School Dinners
 

Well, once again in the morning, I am in the unlucky position of having to find another assortment of delicacies for my grandaughter's packed lunch. If it were up to me, she would lump or like school dinners!! Packed lunches has appeared to make her more selective (fussy) announcing last week that she doesn't really like sandwiches. Being a 'won't cook and can't cook' sorta' person I find this a really stressful exercise.
At the school my son attended, it was mandatory to stay for school dinners, no packed lunches, no nipping out to the chippie at lunch; dining with other pupils with a knife and fork and with the benifit of mealtime conversation was a bonus.
The fact that they were allowed no choice, gave the school the income and the fact that they knew how many captive diners they had to feed, afforded them the privilege of a menu to die for, with at least five choices of main course every day, including meat and two veg, vegetarian, foreign foods, sandwiches, fruit, yoghurts, puddings, etc., and never ran out of the favouries. A menu fit for a royal banquet every day.
Why did we get to this state then !! There would be no need for Jamie Oliver trying to bring some sort of suitable diet back into school dinners.

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agree entirely with like or lump school dinners katex, the points you raise certainly did us no harm,and i know the younger ones will scoff and say "those were the days" i believe that the fact kids go out eg chippy or butty shop does not help the behaviour of kids today,i know there are decent kids but with the reports of bullying increases on tonights news (gathering outside) is a perfect breeding ground for the louts. ;) at the end of the day its the decent responsible kids who are suffering.

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Considering what is served at school I cannot blame them looking for something different. A packed lunch is a good idea but as kate says if they are fussy its a nightmare. My daughter wood take cooked chicken thighs every day if she could with a packet of crisps a bannana and yogurts. Yet The high school around here just seems to empty to the shops and chippy at lunch time with the end result the council is there 13:30 on the dot cleaning up the mess as bins are the enemy. Yes there is bullying and to cashy's point it is getting worse and the school dosnt seem to worry. Its time for schools to put their foot down and sort out this mess.

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I bet shares in semolina and tapioca plumetted when schools lunches stopped being mandatory.

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kids who didn't like school dinners could always take a packed lunch,which is fine,but letting them congregate outside is not the answer.

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My 7year old is on packed lunches. He doesn't like school dinners. After being away for the weekend & arriving home too late to buy bread e.t.c I pursuaded him to have a 'hated' dinner which I paid £1.60 for. He came home and ate almost everything in the fridge & cupboard, saying he had only eaten a bit of pizza which he didn't like & a banana for dinner. It cost me a fortune to fill him up so any idea I had of him having school dinners during the winter have gone right out the window.
Its back to boiling 2 eggs in a morning buttering crackers and buying yoghurts :(

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When I went to school i had school dinners at primary school and hated every single one of them. Went to high school and in the first year i took butties and during winter mum used to make me a flask up with soup in it and my butty box had bread to dip into it and either an orange or satsuma or apple if i didnt fancy it i used to swap it! But when i went to the 2nd year i went out for dinner or stopped in school for dinners because you didnt order your dinner like in the first or primary school you could just go to the canteen and pay for what you had.

Im a volunteer in my old primary school now and school dinners are way better than what we had and there is only 35 pupils having school dinners - the rest are all on sandwiches.

By the way there is over 130 pupils in the school. And i know the school dinners are better because i had them not long ago!

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Loved the stuff and still by it yummy.

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my kids take packed lunches! and quite often bring some back with them!! i find packed lunches better at least then i can keep an eye on what they are not eating. The only thing is they either dont have time to eat all the food they are given because the jnrs are going for their dinner and the infants have to go out or some of the other children taunt them about what they are eating my daughter likes raisins and she all of a sudden stopped eating them the other kids were going EEeeww your not gonna eat that are you and so now she wont eat them. But i then got her some raisins in yoghurt and the other kids dont know they are raisins but its not the point why so they make her feel she cant eat it just because they dont like it! To me thats bullying its not been to bad since she went back but it just goes to show what goes on at meal times eh!!

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Taunted and bullied for what they like eating. If its getting that bad the school should be there to protect them. A child should be able to eat a packed lunch with the same enjoyment as the chip butty brigade.

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think it's too easy to say your son, daughter doesnt like school dinners these days. most schools now offer varied menu and children perhpas must be told in stark terms if don'ty have mixed diet they will be unhealthy and fat, and pay for it in later life. Parents have to be strong rather than caving in and digging out the oven chips and processed rubbish and sweets just to keep little johnny happy. Schools are doing their best - gone is the stodge so to blame them is too easy and in most cases wrong.

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Blast caught out. Yes I do and I love it and proud of it. :D

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My granddaughter's school does excellent dinners. They produce a menu every month, to be brought home, and Laura is allowed to choose whether she has packed lunch or school meal. It works out about half and half. When she has packed lunch it is usually a sandwich (tuna or cheese), cucumber wedges or carrot sticks, a yoghurt and a fruit. The school dinners are healthy and there's always a choice of fruit for pudding.

When I was at primary school, St Mary's on Moscow Mill St., the dinners were, on the whole, revolting. They were prepared in the kitchens at Moor End school and delivered, in huge canisters, by van so they were invariably nearly cold before they arrived on the plate. By the age of 8 I'd started to go home for lunch, which meant running hell-for-leather from Moscow Mill St. to Church Commercial to get the Blackburn bus to West End. I must have been quite a runner as I made it home in 20 minutes. Mum always had lunch ready as I walked in, always a cooked lunch, and there was time to eat it and chill out for a short while before getting the Ribble bus back (12 minutes past 1 from Spread Eagle St), off at the Palladium and hell-for-leather again back to school for 1.30.

You could say that it was school dinners, or at least avoiding them, that kept me very slim and very, very fit.

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I used to take packed lunch. My mum used to make us 2 doubles of butties which were always topped with homemade picallilli. I used to sell one double to my mate(caused he loved my mums picallilli) and use the cash to buy chocolate bars :D

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When i was at school i had the school thinking i went home for dinner and my mum thought i went to school dinners ,at that time dinners for the week were 5 shillings (25p) for the week mum used to give me 5 shillings on monday and me and a mate would club togeather.
we would go to Pickerings pies on Manchester road near larkhill for those that know preston and order the pies for the week meat & patato were 6 pence each 2 1/2p so 5 shillings bought the pies for both of us for the week and the rest went on fags 5 park drive or we would go in the shop each day and buy "separates" and share .oh the memories

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This is why kids get fat, they eat crap each day, junk sandwiches with crisps and sweets.

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We used to have decent school meals.
Apart from prunes.
I still can't stand them to this day.
Ewww just the thought of them makes me cringe.
In the Sec school I used to go to my mates house.
On the way we'd get a pie a custard and 5 park drive or separates if money was short.
Oh, happy days.

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White, crispy cabbage with lashings of gravy ... yummy .. all different palates, 'aint we. ?

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School dinner cabbage must have put many a person off for life. Why did school cooks think cabbage was only edible when it had been boiled to death for an hour and a half? :confused: I agree with Kate, cabbage should be crisp (al dente, yeah?) but I like mine with a bit of butter and lots of black pepper.

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We had central kitchens too, which topped up all the schools own kitchens, built to cope with the boomer years, and now long demolished, complete with asbestos roof, it was probably raining down on the food as they cooked it. asbestos and chips please.
The meals were vile, and I suspect that a lot of you got your dislikes of certain foods at school, especially cabbage, spinage, lumpy custard, tapioca, rice, semolina, angel delight, gravy, rhubarb crumble, plus many many more.

Also when at junior school we had to sit on certain tables in certain places, so you always got to sit next t the same person, and the most well behaved tables got to go up first. I hated sitting about waiting, so I used to tell the others to shut up, then I got put on the bad lads table and always went up last. For this I wish evil things on the dinner ladies if they're still alive, what goes around comes around.
When I got my chance in middle school, my mum thought I had school dinners, the school thought I went home, and in fact we went to the corner cafe for a chip batch and went somerfield for a can of cheap pop.

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I had school dinners, I have to admit that the meals at secondary school were superior to the ones at junior school. I didn't mind the semolina and tapioca but I hated that vivid pink blancmange that we used to get at junior school, occasionally they would produce a yellow version of it, just to vary it a bit, but it tasted just the same. It was thick and horrid and used to glue itself to the roof of your mouth. Once you put it in your mouth you couldn't get rid of it. I still hate blancmange to this day. Most of the veg at junior school was boiled to death and tasteless. We had a dinner lady at Peel Park who used to literally force feed you. I wouldn't mind but she lived around the corner from me and used to tell my mum that I never ate my dinners..

I hope that things have improved..

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Real blancmange with flavour is quite nice as is semolina and rice and custard. I've been brave enough to try all since school and it was just how the school was making it. I think it was some sort of sick punishment, they used to love forcing us to eat it.

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We got free school dinners at one point.....I think it was because my Dad was poorly and unable to work.....if it hadn't been for the school dinners and some very innovative cooking on my mums part we would have starved to death.
Mrs Almond on the end of Marsden St. had a bake shop and she used to let my mum have the bread that was left at the end of the day.....and any cooked spuds or veggies that hadn't sold at dinner time.

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one good point about school dinners even if sometimes the food was crap .....it taught young people how to use a knife and fork and to some extent table manners, it's called socializing ........watching youngsters eat these days is like being at the zoo , all this rubish about my little darling hates this or my little precious doesn't like and parents catering to every dietry whim is the reason why kids are running amok.