“AH BLOODY HELL!” was the laughing response of the nation’s best-known dinner lady when she sneaked out of school for a fag and came face to face again with Jamie Oliver, the television chef.
Nora Sands, the Irish chef at Kidbrooke school in Greenwich, southeast London, excoriated junk food and helped Oliver to champion the revival of school meals. But since then, little has changed, she tells him in Jamie’s Return to School Dinners.
Despite government pledges of £280 million over three years, Ms Sands has seen no money for better ingredients. She is struggling to meet her budget and her refusal to sell sweets and crisps has lost her about £20,000 in takings.
Greenwich’s food budget per child had been only 37p, and now with extra funding the council claims that it is spending another 10p on secondary school meals and 13p on primary school dinners. But Ms Sands says that none of this appears to be coming her way. Nationally, the picture does not appear much healthier.
Eighteen months after successfully campaigning for healthier school meals, the celebrity chef finds in his new programme that the national take-up of school dinners has fallen by 2 per cent. Instead, children are eating more packed lunches — most bursting with crisps, biscuits and fizzy drinks.
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The answer, says Oliver, is clear. Parents must stop sending their children to school with junk food. Although many parents work, he also urges them to cook a Sunday roast or breakfast once a week.
“I’ve spent two years being PC about parents, but now is the time to say, ‘If you’re giving your young children fizzy drinks you’re an a*******, you are a t*****. If you give them bags of crisps you’re an idiot,’ ” he tells viewers. Oliver says he would like there to be a ban on all packed lunches but does not expect to see that happen. While they exist, however, he says parents could make them healthier.
“I have seen kids of the ages of 4 or 5, the same age as mine, open their lunchbox and inside is a cold, half-eaten Mc- Donald’s, multiple packets of crisps and a can of Red Bull. We laugh and then want to cry,” he said after the screening.
He said that if a teacher told parents that their child was very tired at the end of the day, it was wrong for parents to think the solution was a can of Red Bull because “it gives you wings”. “You might as well give them a line of coke,” he argued.
By the end of the documentary, Oliver has extracted a further £240 million until 2011 from Tony Blair, a voluntary ban on junk food advertising for children, which he de-noun-ces as “a bit wet”, and a commitment for a kitchen- rebuilding fund.