Don’t ban packed lunches
Last year Jamie Oliver, a famous young British TV chef, was credited with bringing about a massive improvement in the quality of school dinners after running a TV series exposing the rubbishy quality of much of them, notably the ubiquitous turkey twizzlers and other processed products with a high fat and salt content. He’s now making a new series, Return to School Dinners, and has hit out at parents who send their kids to school with packed lunches which are themselves full of junk food. From the Independent:
In the programme Oliver says: “I’ve spent two years being PC about parents, now is the time to say, ‘If you’re giving your young children fizzy drinks you’re an arsehole, you’re a tosser. If you give them bags of crisps you’re an idiot. If you aren’t cooking them a hot meal, sort it out.’ If they truly care they’ve got to take control.”
Speaking after a preview screening of the new programme, Oliver said: “I have seen kids of the ages of four or five, the same age as mine, open their lunchbox and inside is a cold, half-eaten McDonald’s, multiple packets of crisps and a can of Red Bull. We laugh and then want to cry.
“I have no doubts that these parents love their children,” he said. But he added that if a teacher told a parent that their child tended to get very tired at the end of the day, it was wrong to think the solution was “a can of Red Bull because it gives you wings – you might as well give them a line of coke”.
While a lot of people will have no disagreement with much of the above – whatever they think about the language – what Oliver is calling for is for packed lunches to be banned in schools where school dinners are good, because 70% of the packed lunches he’s seen are inappropriate. This is simply too far, by miles.
To start with, I had packed lunches for almost my entire primary school career and into first year of secondary school (until I was 12). The content was always balanced – a sandwich or bread roll, a piece of fruit, a cereal bar, sometimes a bag of crisps, and a carton of fruit juice. Dinner was in the evening, and was eaten around the table with the rest of the family. I’m sure there are plenty of parents out there who provide packed lunches containing decent food, if only because school dinners, perhaps even after the changes of the last two years or so, are in some places still inadequate, but perhaps also because they want to save dinner for the evening, around the table.
To rob decent families of this possibility smacks not only of nannying, as Oliver in fact said that there “does need to be someone daddyish or mummyish up there saying, ‘Christ Almighty, they are getting fatter – oh, no, they are dropping dead'”, but of the sort of unfair blanket punishments we were subjected to at school when the teachers could not determine who had done something wrong, only that someone had (on one occasion they punished the known victim as well). There could, for example, be a list of items schools should not tolerate being brought in as packed lunches, and specific children could be required to choose something from the school menu if they turned up time after time with inappropriate or inadequate food.
There is another reason, of course, which is that packed lunches may provide for the child’s particular dietary needs, be they of a medical or cultural nature. No doubt nobody would disagree with allowing a child who was allergic to common ingredients in school dinners to bring his or her own lunch; the same is not true with cultural dietary needs. There have been various reports from France of school boards banning packed lunches and then instituting compulsory school dinners containing pork, so that Muslim (and possibly also Jewish) children would have to eat them.
I’m sure someone will say that there’s nothing wrong with doing this, that religion is just a cultural choice and that there’s no such thing as a Muslim or Jewish child, only a child of Muslim or Jewish parents. Then, it just becomes a case of the child finding a given food disgusting, and let’s face it, we all have to eat things we don’t like, don’t we? The fact is that religion is a fact of human civilisation and disrespecting it is the mark of tyrants – and most of those who did so deliberately in the past century were east of the Iron Curtain – and know-it-alls who think they can remake humankind according to their own ideas (the sort who came up with eugenics, for example). In this particular case it causes needless distress, and the right-wing bigots most likely to be responsible probably intend this.
Even Oliver does not actually expect packed lunches to be banned, and even if they were, this being Britain I suspect that we would not, in general, go down the one-size-fits-all “let’s pretend we’re all the same” French route. Still, banning packed lunches is just a bad idea, for the sole reason that it may end up threatening family mealtimes (and not every school will have the resources to provide smaller snacks as well as actual meals). It’s just not fair to punish families with responsible parents for the bad choices of the less responsible.
