Primary School Girl Told To Stop Photographing and Blogging School Meals

JamieKitson writes "British primary school (elementary to those of you in the U.S.) pupil Martha/'Veg' has been taking photographs of her school dinners and writing about them at her blog Never Seconds since April. The blog has become popular, and Martha decided to do something with the popularity: namely, raising money for an international school dinners charity. Unfortunately, the local council, Argyll and Bute, having apparently not heard of the Streisand effect, didn't like the publicity that her blog was generating and have shut her down. They said the blog made the catering staff fear for their jobs. There is a happy ending though: donations have gone through the roof and she has already passed her target."

Comments

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[shortscruffydave]

Just heard an interview with the council on BBC Radio 4, and it sounds like they've reversed the decision.

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[tsa]

That's good news. I wondered why they told this girl to stop in the first place because the food she photographed actually looks both healthy and tasty, so what was the problem?

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[Coward Anonymous]

It's incredible they even end there. I can't imagine a local councilmen getting re-elected after deciding that an incompetent cook's job is more important than children's nutrition.

Congrats on a relevant first post!

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[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, you think this looks healthy and tasty? Uh huh...

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[Darkness404]

Exactly. I mean how is it so terrible that the cooks "fear for their job" of course they should fear for their job! Everyone "fears for their job" if they don't do well at their job. Perhaps incompetent IT guys should call up Oracle and tell them never to post any bug reports and sue any security blogs that post bug reports and security flaws, after all, if they installed an insecure program on a critical computer that can be exploited they'd fear for their job.

More transparency is always a good thing.

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[tbird81]

It doesn't, by any means, excuse them from the original decision to force someone to take down their website.

Their back-pedalling now the case has publicity only shows how out-of-touch they are with the world. I'd love to know who was personally responsibly for this decision.

We're all used to national governments trying to get their greasy control-freak hands on our internet, but now councils are doing it! Stick to water supply, sewerage and rates - keep away from the internet. It's none of your business, and you don't understand it. Controlling the internet is controlling our speech.

UK numbers for the council:
Phone: 01546 602127
Text: 07624808798
Complaints: http://www.argyll-bute.gov.uk/council-and-government/complaints

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[Blahah]

That's not what happened at all. They didn't force her to take down her website, they just told her she couldn't bring her camera to school. Still a stupid move, but not the same as what you are alleging.

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[TarpaKungs]

Some of it looks OK. Some of it looks utterly dire, even compared to what I was being forced to eat 35 years ago! It's not a patch on what my local school serves my kids (I've eaten 3 meals with them, paid for I should add!) and down in East Sussex, £2 consistently buys a good healthy and tasty meal. I was so impressed I actually emailed the catering company's Regional Manager (Chartwells who are contracted to provide our school dinners) and East Sussex CC (school meals division) and said I thought it was an apt time to praise there efforts - the email was received with some excitement judging by the reply I just got back :) It's very easy to criticise, sometimes the opportunity to praise is overlooked. Back on topic - full marks to Martha aka VEG - trended on Twitter worldwide today, 1000+ comments on the BBC News story, front page on BBC News and Independent news (web editions). And as someone said, it looks like Argyll and Bute Council have reversed their decision - probably because her MSP (Member of Scottish Parliament) who also happens to be the Scottish Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning told them to! This sort of story warms my heart - thanks to the Internet, a minor coverup of a small time incident[1] that would have never made it past the local paper now becomes a national and international story. [1] This is a fairly minor event in the grand scheme of things, but is rather symptomatic of the "brush under the carpet" attitude of the authorities in the UK - hopefully this particular event will make other authorities sit up and listen.

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[xaxa]

That's good news. I wondered why they told this girl to stop in the first place because the food she photographed actually looks both healthy and tasty, so what was the problem?

It's variable. Scroll through the May page from the bottom: http://neverseconds.blogspot.co.uk/2012_05_01_archive.html -- some is fine, some is pretty bad.

The council's response in the BBC article claims that there are often better options available. However, that a child can choose an awful option suggests there is still a problem (at least, it is if you think the school should only provide healthy food).

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[AngryDeuce]

They get fucking popsicles in the UK?! Christ, even way back when I was in school, decades ago, the best we could hope for was "nature's candy", raisins, which nobody ever, ever ate, and instead lobbed at each other across the lunch room.

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[jythie]

It was probably less about the actual content being shared, and more about the lack of editorial control they had over it. For better or worse, knowing everything you do is going to be posted for the public to see has a bit of a 'looking over your shoulder' effect on people since you never know what might go wrong, what could be taken out of context, or what could haunt you if people are unsympathetic to the tradeoffs involved in whatever it is you do.

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[AngryDeuce]

Well, I would probably be pretty pissed off if I was catching all the heat for the school district's poor meal choices. It's not like the lunchroom workers get to choose what the kids are served, they just prepare it. At least, that's how it is here in the US in my own experiences, maybe in the UK it's different and the individual schools have more autonomy?

Growing up in Philly, we ate what was called "satellite lunches", which were nothing more than prepackaged meals made by some private company. They literally served us a white box with "food" in it on a tray. Our school didn't even have a proper kitchen, just some ovens to heat them up. They were fucking nasty as shit, too...I bet prisoners ate better then we were. The fried chicken was especially gross, because we could smell it throughout the school in the period just before lunch, so as soon as someone caught a whiff and said "Aw, man, friend chicken again?" a collective groan went through the entire building.

I would have brown-bagged it but we were poor so I was on reduced lunch and thus forced to eat the crap by my mother.

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[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Often the actual "staff" in the cafeteria have no control over how much money gets allocated to them or the mandates being forced on them like "use less empty calories and have more wholesome foods" or "encourage kids to develop healthy eating habits". In these days of budget cuts, I would not blame the kitchen staff alone for poor fare in school cafeteria.

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[Big Hairy Ian]

Yup been reversed http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-18454800

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[bigstrat2003]

That wouldn't be a bad idea, actually. Despite what they think, kids not having a phone to dick around on during school won't hurt them.

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[internerdj]

I see a recognizable vegatable on the plate. Given that, it is more healthy than anything I ever saw in my cafeteria in the good ole US...

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[PopeRatzo]

They get fucking popsicles in the UK?! Christ, even way back when I was in school, decades ago, the best we could hope for was "nature's candy", raisins

You got raisins? When I was in school, "nature's candy" meant moose droppings. They'd just give us a dull knife and tell us to go out and kill something for lunch. And if you weren't fast enough to catch a squirrel or a vole, you starved to death. Once there was this kid who twisted his leg trying to catch a rabbit and we ended up tearing him to bits and eating him.

I'm telling you, we had it tough back in those days.

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[Bob the Super Hamste]

I am more impressed by what appears to be actual metal flatware. That and it looks better than anything I ever got served in k-12 school.

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[GT66]

That looks like a breakfast meal. What's the problem with that? I thought the meals looks pretty good. A little sparse by American standards but then we're the most obese nation on earth so what the hell do we know. In the USA, ketchup and spaghetti sauce are a vegetable. Here you'll get a bag of potato chips a soft drink and industrial waste dressed up to look like meat. Put some ketchup on the meat and you've got your healthy veggie! The British kids have it good!

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[Canazza]

It does, to Scots.

I never had a school meal when I was in primary school, but a few of my friends did. And being at one of the better Glasgow Schools, even back then (early 90s), it was pretty much the same, just without the veg. Also Semolina. They loved to serve Semolina for some disgusting reason.

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[CastrTroy]

I live in Ontario, so all this seems weird to me. We don't have school lunches in grade schools. Parents pack a lunch for the kids. I've always thought it was odd that kids got cafeteria meals in grade school. Even in highschool, we had a cafeteria, but still most kids brought their own lunch anyway. Most people's lunches consisted of a sandwich, some fruit, a juice box, and many of us even had some kind of snack like fruit roll-ups (always hated these) or something like a twinkie. Still it seemed like we were much better fed than the fries burgers and pizza that kids get in their cafeteria lunches. Now that my kids are at school, they still bring in their own lunches, but the school frowns upon bringing things like twinkies. Although to tell the truth, most granola bars aren't much healthier anyway. It seems counter productive to have the schools serve lunches if they aren't going to be healthy. Let the parents decide what the kids are going to eat. It only takes 5 minutes to make a lunch for your kids in the morning, and by the time they are 8, they can do it themselves.

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[DrXym]

I expect the school or the local council contracts the catering service and it's up to them to cook and serve food to the budget and nutritional standards required by their contract. It probably does mean they serve up crap and the crap is prepared by low skilled, low paid workers who are less interested in the quality of the food, as much as they are about their jobs. I'm pretty certain they could buy fresh ingredients and serve a far higher standard of food with the same budget but it's a question of the effort required to do it and the skills of the staff to actually bother and do it properly.

Jamie Oliver has had a campaign running for some time in the UK to boost the standard of school meals a while back and it has raised awareness of the issue. Maybe the blog and the fallout is one consequence of that awareness. From a long term perspective it doesn't do any nation good to serve crap food to children. They'll be mentally and physically underdeveloped as a result, underachieve academically and probably have a higher risk of developing conditions like obesity, diabetes etc later in life.

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[hoggoth]

Yeah, the British authorities shouldn't be forced to work with a "looking over your shoulder" effect on them. That situation is very stressful and will make you paranoid. I'm glad the British authorities understand the awful stress of constantly being monitored and surveilled.

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[kelemvor4]

Sorry, you think this looks healthy and tasty? Uh huh...

It appears to represent a reasonable (for a primary school child) amount of all four food groups, and even has a tasty low calorie Popsicle desert to finish it off. It may not be catered by outback steakhouse but looks like a good lunch to me.

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[MickyTheIdiot]

What a coincidence! American schools love to serve salmonella.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Congratulations on growing up middle class. Many kids, especially inner city kids, don't have responsible parents to pack their lunch for them, let alone the money to buy twinkies or fruit-roll-ups. Many schools in the US also serve breakfast, and many kids qualify to receive both for free.

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[q-the-impaler]

Did you hear that they confiscated a child's turkey sandwich in the U.S. because the state inspector deemed it unhealthy? Then they gave her chicken nuggets. Freedom is dead.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/15/school-lunch-guidelines-p_n_1278803.html

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[AngryDeuce]

I've always thought it was odd that kids got cafeteria meals in grade school.

It obviously depends a lot on where you live and go to school. I grew up in one of the poorer areas of Philadelphia and the vast majority of the kids I went to school with were latchkey kids in single-parent households (many of whom had younger siblings to care for when they got home, myself included, even in grade school), and I'm betting many of them ate even worse at home, as horrifying as that thought is to me.

I was in the reduced lunch program so my cafeteria meal only cost my mother $0.40 a day each for me and my younger brother, which even brown-bagging it couldn't really compete with cost-wise...

Later, when I was in high school (by that point my mother had married my stepfather who was in the U.S. Army and we were stationed in GA) the lunches were much higher quality than the Philly ones (but my God in heaven did they love their fucking chicken-fried steak, that was served at least once a week, if not more), but the rules on what you could bring were much, much more restrictive. So help you if they caught you drinking a can of soda, even the juices that come in cans like soda would be confiscated. They'd take candy from you if they caught you eating it, which was doubly ridiculous when you consider the fact that they sold candy at the fucking school store. You had to take it directly to your locker after purchase and leave it there or else they would take it. This is high school students we're talking about here, mind you, 18-year-old's getting hassled over Now-and-Laters, it was unreal.

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[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I thought that the UK had banned all metallic objects longer than they are wide by now, to tackle the knife-crime menace...

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[mekkab]

Yes; as a corollary to this, DC public schools are loathe to close on snow days because for some children, that's the only food they get all day.

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[milkmage]

you must be from Winnipeg.

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2012/06/07/Teachers-let-kids-eat-moose-droppings/UPI-41501339102360/

One 13-year-old boy ate one and then rushed to a river to rinse his mouth, while the second, a girl with braces, threw up, the report said.

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[mekkab]

ahhhh, I see we have Irony for lunch. /it tastes kind of like goldie or bronzy, except it's made out of iron.

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[AlecC]

School lunches are a surprisingly powerful tool against malnourished kids in deprived areas. Getting a decent meal into deprived children is both good for their general health and for their ability to absorb the education the school is offering. Therefore it is a policy aim that all schools be able to offer a quality meal to any deprived children in the area (since deprivation occurs in wealthy areas as well as poor). In fact, the percentage of children entitled to such meals for free is used as a metric of the school's intake, those with a higher level of free lunches being assumed to have a less well supported intake. Given that such a meal must be offered to those entitled to it free, it makes economic sense to offer it to all children. It doesn't stop children bringing their own lunches to school as you describe, and many do. In my experience in comfortably off areas, about half of all children bring their own lunches and half have school lunches.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Freedom is dead.

Your post was interesting and useful until that bit. Why include that hyperbolic crap? What did it add (except for making you seem like a crackpot)?

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[milkmage]

blame the press

http://www.argyll-bute.gov.uk/news/2012/jun/statement-school-meals-argyll-and-bute-council

But we all must also accept that there is absolutely no place for the type of inaccurate and abusive attack on our catering and dining hall staff, such as we saw in one newspaper yesterday which considerably inflamed the situation. That, of course, was not the fault of the blog, but of the paper.

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[Sentrion]

Here in China they just give us two sticks and a bowl. Now, how am I supposed to eat my soup with these two sticks?

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[MightyYar]

In NYC they shift the school subsidized lunch programs to the city pools in the summer. It's the closest thing to a healthy meal those kids will get.

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[Lumpy]

BRAWNDO! IT has the Electrolytes you Crave!

My daughters school had a choice of energy drink as well. Monster in a smaller soda can. I was disgusted.

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[Electrawn]

The Turkey Sandwich story is a bunch of hysterical bunk that was rapidly picked up by Fox News and Huffington Post. It was a bunch of poorly worded reporting by the original source, Carolina Journal.

Please read: http://www.carolinajournal.com/jhdailyjournal/display_jhdailyjournal.html?id=8780 for the real deal.

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[canajin56]

In the original outraged story, poor innocent child comes with a healthy meal of chips, a banana, a sandwich, and extra sugary apple juice (less healthy that pop). She tries so hard to eat her healthy meal but the nazis throw it in the garbage. She gets chicken nuggets only. No fruit, no vegetables, nothing to drink. Then she is sent home with a bill for the food. This is the story in the local paper. Then Fox CNN NBC ABC HuffPo Slashdot Reditt etc all link to the local paper without any followups of their own, and it makes national news. The school is confused because their inspectors don't confiscate anything except peanuts, and they never sent home a bill. This is taken by Slashdot etc as a sign of coverup. Then the woman posts a picture of the bill. The "bill" is a note. This note is dated. The date is NOT the day this happened, but the week prior. The "bill" says that in future, they may begin charging children who are not enrolled in the lunch program, but who need supplementary food because, for example, they were sent with a lunch with no fruit or vegetables. Oops, nothing that could have been done to avoid that mistake except hiring reporters who know how to read. So all you're left with is a mom angry that her child ate junk food like chicken nuggets instead of healthy potato chips, a crying child who says that they made her eat the delicious chicken nuggets and she really tried to eat mom's sandwich but they threw it out, and a school that says they supplement unhealthy lunches, but never replace them. Obviously children never lie to get out of trouble, but schools will always lie about following their documented procedure to get out of trouble.

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[CanHasDIY]

Not saying banning the girl's camera was a good move or that something productive could not come from scrutiny, just saying I could see why they would be worried even if they had done nothing wrong/bad/poor.

Protip - If you have a problem with the general public scrutinizing your every action at work, don't work for the general public.

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[X86Daddy]

Oh yeah... I attended a GA high school (obedience school) and was really impressed with what they emphasized. The most important geometry to know was skirt length to knee distance, etc...

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[AngryDeuce]

Given the way that some high schools treat their students [like little children] it's no wonder that so many young people today have such a hard time taking care of themselves after they graduate.

If you want to see something truly disturbing, check out the documentary The War on Kids . It is currently available on Netflix; I just watched it a few days ago and was totally disgusted. The section on the over-medication of our children is especially troubling, and the coverage of the full SWAT raid at a South Carolina High School at the behest of the administration (which turned up absolutely no drugs at all) is both infuriating and chilling at the same time.

Much of the documentary focuses on the testimony of kids dealing with the rise in police involvement in our schools, not to mention the ineffectiveness (and outright insanity) of zero-tolerance policies. The kid's themselves know it's a complete joke, all the anti-drug programs like D.A.R.E., plus the teachers talking about kids looking like fucking lobotomy patients after a change in meds, literally drooling...

I can tell you emphatically, there is no way in hell I'm going to allow my child to go to a school that even kids themselves cannot differentiate from a prison (they actually do an experiment with children in the documentary examining just that). I will be home-schooling my children, no matter what it takes. My kids will not be drones. They may not be able to diagram a sentence, but they'll damn sure know their rights.

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[Kijori]

I've heard of this happening where there is a child with a very serious peanut allergy.

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[Anonymous Coward]

That doesn't seem to refute the basis of the story at all.

It just says "we used the term 'forced' and we actually meant 'recommended' instead". But we're talking about an adult and a four year old here. So is there really any difference?

I mean, I guess you could note that they didn't strap the girl down and put the food in her mouth, but no one was suggesting that in the first place.

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[cffrost]

Sorry, you think this looks healthy and tasty? Uh huh...

Firstly, that sorry-looking excuse for a cheeseburger is an insult to human dignity. Poor kid's gonna need that stiff upper lip to bite into that son of a bitch as-is. If the time, effort, and expense is going to be put forth to make cheeseburgers, you put some ketchup, lettuce and onion on there at a bare minimum in order to normalize the flavor and provide a texture conducive to it being eaten, especially when the burgers are deployed on those nasty little miscible, hygroscopic buns, as opposed to proper rolls that can maintain cohesion while providing a dry, frictive containment/handling envelope.

Regarding healthfulness: Having done time as an American public school student, I could not care less about the healthfulness of kids' school lunch. Food safety is certainly of maximal importance. With that, lunchtime represents one half-hour or so break in dealing with eight hours of authoritarians, bullies, test-teaching, sport, and nowadays, police response to incidences of child behavior. Not unlike television in "correctional" facilities, the fat, salt, sugar and abundance of watt-seconds provided by school lunches are important for maintaining the mental well-being of students/inmates, and possibly the physical well-being of the employees. Allow me to spin this from another angle: The function of school lunch is to provide food kids will eat, not to assuage (what I sense to be) a misguided sense of guilt or wrongdoing by those of us funding/serving it.

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[dubbreak]

Congratulations on growing up middle class. Many kids, especially inner city kids, don't have responsible parents to pack their lunch for them, let alone the money to buy twinkies or fruit-roll-ups. Many schools in the US also serve breakfast, and many kids qualify to receive both for free.

Exactly. I spent most of my childhood in Canada (capital of BC) where there weren't any hot or prepared lunches supplied by the school. Then we moved to the US (Montana) where they had a hot lunch program. Lunches were subsidized or free for some people (depending on income level). Unfortunately they got different colored punch cards, so it was doubly easy to pick out the "poor kids" (i.e. lower income families). I ended up eating the prepared lunches as it was easier, helped me fit in as a "foreigner" (almost everyone ate the lunches) and even at full price it was quite affordable (possibly cheaper than making your own lunches).

The program was definitely needed where I lived in Montana otherwise there are plenty of kids that would have gone hungry. I was only a kid, but I don't think it would have been needed in the neighbourhood I grew up in Canada. I don't remember anyone not having a lunch (and as kids anything that makes someone stand out is noticed quickly). It appears now schools that have a lunch program are either private schools or in poorer areas (so it's either a feature of the elite or a support system). Apparently the middle class must fend for themselves.

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[Hyperhaplo]

Same. Although, I soon found out how to make a very very small amount of money stretch really far.

I used to catch the bus. Instead of buying bus tickets I would ride my bike to school and spend 30c? something like that at a fish&chips shop on the way which would usually get me one big or two or three small potato cakes. I realise now that the shop guy was being very nice.

This went on for some time. I never did find out if my mother knew I was riding my bike to school.. in any case, for three years (most of the time) I collected the bus money, caught the bus sometimes, always had a spare book of tickets, and rode or walked whenever I could.

I applaud the girl in TFA. always good to shine a light on the parts of our society the rest of us don't see. Am sure Jamie Oliver is loving this.

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[guises]

Peanuts are very dangerous to some people. They could certainly be used as a weapon, though that's not why they're banned:

http://foodallergies.about.com/od/adultfoodallergies/f/nutsatschool.htm

It seems odd to me that you haven't heard of this problem since it's been so widely publicized, but maybe that's only the case around here.

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[Sulphur]

The school is confused because their inspectors don't confiscate anything except peanuts

Err...peanuts confisticated? Seriously? Are peanuts now a dangerous weapon?

I suppose the nuts themselves might be thrown and could put someones eye out....but would they allow a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?

I'm guessing you're being as tongue and cheek as I am....?

Peanut butter could be thrown, and the spoon would put someone's eye out.

One should rely on tongue and cheek sandwiches.

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[AngryDeuce]

Our campus was totally closed, although the degree with which it was closed changed a lot over my 4 years there. When I first started going there, there were portables that were adjacent to the student parking lots, and the teachers stationed in those portables would watch out the windows for students trying to leave school grounds...but generally you could slip out if you were super-sneaky about it, although it sometimes required Mission: Impossible style coordination with students in those particular portables at a given period to act as a distraction to the teachers inside, who could just look up out the window and see the bulk of the lot from their desk.

Towards the end of my high-school career, though, they'd finally had it with kids like us getting off campus and started posting security guards out there, and a year or so after I left (when Columbine happened) they graduated up to a toll-booth style checkpoint with a permanent security guard and checked the badges of everyone entering and leaving campus. Our school was surrounded by woods on 3 sides so a lot of kids used to just park off-campus and sneak through the woods instead, but I've heard from a few people I went to school with that stayed in the area after graduation they've completely fenced in the grounds and removed a lot of the brush since I was last there almost 20 years ago to make this more difficult.

It's really shocking how much different the vibe is at school these days. I wouldn't want to be a student in today's public schools, that's for sure...I'd probably have been arrested a dozen times already for the shit we used to pull when we were in school, and it's not like I'm talking about the distant past or anything, I'm talking mid-90's here.

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[AngryDeuce]

I think its time to forgive her, bro :)

Of course...she was a single-mother with zero help from my drug-addicted father, working two jobs over 16-hour days to provide for us. I admit, I was pretty bitter about it growing up, seeing as how I almost never even saw her face-to-face for days at a stretch (we communicated mostly through notes on the fridge) and I had a young brother to care for when other kids spent their days after school playing Nintendo, but now that I'm an adult, I understand completely that she would have rather been home with us if she could have afforded to be.

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[Xest]

To be fair I never got them at school, but please don't tell Jamie Oliver or he'll shit bricks and give the whole nation a lecture again on how it's disgusting that we dare to let children have a choice of what to eat or allow parents to consider letting them eat anything other than Jamie's menu.

All whilst he continues to become even more of a fatso himself, proving the point that it's actually got fuck all to do with whether you eat chips (fries for non-British) now and again or not, because Jamie gets Jamie's immaculately healthy dinners every night but is still getting rather more weighty. It's more about how your metabolism copes with different food, relative to how much exercise you get coupled with the volume and frequency of food you consume. It's not a problem you can simply solve by changing the menus to make them piss fucking boring for most children such that they don't bother to eat a healthy amount at all- it's far more complex than that.

Honestly, I'd rather Gordon Ramsey had been given the role of dealing with the problem of childhood obesity rather than Jamie Oliver because at least Gordon shouting at the kids "Stop eating shit you fat little fuck" would've been an awful lot more amusing if nothing else, but then, that's probably why I wouldn't ever be any good at working with kids.

How many chins are you on now anyway, Jamie?

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[TheLink]

They could have air-dropped aid packages just like they do in somewhat similar places elsewhere.

One of the richest and the most powerful country in the world after all.

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[LoyalOpposition]

how am I supposed to eat my soup with these two sticks?

Is one of the sticks hollow?

~Loyal

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[ravenshrike]

That was the best description of hamburger handling devices I've ever seen.

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[darrylo]

Dem m00se bytes cAn be pretti nasti, tooooo.

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[MickyTheIdiot]

With the Food Desert problem in places like Detroit, a food drop might not be that far fetched.

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[Mindcontrolled]

Uhm, a decent pasta sauce should count as vegetable... in case you mean a tomato sauce there.

Lightly fry some onions, garlic, celery and carrot in olive oil, add peeled tomato cubes, let simmer - no matter how long. Short gives a fresh, summery zingy taste, long gives you that settled, autumny thick sauce. Salt, pepper, some basil. Done.

Of course that refers to a decent spaghetti sauce. But a caterer that takes a contract for a couple of hundreds of meals per day and can't prepare that should be flogged, tarred, feathered, covered in honey and left outside for the fire ants to have a party.

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[cayenne8]

Geez....I have to agree, I'd not want to be a kid in school today.

When I went, it was somewhat like college...except they took attendance in the classes. You could leave campus...hell, on some assembly days, we ran and got some beer, and had a party near the river, etc. But we all graduated, did decent grades...and now have fine and successful careers.

I do think...senior year...they did start giving out student IDs....but it wasn't like you had to carry or show them for anything.

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[Electrawn]

There is even more to the story, as the mother "opted-in" for the food inspection program but forgot she did so. It was a non-story story. I forgot about this additional blog post:

Enjoy: http://ordinary-gentlemen.com/blog/2012/02/15/a-north-carolina-non-troversy/

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[alva_edison]

Really makes a case against libertarianism, though.

No, it really doesn't.

Under libertarianism the program wouldn't exist therefore the children would starve.

Re:U turn

[vistic]

I hate to tell you this but there is no such thing as "free". When I was young you were supposed to support your family and that meant feeding them. I fed my kids and I resent having to feed other people kids. There used to be a thing in society called responsibility. That meant you were responsible for you and your's. That free healthcare and free meals you allude to are paid for by taking money away from me and mine.

That's a pretty sickening attitude. Really, society only survives because thankfully not everyone thinks the way you do.

all changed now

[SkunkPussy]

Apparently the Chief of the council was on radio 4 just now and he has reverted the ban live on air. It remains to be seen if this filters down correctly!

Free speech

[gagol]

Is valid at all ages... how is that different from resto clitique?

Re:Free speech

[gagol]

I did not got the news about reverse decision, still how can things like that happens?

The pupil had a creative project involving writing and the school serioulsy decided to try and stop it. In my days it would have been highly applauded!

Re:Free speech

[Anonymous Coward]

That was not school who banned her but the council. The school supported it, but the council was embarrassed when it was revealed how crappy food the pupils are eating, so they tried to gag her.

Re:Free speech

[Rogerborg]

There is a limit to free speech though. And apparently that bar has been lowered to shouting "Eww!" in a crowded cafeteria.

Re:Free speech

[AngryDeuce]

Not sure about the UK, but the U.S. courts have repeatedly upheld that students do not have free speech. The case Morse v. Frederick comes to mind, otherwise known as the "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" case.

Long story short, the students were released from school early so they could watch the torch pass from the 2002 Winter Olympics, and Joseph Fredrick, a student at the school, along with friends, held up a banner they'd made earlier that said "Bong Hits 4 Jesus". He was suspended for 5 days (later increased to the maximum 10 days after quoting Thomas Jefferson, which is hysterical), sued, and lost several times. School speech can be regulated both on and off campus; Frederick was not technically in school at the time of his banner (as they'd been dismissed) and he was also standing across the street from the school, thus not technically on campus, but in view of those that were.

Then, of course, are the myriad cases cropping up over the last few years where student's Facebook posts are getting them suspended Just a few months ago a 12-year-old girl was interrogated at length by the administration at her school, with police officers present (but not her parents, of course), and ultimately forced to give up her Facebook password.

If this girl had been here in the U.S., she'd probably already be charged with some form of terrorism by DHS and thrown in a cell with murderers, rapists, and people that upload HD rips of hit movies to the internet.

Re:Free speech

[91degrees]

Free speech is a right throughout Europe. However this is a right that is considered to be balanced against other rights, such as the right not to be harassed, privacy, and anything else that may be considered a fundamental right.

But that's beside the point. Freedom of speech doesn't mean that all rules that may impact freedom of speech are invalid.

Re:Free speech

[xaxa]

The Human Rights Act applies to everyone (not just adults, not just British people, not just in British territory) and includes the right to Freedom of Expression.

There are also extra Children's human rights http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/parents/parentsrights/dg_4003313

from 15 January 1992, when the treaty came into force, every child in the UK has been entitled to over 40 specific rights. These include:
* the right to have their views respected, and to have their best interests considered at all times

Re:Free speech

[slimjim8094]

If this girl had been here in the U.S., she'd probably already be charged with some form of terrorism by DHS and thrown in a cell with murderers, rapists, and people that upload HD rips of hit movies to the internet.

C'mon dude, you made a lot of good points, why did you have to spoil it with outrageous hyperbole? It's one of the most obvious rules of trying to prove a point - people judge your argument as a whole, so if you throw in a crapton of obvious nonsense, people don't take the good parts seriously.

Re:Free speech

[MobyDisk]

I had never heard of this case so I became outraged, and read up on it. You posted that "the students were released from school early" which is not true. They were not released from school at all. Instead, the students were escorted across the street, as part of a school event, including supervision by teachers. That's a huge difference. You can walk across the street and be free of school rules. But you can't go on a school field trip, with school teachers, and expect not to follow school rules.

When will they learn

[cmdr_klarg]

The more you try to hide something, the more attention it will attract.

Re:When will they learn

[hey]

Well yes and no. How much do we hear about people in prison in China for political "crimes".

Re:When will they learn

[Rogerborg]

Seems like we never stop hearing about it. You may be mistaking "hearing about" for "caring enough to do something about".

Re:When will they learn

[JoeMerchant]

In cases like this, yes. All too often, oppressors of all kinds are successful. It's good to have cases like this to remind people that they actually can fight back and win, sometimes.

summary error...

[Anonymous Coward]

the blog didn't make catering staff fear for their jobs.

the press reaction in the UK has made catering staff fear for their jobs

Martha was blogging what she had for dinner NOT what the full menu was.

the press ommited this detail and pitchforks started being sharpened as it appears Martha wasn't picking the best of what was on offer (health wise)

all that said, i think it's a bloody shame the council have stopped given that the school actually encourages children to talk about their diet and this girl's only taken that training to the next logical conclusion of sharing with the internet.

Re:summary error...

[jamesh]

Nobody else reads the articles, why would you expect the person who wrote the summary to have read it??

there is very little meat in these gym mats

[Joe_Dragon]

there is very little meat in these gym mats

Re:there is very little meat in these gym mats

[Slippery_Hank]

More testicles mean more iron!

Re:there is very little meat in these gym mats

[gregg]

but they go so well will a tall glass of malk.

Bad publicity?

[Darkness404]

To be honest, all the British (and the foreign food) all looked fairly decent. Really the only terrible looking food was the "foreign" (being as she is from the UK) US meals. If anything it is a good showcase of what school lunches are from around the world and honestly I'd say it puts the British in more favorable light than the US.

The public have a fundamental right to see what their tax dollars (or pounds in this case) are doing, whether that is detailed information about Afghanistan and Iraq or school lunches.

Re:did the 3rd party catering / food service push

[wvmarle]

OK too lazy to look up that blog, but if the meal providers are afraid of their jobs, then I'd say that implies they know their food is of poor quality.

All they have to do is make their food decent. That is: reasonably healthy and balanced, reasonably fresh, and reasonably tasty. No need for five-star dinner quality, it's school dinners, but that also means you shouldn't serve them crap.

Even funnier

[drinkypoo]

One of the links IN THE SUMMARY says that the ban has been lifted (on the BBC.) Perhaps it's been changed since the submission but before the story hit the front page.

Yum

[zenyu]

The food she photographed looks pretty amazing compared with what I recall eating in primary school.

Re:Yum

[turkeyfeathers]

And it's not being made from surplus hamburger meat prepared from condemned cattle, as yours probably was.

Re:Yum

[Greyfox]

I was an Air Force brat, so we moved around a lot. In Hawaii it was pretty common to get spam and pineapple in some sort of green sauce. I'm going to assume the green sauce was dioxin. It was so disgusting that I still remember it clearly 30 years later.

I honestly don't remember the school food in Georgia, though I do remember bringing my own lunch and awful lot.

Upstate New York we had some choice. My favorite was actually a fried brown chicken puck sandwich. Except the week I got strep, then the fried bits were like swallowing broken glass (The subsequent visit to the school nurse was how I found out I had strep.)

I'm pretty sure even the spam-in-dioxin was still healthier than my college diet of ramen and pop tarts. The pop tarts were for vitamin C, you see, otherwise you get scurvy.

I wasn't the least bit surprised when the pink slime story came out a while back. In a few of the districts I attended, canned pet food would have been an appetizing improvement.

NeverSeconds

[eternaldoctorwho]

I think it's awesome she named her blog "NeverSeconds". I always remember being left hungry in middle/high school by the paltry lunches we got, to the point where I started bringing in my own every day. The worst was pizza day - you got the equivalent of one piece of pizza, a drink, and a "salad" (actually a couple pieces of lettuce and some shredded carrot). That was it. I guess it all worked out, because after the long lines, including many line-cutters, you only got about 10 minutes to eat anyhow.

My point is: school lunches suck! I fully support this girl in her efforts.

incompetent or poor ingredients / equipment / time

[Joe_Dragon]

incompetent or poor ingredients / equipment / time tables.

Maybe they are useing poor ingredients with under sized equipment with a time table does not let them put out grade A food.

Re:did the 3rd party catering / food service push

[semi-extrinsic]

All they have to do is make their food decent. That is: reasonably healthy and balanced, reasonably fresh, and reasonably tasty. No need for five-star dinner quality, it's school dinners, but that also means you shouldn't serve them crap.

On this topic: the girl and her dad inquired the school about the type of chicken and sausages they serve, and apparently they are "safe to keep for up to three years". That says it about the quality of the food for me.

Links to blog and stories

[TarpaKungs]

This may be helpful:

The blog: http://neverseconds.blogspot.co.uk/

BBC story: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-18454800

Independent: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/school-dinner-blogger-martha-payne-photo-ban-overturned-7854487.html

Council rebuttal: http://www.argyll-bute.gov.uk/news/2012/jun/statement-school-meals-argyll-and-bute-council

Re:Don't like the school lunches . . . ?

[InsaneMosquito]

This isn't always an option. For example, this school in Chicago bans packed lunches because kids could bring something healthy. Who's to say more principals won't latch on to this line of thinking? http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/education/ct-met-school-lunch-restrictions-041120110410,0,4567867.story

Re:incompetent or poor ingredients / equipment / t

[jythie]

Yeah, but often the wrong people get in trouble. As the saying goes, praise travels up, blame travels down. I could see cooks (or their immediate superiors) getting public ire for things that are not really under their control.

Pieces of hair

[nabob]

Each review also contains an awesome "Pieces of Hair" tally.

I'll save you the effort: looks like the last sighting was May 15th.

Streisand in real time

[Zelos]

You can actually watch the Streisand effect happening in real time as the hit counter at the bottom of her page shoots up. Heading for 3 million pretty quickly :-)

Toothless

[tepples]

In that case, the government could just claim that any and all restrictions on speech "are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary."

I hope the ban gets overturned.

[wcrowe]

I know what would have happened at my school after such a ban. EVERY kid would start taking pictures of their meals and posting them.

I wish someone would explain to me why the UK is becoming so totalitarian these days.

Re:Calling for roadside assistance

[Ranger96]

Do the same thing I did in the days before ubiquitous mobile devices: walk.

metal utensiles, including knives

[loupgarou21]

I find it refreshing that she's given actual, metal utensils, including a knife.

I'm 30 now, so you can use that for a frame of reference. Back in elementary school, we were also given metal utensils, including knives. somewhere around middle school/high school (I think it was when I was entering high school), Minnesota passed a zero tolerance knife policy for the grade schools. Now, even a butter knife would get you immediately expelled from school, the cafeteria switched to plastic-ware and no longer had even plastic knives.

I'm glad to see that not everyone is insane.

The charity

[nozzo]

The best bit about all this is that Martha has raised around 4 times her £7,000 target for the charity she supports. The proudest 9-year-old ever when she comes home from school and finds out!

Re:Luch Lady = Catering staff

[cptdondo]

I don't know where you went to school, but the "drivel" you refer to looks really good to me. The food is visually appealing, and looks varied in texture. The presentation is pretty good. In other words, for mass produced industrial cafeteria food it's darn good.

Try running a kitchen before you spout.

When you're given a budget where you have to produce a meal for less than $2 and this includes your labor costs, and meet all the "nutritional needs" and make stuff that people actually want to eat, you realize just how great a job some of those people do.

Her charity page

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone wanting to show her some support might also consider donating to her charity page:

http://www.justgiving.com/neverseconds

Yorkshire school dinners

[Roger W Moore]

Well I am a Yorkshireman and after school dinners we sometimes had "secs" (meaning second helpings). However it you think about the pronunciation of that word you may understand what caused considerable confusion for me as a 7 year old when I came out of school and announced to my dad that "after dinner we had secs" and got into a lot of trouble...at least until he understood what I meant. Fortunately he did not "thrash us to sleep with a broken bottle" though so by Four Yorkshiremen standards I was very, very lucky!

Re:Oblig...

[jkiller]

Lisa Simpson: Isn't there anything here that doesn't have meat in it?
Lunch Lady Doris: Possibly the meat loaf.

Re:incompetent or poor ingredients / equipment / t

[Compaqt]

>which means that somebody needs to be fired.

Why is it that the answer to everything seems to be to fire someone?

If the cafeteria equipment is sub-par, why can't the person in charge simply be told to get better equipment instead of being fired?

Is this a common approach to problem solving in most companies?

Bug tracker not easy to use? Fire someone.
Windows has an occasional crash? Fire somebody.
There was a brownout and you didn't have enough diesel for the backup generators? Fire the whole IT dept.

Re:did the 3rd party catering / food service push

[Belial6]

This is a new thing on trying to imply food is bad for you, or not good quality. It is simply untrue. We have become extremely spoiled in thinking that good food only lasts a few days. Having a ready supply of food from the grocery store who imports fresh food from all over the planet will do that to us.

Before taking the "It doesn't spoil in 3 days!" as an indicator of quality, you need to first look at what kind of food it is. Sausage is not a specific food, it is a class of foods. No doubt some types are more prone to spoilage than others. There is also the fact that the biggest problem in spoilage is bacteria and mold. To grow and spoil the food they need water and warmth. Packaging can for the most part prevent live bacteria and mold from being in contact with the food. No mold/bacteria, not mold/bacteria growth and the food can last a very long time. Prepackaging preparation can remove water from the food. No water no mold/bacteria growth. Lastly, we have refrigeration. Put the food in the freezer, and mold/bacteria growth is slowed dramatically.

Was the offending sausage vacuum packed? That would extend it's life without harming it's quality.
Was the sausage a dried sausage? That would extend it's life without harming it's quality.
Was the sausage frozen? That would extend it's life without harming it's quality significantly if at all.

Was the sausage vacuum packed, a dried style and frozen? If so, 3 years is not unreasonable. "Safe to keep for up to three years" is also not a statement that it doesn't lose quality over that time. A loaf of sliced sandwich bread is "safe to keep for a week" exposed to the air on my counter. That doesn't mean that I would want to eat it at that time, and it wouldn't be better if it grew mold in 3 days.

Shelf life is not correlated with quality.

The food improved as a result of her blog

[billstewart]

The papers reported that in response to her blogging, the schools started allowing the kids to have as much salad and vegetables as they wanted (like kids are really into overcooked vegetables), so the food was improving a bit. But they really really didn't like to do that.