Yeah, because that's what regular people like to eat. What, never had crackers with ham and cheese? Now, if you are going to serve gourmet meals in schools, go right ahead, I heard it's a thing in France. But don't delude yourself into thinking 8 year olds are going to eat boiled broccoli and whatever unappetizing thing you conjure up for protein. It's not "weak rules", it's no money and cultural attitudes. Either fix these, or let kids at least enjoy their lunch.
France serves edible cooked normal food in schools, which means it tastes good and is nutritious. That’s not the same as “gourmet”, and it’s surprising other countries don’t even try to meet this low bar.
That reminds me of the episode that Jamie Oliver did, where he tried to prove that he could make healthy and delicious (to him) school meals, while staying inside the budget, at scale, as an alternative to fishsticks with chips (as in french fries) and peas, which he considers unhealthy. He succeeded with his culinary mission. And then, none of the kids actually chose his lunch. They wanted the fishsticks.
Personally, I don't think there's anything wrong with fishsticks, chips, and peas. (It also doesn't meet the criteria for ultra-processed, if I correctly understand the term, so it's a bit off topic here). The chips are just potatoes and oil. The fishsticks are actual fish (cut into stick form while frozen) with breading. The peas are ...well, peas.
> Not that there's anything wrong with fishsticks, chips, and peas. It's actually not ultra-processed, if I correctly understand the term. The chips are just potatoes and oil. The fishsticks are actual fish (cut into stick form while frozen) with breading. The peas are ...well, peas.
Some chips are re-hydrated mechanically digested potato flakes with a dozen different binders, preservatives, and stabilizers, and most budget fish sticks are half miscellaneous whitefish scrap and half breading made from stripped grain and a dozen different binders, preservatives, and stabilizers.
Aren't there pretty stringent rules on what they have to list as ingredients on the packaging? At least where I live (in Germany), I would have thought so.
And when I buy chips, the ingredients list lists exactly two things: potatoes and sunflower oil.
The fishsticks that I buy ("iglo", the procter & gamble brand, and I get the gluten-free ones) list a specific species of fish, then rice flour, chickpea flour, salt, corn flour, canola oil, water, potato starch, starches from peas. Plus MSC certification. That doesn't really sound objectionable to me.
So? Is that like dihydrogen monoxide? If it is actually bad, ban it everywhere and not just school lunches. Otherwise, the nutrition seems like a much more important issue than "rehydrated".
Deep-fried foods are pretty much inherently unhealthy. The oil, often cheap and having a poor fatty acid profile to begin with, is repeatedly heated to high temperatures and reused for up to weeks at a time. It oxidizes, forming free radicals that increase oxidative stress and cellular damage. I'm sure it's fine to indulge now and then, but it's bad, bad stuff to build a diet on.
You just wrote "inherent", and then you gave a reason that's not inherent to the process of deep-frying. If the use of poor quality oils, and their repeated use are problems, then let's write those into the fda rulebook (and international equivalents), but let's not just say that "deep-frying is bad for you", and condemn the whole enterprise of industrial food processing along with it.
There is a lot of "assuming the worst" going on in this thread and surrounding the topic of "processed foods" in general.
My concern is that turning our backs on industrial food processing is a luxury that many of us simply can't afford, either financially, or in terms of the practicalities of making our lives work.
There may be a lot of things that frequently happen in the processing of foods that lead to bad health outcomes, and the consumption of a diet rich in processed foods may strongly correlate with bad health outcomes, but saying "processed foods are bad for you" is doing a lousy job of identifying in a causative sense what exactly it is that's bad for you, and it's also a "luxury belief" in the sense that Rob Henderson has been talking about [1].
Healthy deep frying (if it’s even possible) would be very expensive due to the high waste/use of oil, and I’m not sure most customers would like the taste of foods fried in avocado or olive oil (which, also, are more expensive).
Children may not get a choice in whats on their plate, but they do have a choice in what goes in their mouth. Schools cannot force a child to consume anything, and the kids are free to toss all the food given to them into the trash, and they do, but not totally, some of that food appears in places other than the trash.
Kids, who as a category have no income, have a Hobson's Choice: eat or go hungry.
The UK also has (or recently had, I no longer follow news from there) a significant poverty rate such that lunch was some school kids' first meal of the day, and free school meals was a significant political issue.
Kids, who as a category have no income, have a Hobson's Choice: eat or go hungry.
The problem is that if kids don't eat lunch and go hungry that will negatively affect their ability to learn. As such offering less healthy food that they actually eat might very well be better than healthy food that they don't eat.
This is a problem for society, it doesn't enter the minds of the kids.
If the only meal is literal dog food, hungry kids will eat it direct from the container — a fact I know thanks to a real-life experience of an ex-girlfriend who was trying to be helpful and charitable but had a fit of middle-class naïveté after finding a puppy in a school in Kawangware.
France has strong rules here: if the kid wants to eat their own lunch, they have to do it offsite. Teens will do that but not imagining many parents picking up their 8 y.o. daily to do so.
They (probably) put more money into it and have the cultural attitudes to do all of the above.
I’m not sure (I’m French) but I think it’s something like “we need the tables for the kids who eat at the canteen, and we can’t let kids eat anywhere in the school for messiness reasons”.
Meal prices are quite competitive, kids usually eat at the canteen or at home, they don’t usually bring their own food
The food served at the canteens needs to be traceable, to avoid/mitigate food poisoning related issues. Once you start bringing external food into the system, you can no longer guarantee the safety of the other canteen goers, even if, theoretically, they will not be sharing their meals.
It's the first solid thing our kid ate, and he loved them. I guess it also depends on when they are exposed to that. If they are 5 years old, it's probably too late.
Taste also evolves. My daughter loved broccoli (and a bunch of other things) when she was little, but once she turned 8 or so her tastes completely changed.
Yup. I favour Mornay Sauce (a.k.a. cheese sauce). I have no idea why hating broccoli is a meme; broccoli-cheese with french fries is a nutritious and tasty meal.
Honestly it is probably the worst way to prepare broccoli. Broccoli is one of my favourite vegetables and I would probably pass on boiled broccoli, if there was any other vegetable on offer.
I've tried steaming florets; I find it hard to judge done-ness when steaming. It's easier to blanch in not much water, then use the water to make the cheese sauce.
Huh? I never had crackers with ham and cheese. Certainly not to replace a lunch. And what's bad about broccoli? Our kids like it steamed. It's a handy snack for a family trip - you can prepare it in a microwave in a few minutes when you're packing.
You're right that it essentially boils down to the dietary preferences of the parents. If the parents are ok with such lunch as described in the article, there isn't much a regulation can do.
