Labour is to make lentils and chickpeas compulsory in school dinners and ban traditional fish and chips and other fried food in its latest killjoy move as headteachers warn the pricey health drive will lead staffing cuts. The Mail has more.
A new healthy eating diktat for school dinners could result in staffing cuts and further “divert money from teaching” as budgets are squeezed, headteachers warned today.
Schools across England will have to cut down on serving pupils sweetened baked desserts under the first new school food standards for more than a decade.
The desserts must contain or be served with fruit as part of the Department for Education’s sweeping overhaul aimed at tackling childhood obesity and tooth decay.
Sugary drinks and foods such as ice cream will also be restricted, while deep-fried foods are cut. Foods high in fat and salt such as pizzas will also have to be limited.
More fibrous wholegrains and pulses such as lentils and chickpeas will be required on menus alongside main meal options at least once a week – while a portion of vegetables or salad should accompany, or be incorporated into, every main meal.
But leaders have warned schools will need additional funding to comply with the new rules, given a kilogram of chicken nuggets costs the same as two chicken breasts.
Pepe Di’Iasio, General Secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: “The current funding rate for free school meals is not enough to cover costs.
“Many schools have to divert money from teaching and learning in order to afford this vital provision. It is a case of having to rob Peter to pay Paul.”
Paul Whiteman, the National Association of Head Teachers General Secretary, added: “If the Government is serious about them working in practice it must provide significant additional funding to reflect the real costs of school meals, which these new requirements are likely to increase.
“Many schools already have to raid stretched core budgets for staffing and the curriculum to subsidise the costs.”
He also said any checks must not place “additional burdens” on “already over-stretched” school leaders.
The changes mean the traditional ‘fish and chips Friday’ lunches loved by many pupils will still be permitted, but must be prepared using oven baking instead.
In addition, sweetened desserts such as cake, waffles and ice cream can be served only twice a week in secondary schools, and once in primary schools – and must include a portion of fruit.
Previously, cakes and desserts were allowed every lunchtime.
Under the new rules, all bread must be at least half wholemeal in its composition – whereas previously it could be all white.
Processed meat products, such as sausages and chicken nuggets, can be served only once a week and all pasta must be at least 50% wholewheat once a week.
Condiments will also have new regulations, with only reduced salt and sugar ketchup permitted and chocolate spread not allowed.
Meanwhile, breakfast clubs, which previously had no specifications, must not include pastries, fried eggs and high-sugar cereals such as Coco Pops.
Worth reading in full.
If Labour politicians think children won’t just refuse to eat their new mandatory health foods they haven’t met many children. Expect a surge in kids with packed lunches.
Stop Press: Schools will be expected to police children’s lunchboxes and ban “sugary drinks, crisps and confectionery”, telling parents what they can and cannot give their children for lunch and publishing their ‘guidance’ online.
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These changes appear a covert compliance of UN Agenda 2030, which was brought in to control the world through bogus Climate Change.
The children are not at school long enough to invest all this effort. Where I live the corner shop is full of kids stocking up on chocolate and crisps, then to the park to play football for a couple of hours. Presumable they eat a cooked meal in the evening.
How can we find out the average weight- and waist measurements- of the decision makers? Maybe AI could estimate from a photo of the proud committee members?
More do as I say, no surprise there.
They’ll walk out of school and go straight to the nearest takeaway or corner shop selling crisps and chocolate.
That’s rather like what happened when Jamie Oliver was let loose on school meals.
I’m surprised there’s no mention from the government of how less meat and more plant based foods will help achieve net zero, increase biodiversity and meet other arbitrary targets.
What next, no pork in case Muslim pupils are “trigged” watching other people eat it? I bet that if there’s Muslim pupils at the school all the meat is halal rather than cooking separate cruelty based meals or giving them the vegetarian option.
Well, since neither Lentils nor Chickpeas are grown in our climate, we have to import them, and the biggest supplier of both is INDIA.
So this new scam will be a Nice Little Earner for INDIA, and also get British children used to eating that Foreign Vegetarian Muck, so they’ll easily become Global Vegan Slaves later on, and return to the good old Medieval days of Lords & Serfs, where meat was reserved for the Lords, while the Serfs ate porridge.
Also, legumes like lentils, chickpeas & beans are all TOXIC in their unprocessed form, and cause terrible bloating and intestinal problems in humans. Avoid.
TBH I actually quite lentiils, sorry everybody!
No worries but please stay downwind 😀
I love lentils and chickpeas too, and I definitely don’t suffer from terrible bloating and intestinal problems… they are only toxic in their raw form. Not that I approve of this kind of government micromanagement of course!
I actually think this is a good idea, not necessarily the Lentils but the cutting down on the deep fried and processed foods, and puddings. Children these days are a lot less active, they are either glued to their phone, or some other device. Schools no longer have playing fields, do PE daily, play sports so the children do not need the extra fat. Likewise the frankly awful crap that goes into cheap processed foods, I wouldn’t feed to my dog.
I think the school food providers could be more imaginative with Vegetables, Pasta, grains and of course the cheaper cuts of meat and fish. Fish and chips on a Friday should be preserved as its a treat, and maybe the schools could explain the Christian beliefs behind the eating of fish on a Friday.
Our Children are Fat, they are unused to physical playing and exercise, this is a good idea from Labour, although I suspect they will screw it up.
Then get them out doing physical exercise. There was a reason why people weren’t obese in the days when everything was cooked in lard. They were burning it off.
As I walk in the street, in stores, see school children from nearby small persons’ school, secondary school children coming from the railway station, I rarely see a fat child, or fat adult. Same observation in other towns.
So where exactly is the obesity crisis? Another climate crisis? Pandemic?
Funnily enough, I went to the chippy myself last night… I’d estimate that 90% of the 20 odd people I saw were overweight, by some margin, including the eight kids up the road in the playground (where they might have been playing hoops but were all sitting around looking at their phones ).
My observation is no more scientific than yours, of course, but it does demonstrate the other side of this particular coin, I suppose?
You pick a location most likely to attract fatties and compare that with the wider population distribution?
If you go to the zoo I expect you will find more elephants than in the high street.
“… The desserts must contain or be served with fruit…” which contain the sugars: fructose, glucose, sucrose (that’s the “bad” sugar). All sugars and other carbohydrates such as those in grains, pulses, vegetables are converted in the body to glucose for immediate energy.
Children need plenty of energy.
Unused glucose is converted into glycogen and stored in muscles and liver, or if these are “full”, into fatty tissue.
Lentils are mostly starch – carbohydrate – and sugars: sucrose, fructose and glucose.
The idiots are just changing one source of sugars and carbohydrates for another. None of these nitwits understand nutrition or physiology.
School meals in the 1950s/60s were designed by dieticians. My school meals included: meat pie, roast pork, roast beef and Yorkshire pud, meat stews, mince cobbler, spam fritters (didn’t like those), fish and chips, steamed fish, always potatoes – mashed, boiled, roast, veg including carrots, cabbage, peas, salads.
Desserts included: chocolate or ginger sponge, rice pudding, sago, spotted dick, sponge with icing top, variously served with custard, “pink” custard or white sauce.
Returning to that would make sense – based on good diet not ideology and politics.
Yes, up to three roast dinners a week with mince, sausages or fish and chips on the other days. The current diet sheet has more to do with puritan food fanaticism than healthy eating.
“Puritan”??? The word is defined as “a person with censorious moral beliefs, especially about self-indulgence and sex”
Lentils do not come into it.
That’s a perfect definition for the sanctimonious twerps who wish to police every aspect of our lives, including what appears on our plates. Lentils are fine in a rich ham bone winter broth, otherwise the food fascists can stick them right up where the sun don’t shine.
Puritanism is worrying that someone somewhere might be enjoying themself, including enjoying what they eat.
They banned mince pies.
Not specifically mince pies, but all Christmas festivities, because they said Christmas has no Biblical foundation, and Jesus never told his disciples to celebrate his birth, nor to worship the Impostor Goddess.
And almost all youngsters were slim and active back then!
Yes, well said. Those were also the days when we did not eat in the street. There were meal times, and none of this constant picking at food all day.
Stop it! You’re making me dribble!
I love all those things and am now 70 years old and never been overweight.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t my experience when I had school dinners at my primary school in the early 1960’s. I am well known for eating just about anything put before me, indeed I was never allowed to refuse food at home, even when it made me gag, such as oversized broad beans with gross thick skins, and Ovaltine. Said school dinners consisted of disgusting orange gristle stew and vegetables that were boiled to death. I was fortunate to not have to suffer these horrendous meals for long. The meals at my secondary school, however, were excellent.
When my kids had school dinners, the Wednesday roast and the Friday fish and chips (and it was the same schedule even in different towns) were the ones which had the kids really piling into the dinners.
True. You could tell which day of the week it was by the dinner menu. And no choice, except eat, don’t eat.
Well at least they’re spending £1,000 a second on Net Zero. That’s the main thing.
Another area of our lives that a bunch of finger waggers have appointed themselves to govern.
What is the bet that plenty of those finger waggers are not paragons of health themselves.
But hey, this is our democratic system. Every four years or so we shove a piece of paper in a ballot box and then a bunch of fatties with a range of bad lifestyle choices get to lord it over children and tell them how to be healthy.
Fish and chips are healthy, cakes not so much
End state education
Cake contains sugars and carbohydrate which provide immediate energy. They also stimulate insulin production which aids quick breakdown of the sugars and other carbs from the other foods to glucose for that energy.
In France dieticians visit schools and give talks to children. A balanced meal should have modest portions of meat or fish, vegetable or salad, a little cheese or other dairy prodict, and finish with something sweet.
Anyone who has visited or lived in France will see this on “le menu” which is a set three or four course meal.
I think most people get enough energy without cake, and a lot of people eat too much cake.
But I don’t think the state should be providing dietary advice (or education).
I agree – the state should not be giving dietary advice; however, I think that schools should definitely be providing well-balanced and nutritious food; surely this is therefore a failure of the Head teacher (and their “leadership team”) that the government feels the need to step in.
Head teachers get paid huge amounts of money (complete with eye-watering pensions that enable them to retire in comfort in their fifties) – if they can’t be trusted to provide a healthy diet to their pupils – how can they be trusted to provide a decent education?
I guess whether the school is run by the state or privately it may choose to provide school meals. Choosing a school might include looking at what their meal offerings are.
How about parents providing their children with food and the school spending its resources on a first class education in the classroom?
You know the answer to that… we’re already governed by people who think it’s right to allow parents to abdicate from their responsibilities and provide what they call ‘breakfast’ for their children for them… why would you think lunch would be any different?
All part of the plan to create a client class dependant on the state for everything…
Wow! Radical!
🙂
Ooh – surely not!
The state needs to give dietary ‘advice’ and encourage the populace to accept what they are given, like this because the plan, eventually, is that your weekly ration will be controlled by the state, along with the universal basic income that they are already some way towards implementing through welfare… there’s much, much more to come.
This has the hands of Michie’s ‘nudge unit’ all over it.
Indeed
The fact that the existence and activities of the nudge unit are a matter of public record and not a state secret gives a shocking measure of how much trouble we are in- it’s accepted by many as the proper role of the state to tell us how to live our lives.
“…People eat too much cake” ????!!! I’m shocked. Shocked, I tell you. 🙂
There seems to be a polarisation in progress. When I was a boy there were a few health and fitness nuts, people who did sport or lots of physical activity or had physical jobs, and a quota of overweight people. Now that hardly anyone does a physical job, there are more people who are conscious of what they eat and who take regular intense exercise, but equally many many more people who eating themselves to death.
Diabetes.
Avoid carbs.
Children need protein to grow – pork chops, bacon, sausages, eggs, steak.
This is a hilarious move, by a bunch of folk who don’t understand either children or human nature.
If the wee chubbies don’t go on hunger strike, they may kill and eat each other.
Two possibilities:
(a) They care deeply about the kids and their welfare and really want to make sure the next generation are the best, healthiest version of themselves they can be.
(b) They are using the welfare of children as an excuse to indulge a deep rooted human instinct to exert power over others.
Which do we think is more likely?
Force fruit and lentils on these kids and they’ll just eat at the halal fried chicken shack across the road, which most of them probably already do.
Do you mean the kebab shop with that hunk of MRI meat that is reheated daily and looks like a larger ulcerated leg.
“… and looks like a larger ulcerated leg.”
Only when they’ve brushed all the flies off.
Nothing wrong with a good shish though, chicken or lamb. Pork if you have a Greek place.
But news reports a while back said that many kebab shops were caught selling kebabs made from GOATS.
It might of been the same report that said they contained skin and various other things that can’t be legally called meat.
When I was at school decades ago there was a story being told in the playground that council inspectors had found half a dead Alsatian in the freezer at the local kebab shop. For a long time I thought it was just kids making up silly stories but given what’s now known about a lot of kebab shops I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it was true.
I remember hearing this tale.
Goat is good!
Haha, I know what you mean – though I’m guessing your career in marketing is waaaay behind you! 😉
It is a feature of such foodstuffs that they are not filling and the stomach empties quickly, giving rise to feeling hungry which then encourages snacking.
It is why diets fail which involve eating a bowl of weeds with lentils scattered on the top.
Meat protein, fat in food or fatty foods like cheese, slows down stomach emptying, gives a feeling of being full for longer so the desire to snack is reduced.
Protein is not converted to fat in the body. The most concentrated source of protein is meat and fish which co gain all the essential amino-acids Humans need for tissue growth/regrowth.
Halal must be banned.
Also the import of it.
Remember what happened when a famous TV chef introduced healthy food into a Northern school? Labour clearly doesn’t as the net result was parents passing fish&chips through school boundary fencing. Watch this space.
There’s a simple fix: make the fences fish and chip proof with a net to intercept drone delivery.
They can’t even manage that in our prisons and there are far fewer of them…
Breakfast without fried eggs? What planet are they on!
Eggs are a miracle food
Teacher, leave those kids alone. Pink Floyd “Another brick in the wall”.
Government leave us ALL alone!
Yes, as Rupert Lowe said,
“We need a government that will:
Put us first,
Defend our interests,
And get the hell out of our way!”