Banning goujons and slashing costs with new cold options: what's really happening to school meals?

Valerie Flynn

THE WORKING WEEK of a satsuma in our house goes something like this.

On Monday morning, the satsuma is lovingly placed in a child’s lunch box. (Ours is among the minority of primary schools that does not yet have access to the free hot school meals scheme.)

The satsuma’s role in the lunch box is essentially decorative. Despite frequently holding forth on the importance of eating fruit, I know there is only an outside chance that the child will eat the satsuma. The child knows I know. 

On Monday night, I take the uneaten satsuma back out of the lunchbox, rinse grease and crumbs off it under the tap and put it back in the fruit bowl. On Tuesday morning, the hard-working satsuma puts in another shift in the lunchbox, and so on it goes. 

My performative provision of satsumas (observe that I am a good parent who provides healthy food!) illustrates a few things we need to understand about the hot school meals scheme, which is back in the headlines following another big review. Not that the scheme is ever out of the headlines for long.

First, children turning up their nose at good food is, unfortunately, a fact of life. Almost half of parents told a survey conducted alongside the review that their kids brought home food uneaten back when they were sending in packed lunches from home.

Headlines screaming that almost one in five hot school meals is going uneaten (actually closer to one in 10 when absenteeism is factored in) may make us feel queasy at the amount of food waste generated. However, we have to be realistic about what feeding children looks like. We present them with food – they will not necessarily eat it. 

The government’s review has concluded that allowing parents and kids to choose a cold lunch on any given day would reduce waste.

“That was a preference of many parents,” Dara Calleary, the social protection minister, told journalists on Monday.

At the same time that Calleary was briefing the press in government buildings, school meal providers were getting their orders on foot of the review from his officials.

Providers who were at the meeting told The Journal it was “very fractious” and they were “shocked” to learn that the hot meal element of the scheme was being subverted.

Providers learned that whereas they receive a €3.20 subvention to provide a primary school child with a hot meal, for a cold meal they will get only €1.40-1.70, depending on whether a drink is provided. These prices have not been reviewed in three years.

Providers said their entire supply chains and in-school facilities have been built around the scheme’s original goal of providing hot meals – they fear they will now find themselves under massive financial strain.

It’s also not necessarily the case that little Johnny who doesn’t want to eat cottage pie on a Monday is going to enjoy the cold food option either. The new sandwiches will not be of the plain ham-and-cheese-on-white variety on which previous generations of Irish school children were reared.

As one provider, who asked not to be named, explained, the nutritional rules for the scheme will still apply. A cold food option will still have to contain two portions of vegetables, salad or fruit.

Providers were told on Monday in no uncertain terms that goujons and sausages must now come off their menus.

Some providers have already reformulated these to make them low in fat and salt. Others are, for example, baking goujons rather than frying them.

At any rate, despite previous exhortations by the government to get rid of them, these child-friendly foods continue to be offered by many providers as an option once or twice a week (or more) in response to demand – accompanied by mash and carrots or whatever else. No more, the government has decreed.

School meals have been called out by the likes of celebrity chef Darina Allen and influencer Sophie Morris for including processed food. However, only a minority of (13%) of parents surveyed viewed the meals as unhealthy.

Do the numbers add up?

The government survey also revealed that many parents are sending food from home in case their child does not like the hot meal – it’s not clear that this is going to end.

Children have to be fed. The (extremely plain) sandwich and raisins that accompany my trusty satsuma to school do not generally come back home again uneaten.

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The government, for its part, is intensely defensive of the scheme. It really, really wants to chalk up hot school meals as a win.

It wants hot school meals to be seen as an important social inclusion measure: the Taoiseach has repeatedly cited the scheme when defending the government’s record on child poverty.

But it also wants parents more generally to like hot school meals and, indeed, to be grateful for them.

“Overall, this is a very successful programme, and a very consequential programme,” Calleary told the press.

The minister emphasised that the €300 million scheme is saving families money – over €1,100 per year if you have two kids in primary.

Now, I ran the numbers on this, and I could only get close to that amount if I opted for at least some branded rather than supermarket-label products and sent in a ham and cheese sandwich, four crackers with butter, a big Yoplait petit filou yoghurt, a Pink Lady apple, the aforementioned satsuma (of course) and a Cheestring for each child. If you don’t know what a Cheestring is, you are frankly better off, but suffice to say they are a thing children eat.

That would be a very big lunch for a younger child, and buying branded ham and cheese is obviously deranged. I also calculated prices from Tesco rather than, say, Lidl to get to over €1,000. So I would say the government estimate of the cost saving is maybe a little over-generous.

We asked the government how it came up with its figure, and put some of the points raised by providers to it, but it had not responded at the time of writing. 

Why the scheme exists

At any rate, the cost saving for the average family is not really the point. The original and underlying purpose of the school meals scheme, which no-one is taking issue with, was to ensure that children who might not otherwise get a hot meal would get one, so that they can take full advantage of their education.

“When the kids are fed, everything is easier,” one teacher told me. “Behaviour, academics, all of it.”

And when everyone is getting a hot meal together, no-one is stigmatised.

The government survey found the scheme was generally viewed positively by teachers, particularly in Deis (disadvantaged) schools.

For their part, kids are pretty clear on what they want. Dig into the government review, and it’s very clear that goujons and sausages are the most popular meal options. 

“It is evident that when they are available, children will choose them over healthier options,” the review found.

It is horrible to think that some children who are hungry could find themselves presented with a meal at lunchtime that they cannot stomach.

One school meal provider made the case to me that perhaps we need to think of the scheme in more ambitious terms. Perhaps its purpose should be somewhat educational or aspirational: to give children – who may never otherwise get the opportunity – the chance to develop a taste for stew or cottage pie.

Parents, this provider argued, may need to grit it out a little bit – perhaps after a few weeks, the child will eat the cottage pie. Now that a cold sandwich will be available, this may be less likely to happen.

Calleary was asked whether the scheme could be more ambitious – whether schools should be provided with kitchens, as in the UK, or food education could be integrated into the curriculum as it is in Japan. He said the rapid growth of the Irish scheme in itself was ambitious, adding that his own ambition was for the food to be of the “best possible quality”.

Different cohorts want and need different things of the hot school meals scheme. The government is trying to ride a few horses, ensuring hungry children are fed but also that it is shielded from criticism from the nutritionally anxious and that middle-class parents who vote for Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are satisfied.

The big problem – and here we come back to the performative satsuma – is that feeding our children brings up a lot of feelings: love, joy, anxiety, frustration, guilt and shame can all be in the mix for any given meal of any given level of healthiness that goes eaten or uneaten.

We want our children to be well-fed, and to try new things and expand their palate, but we also really need them to be fed, full stop. It’s hard. We could probably all benefit from approaching school meals with a bit more grace.