The work Jamie Oliver is doing regarding school dinners in the UK is just fabulous. I commented on it briefly recently but have to harp back on it.
As a parent it is much easier to give our kids something they want to eat rather than something nutritious we have to prepare but watching Jamie’s School Dinners makes you want to go down the nutritious food path for sure. I for one was getting in a bit of rut with JJ’s food and letting him have canned spaghetti because he didn’t like eating vegetables but I have been persisting with giving him healthier food for the last two weeks and he’s eating more vegetables with less of a fuss now.
I watched Jamie’s show last night and he was having trouble getting one lot of kids to eat his healthy food so he went for the shock approach. I’ve never been a chicken nugget fan and I will never eat them and I will never let my kid eat them.
To prepare chicken nuggets (or mechanically reclaimed meat), get a chicken carcass, put it in the food processor and process it. Get some more fat and skin, plonk that in the food processor and process it. Sprinkle it with some bread dust and add lots of preservatives and colouring and then deep fry it. After the kids saw Jamie do this they dived on the delicious looking chicken legs he’d prepared earlier and left the chicken nuggets well alone.
For all the quibbling the British government were doing about an extra 10p per kids meal per day, the cost savings for health have got to be astronomical.
One school commented that since Jamie’s Dinners have been served in their school, nobody has gone to have asthma treatment at all. Their behaviour has improved. Once, the kids behaviour in the afternoons afternoons weren’t very good but since the introduction of Jamie’s Dinners the teachers noticed that concentration improved immensely.
JJ isn’t a school age kid yet and I will pack his lunch most days for him but that won’t stop him from wanting to eat junk I imagine. We don’t have school dinners or lunches served here like they do in England but there are school canteens and I often read about them trying to eliminate junk. I will be curious to see the roll-on effect Jamie’s efforts will have in the developed world and at my local primary school.
Jamie, I can see you being knighted one day for this work you’re doing. Good on you ‘Sir’ Jamie.
