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Friday, October 25, 2024

Ele Ludemann: How healthy were your school lunches?


The government is going to fund the provision of school lunches for less than half the amount Labour’s scheme cost.

This has resulted in a variety of criticisms, one of which is that children won’t like them/

The obvious response to that is that hungry children aren’t fussy.

Another criticism is that the lunches won’t be healthy.

This made me look back to the school lunches I had. they were made by my mother every evening, each package labelled with initials to identify which belonged to which of my brothers and me, and stored in the fridge for the following day.

They consisted of two white bread sandwiches (progressively more stale as time passed from bread delivery day); two biscuits or pieces of cake, homemade of course; and a piece of fruit; plus a bottle of cordial which I suspect consisted of lots of sugar, artificial colour and flavoring.

Sandwich filling on Mondays would be cold mutton left over from Sunday’s roast, the rest of the week might be tomato in season (which would make the whole greaseproof-wrapped sandwich package soggy); honey and cheese or what we called Belgium that is now known as luncheon sausage.

Once a term we were given a shilling which would fund a pie with tuppence over for sweets, or we’d spend the whole lot on fish and chips.

For my first few years at school we also had milk, warm after sitting in the sun on hot days but I opted out of that early on.

By the time I got to high school, Mum had discovered cheese boats – an egg, onion, bacon and cheese mixture in a bread case – as an occasional change from sandwiches.

Yoghurt became popular around then so a pottle of that – a good source of calcium and some vitamins, but also high in sugar – might have been added some days.

Our lunches were much the same as those of our classmates.

I wonder what the food police who are so opposed to the government’s menu would think of them?

Ele Ludemann is a North Otago farmer and journalist, who blogs HERE - where this article was sourced.

6 comments:

Doug Longmire said...

Lettuce and Marmite sandwiches. Lettuce and cheese sandwiches. An apple. We drank water out of the fountains.

Barend Vlaardingerbroek said...

Doug's school lunch would be close to being just right in terms of carbo's, protein, vitamins and minerals. Perhaps more importantly, it is very low in fat, salt and sugar. Children do take to these culprits like a fish to water and their eating habits when they grow older reflect that.

Anonymous said...

And most of us grew up to be healthy adults even though we ate extremely simple sandwich type lunches at school.
Now we are the most long lived generation ever despite never having a hot school lunch !

Anonymous said...

Yes, and Mum made them, not the interfering corporate state system. Those were the days.

Anonymous said...

Is it not interesting, that here in New Zealand, we have a sport, that has more participants than Rugby - and that sport is called -
"lets bash any new idea, concept, project, outcome, proposal, that we suddenly hear about, suddenly do not like (because we have a literacy & listening issue on such matters) and will both by verbal and/or in print ridicule it, before it has even been tried".
I am very pleased to see "the written reminiscence's of lunches past", but we have moved on - so let us support the idea of CHANGE.

Gaynor said...

Just watched ' What are we feeding our Children?' a documentary on TVNZ plus which is a British documentary on the horrifying addictive nature of junk food. Everyone especially parents and medical people should view this well presented programme.. After going on a predominantly junk food diet for only a month , the doctor who offered himself as guinea pig in the study had various tests to compare the body changes undergone from when he was on a good diet not including a high proportion of junk food.

The most shocking change was in his brain which scans revealed he had developed a brain similar to someone who was addicted to substances or behaviours like gambling. Even the professor , specializing in obesity, and conducting the study was astonished and resolved to monitor her own children's eating habits more carefully.

We have a bad obesity problem here . When are the appropriate agencies going to look into this very serious issue ? Tobacco and vaping are bad but this addiction to junk food by our children and produced by manufacturers for profit, is probably worse. As Barend mentioned children can't resist food over endowed with harmful ingredients. In fact they are insidiously addicted to them.