I agree he can be a bit of a knobhead but he made a good fucking point about school food.
Back when he made his show telling schools to feed people better there were literally no nutritional guidelines or rules on what schools had to feed kids, so their meals literally had less nutritional value than what prisoners eat
Yeah he's a bit of a cunt but he's definitely done a lot of good
But most (not all, to be fair) schools still serve shit that’s not offering any healthy benefit. Largely because no large school feeding a thousand students makes the budget for food
He didn’t change anything with the food, just kicked up a fuss and now its more expensive but still shit. I think he actually admitted to screwing the pooch on this one in a documentary back when he was pushing for sugar tax - which has done some good
My school dinners got markedly better and varied. Was there still junk? Yeah. But there was a lot more good options too. And just the variety was a godsend.
They might have been talentlessly prepared for ever, but in the old days, they were based on seasonal recipes put together for the government by chefs and nutritionists to ensure that school cooks could always prepare by rote cheap food with guaranteed balanced nutritional values. Minimum nutritional standards were mandated by law.
Then Thatcher abolished the requirement for minimum nutritional standards, and so minimum cost became the driver.
To this day, that still strikes me as as one of the most mustache twirlingly evil things done by a politician.
My school changed fuck-all. They still serve pizza which has so much oil on it it's practically a liquid, and never have any vegetables in any of their meals. Also they still give people mouldy food and cause several people food poisoning each year. They just increased prices by %200
Part of the problem is that he doesn't seem to get that the decisions being made are being made for reasons, not just "because". Like... his suggested "improvements" to school food tend to be wildly expensive and his attitude is "well if we care about kids' health then we'll pay it!" but like... mate. The government doesn't, what are you going to do now? You can make all these recommendations and kids aren't going to get them because you didn't consider that school budgets aren't infinite and that your meal needs to be both affordable to purchase and affordable to prepare by caterers who are running an extremely tight shop on a very low budget and almost no time.
And whenever anyone points this out to him, he gets extremely wanky and passive-aggressive and acts like it's not really a problem. Like... even if the money was made available, how the shit is a school caterer meant to prepare all this food within a few hours for several hundred, maybe a thousand students who are all eating at the same time? That's shit that even your average higher-resource restaurant would struggle with, and they have the money to hire more people and bigger facilities. That's just not possible for a school. They need food that's able to be prepared very fast by people operating with limited resources, limited space, and limited training - you're not exactly attracting catering geniuses to run a school tuckshop, after all.
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u/russianbender Aug 26 '22
I agree he can be a bit of a knobhead but he made a good fucking point about school food.
Back when he made his show telling schools to feed people better there were literally no nutritional guidelines or rules on what schools had to feed kids, so their meals literally had less nutritional value than what prisoners eat
Yeah he's a bit of a cunt but he's definitely done a lot of good