of a healthy diet

KillerKat

This post has nothing to do with school food but since Nestle have bullied YOUtube into taking down the Greenpeace video I thought I would add it here and encourage you to visit the The Greenpeace site where you can find out more. The video is quite horrific and is designed to pressure Nestle into changing their source of palm oil. I am no fan of Nestle because of their appalling record on selling babymilk in the developing world.Have a look at Babymilk action who have done a great job in tackling Nestle over this. I am also truly outraged that in this day and age they can still use child labour in their cocoa plantations. It appears that nestle fail to understand the nature of social media sites as they have now upset facebook users by replacing their hello and welcome message with an instruction not to use a Nestle logo or image! Interesting blog about it here.
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