James Delingpole on the most recent “Nanny knows best” appointee hoping to dictate what the kids are going to eat for lunch:
“Mr Dimbleby”, it seems to me, is coming perilously close to suggesting that the decision as to what children eat at school should be a matter for the State rather than parents. Can he really believe this? Is there nothing about saying this sort of thing that makes him uneasy?
I mean sure, I agree with him on the principle that a good, well-prepared hot meal at lunchtime is probably more filling and nourishing than a packet-bread sandwich and a packet of crisps. Problem is, not all school canteens offer quite the same range and quality you might find in — oh, I don’t know, let’s pluck a random example from the air, shall we? — Bekynton.
Having put children through the state system myself I know whereof I speak. A new caterer arrived at my daughter’s primary school to much fanfare and for a while the food was great and most parents gratefully abandoned packed lunches (which, let me tell you, are a real hassle for a parent to prepare because they have to be done fresh in the morning when you’re already in a rush having breakfast and getting ready for the school run) and welcomed the new regime. But then standards began slipping to the point where my daughter (who, like a lot of children whose staple diet is gastro-porn TV programmes from the Great British Bake Off to Masterchef, genuinely cares about food) couldn’t eat the stuff any more. Again: is “Mr Dimbleby” seriously suggesting that schools should force children to go on eating in the canteen regardless of how disgusting they find the food?
You hear similar arguments from well-heeled progressive types on the school system generally. “If only public schools were abolished and all those pushy middle-class strivers were forced to put their children through the state system, standards would rise across the board.” Well, possibly. What would more likely happen is that all those scrubbed, diligent, nicely spoken, polite young poshos would be dragged down to the level of the lowest common denominator. And in any case it’s not an experiment which has any right being attempted anywhere in a Western notionally free-market economy. Why not? Because it’s illiberal bordering on the totalitarian, is why.
This is hardly a new topic … last year I said:
I remember what kind of crap my middle and high school cafeterias offered … and if I’d forgotten to bring a sandwich with me that day, going hungry always seemed like the better choice. The food on offer always seemed to manage the difficult stunt of being visually unappealing (sometimes being actually disgusting to look at), nutritionally inadequate, and either utterly flavourless (the better choice) or actively nasty. No wonder the best sellers in the cafeteria were the milk cartons (especially the chocolate milk), pop cans, potato chips, chocolate bars, and Vachon cakes (all of which were pre-packaged and relatively invulnerable to further processing).
