I’ve
been following school-dinner blogger, Martha Payne, with interest and enjoyment
as her hideous photos of clods that claim to be sausages, and hooves that are technically
burgers, embarrass her school authority into change (and I don’t think any
parent would be pushing those particular burgers through the bars to protest at
their children being fed healthier options).
We’re very lucky in Powys; we have a
good cook in our school who has a three-week rotating menu of normal proper
food. The kids are chuffed to bits when they get mini-grill, but are content to
scoff the shepherd’s pie in order to get the properly-made pud after it. So in
being alright Jack, I can watch and snigger from afar.
It’s always perplexed me that parents,
grandparents or school authorities can offer kids any food that they wouldn’t
touch with a barge-pole themselves. At an old friend’s house, the grandma would
cook fantastic fresh wholesome food for her off-spring, but would indulgently
feed smiley faces and chicken arse-holes to the grandchildren.
I felt that Jamie Oliver missed a
trick when he didn’t feed a slab of fried luncheon-meat and a handful of sweet-corn
drenched in brine to the Board when he was asking them for change, followed by
a strawberry milk.
I was lucky: I loved my school
dinners. Whilst everyone around me was moaning about pink custard, and liver
and bacon, I was scoffing it down. My mum tended to cook things that hardened
as they went off the boil (including soup and gravy), and so speed was the eating
aim in our house. Therefore to savour a cottage pie that stayed a cottage pie,
and then to have it followed by ginger cake and green custard was bliss.
There is one thing that Martha might
savour about her dinners – she has officially earned the ability to moan about
them with her mates when sitting round a table in a dirty pub in years to come:
conversations that just left me feeling as empty as the ones I listen to now when
people talk about ironing.
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