Jamie Oliver, celebrity chef, has made a series of programmes revealing how children's health, behaviour and learning are affected by the privatisation of school meals. LIAM MAC UAID who worked for a number of years in Kidbrooke School, which is featured in the series, reviews jamie's School Dinners (Channel TAVOIDED eating in the Kidbrooke canteen. It was the plastic prison style plates that put me off. But the two occasions I did have lunch there have remained with me.
They were staff Christmas dinners. The frozen brussel sprouts were edible. The roast potatoes had been lovingly prepared in a factory somewhere. The stuffing was adequate but the thing that was described as "turkey with gravy" still has the power to make me retch. Thin, rubbery slices of shiny white stuff that may have been driven past a turkey farm.
It was vile. And this was Christmas dinner!
Things don't seem to have changed much. A decent tin of cat food costs 52p.
Greenwich council allows its private caterers to spend 37p a portion on the main course of a school lunch.
In Durham, the other local authority in which Jamie Oliver has been working, it is 44p.
Oliver, who worked hard to be TV's most punchable celebrity chef, has produced one of the year's best pieces of anti-capitalist programming. He's no radical. As he says "my kids ain't goin' to no fuckin' state school."
But his genuine fury at the processed garbage that is being fed to school children is likely to get him arrested. He proposes blowing up the factory that produces the "turkey twizzlers" (30 per cent processed turkey with added salt and fat) that are a staple in many school canteens.
When a typical school lunch is analysed by nutritionists it is revealed to contain no vitamin c, no iron and large quantities of salt and fat. In the two schools Oliver visits more than 60 percent of the pupils receive free school meals and for many this will be the main meal of the day.
The most telling scene in the series is when Oliver is reprimanded by the head of Kidbrooke school.
He had made a lunch without using processed ingredients and which contained all the vitamins and minerals a healthy diet requires. It cost 90p per child.
The head explained that to pay for this she would have to take it from the book budget or the staff budget.
That encounter said everything that needs to be said about New Labour's view of comprehensive education, privatisation and child poverty. and others have discovered.
The "joy" of the marchers was simply their relief at no longer facing their fears as isolated individuals. Something Perowne/McEwan would have benefited from. But, like in his other novels, there is little sense of a "social" that might mediate the individual's relations with the
However this is a novel full of dramatic tension that explores a wide range of themes of which the war is only one.
Like the 1983 film "The Ploughman's Lunch", also scripted by McEwan, which centres on the Tory Party