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Spectator
30-04-2025
- General
- Spectator
Prepare to feel nauseous at this School Dinners exhibition
If your stomach turns when you walk past a Japanese restaurant with moulded plastic replicas of sushi on display, prepare to feel even more nauseous in the School Dinners exhibition at the Food Museum in Stowmarket, Suffolk. Here, moulded in that same plastic, in (if anything) even more garish colours, you'll see a sample two-course school dinner from each decade from the 1940s to the 2020s. If orange PVC cod's roe looks a bit disgusting, a heap of pale, lumpy, plastic 1970s mashed potato with over-boiled carrots is even worse. The sample plate from the 1940s contains chunks of dark brown liver polluting the inside of a jacket potato. (I'm not sure dinner ladies would have put liver inside a jacket potato in the 1940s.) The 1970s beige spam fritters look like flaccid inflatable beds. By the 1980s, the plastic flight tray had come into fashion, so while eating their greasy sausages with mash and peas, children were distracted by the chocolate sponge with pink custard in a separate division of the same receptacle. By the 1990s the turkey twizzler was ruining children's health, resting on a bed of vomity 'mixed vegetables' (carrot cubes, peas and sweetcorn) with, again, the scoop of mash which, in plastic form, looks like vanilla ice cream. By comparison, the lentil dahl of the 2020s, with rice, sweetcorn and a small flatbread, followed by fruit salad and a pot of yoghurt, looks bearable. Beware the onslaught of wall prose. I go to an exhibition to look at items, not to read wall prose. When you enter the exhibition, housed (appropriately) in the Bone Building on the glorious 84-acre site of the Food Museum – which used to be the Museum of East Anglian life but was rebranded in 2022 – you're accosted by bite-size chunks of educational prose lining every wall.
Telegraph
06-04-2025
- General
- Telegraph
Gristly beef and watery cabbage: the school dinners I'll never miss
If you find yourself near Stowmarket, Suffolk, this Spring, you could consider visiting the Food Museum, where a Proustian experience awaits. The museum's new exhibition is devoted to the history of school dinners from the 1940s to the present. The show explores menus old and new, the role of dinner ladies and (alarmingly) offers visitors the opportunity to sample school food from different eras. The provision of school meals began in 1906, when the nursery school pioneer Margaret McMillan argued that if the State intended to make education compulsory, it must also ensure that pupils were adequately nourished. An enlightened understanding of the role of food in maintaining morale led to the universal provision of school dinners from 1944. But over the decades it is striking to observe how some things about school dinners remain constant, while others have profoundly altered. The sharpest divergence is in menus, which have changed dramatically over the decades, driven by the tension between evolving ideas of adequate nutrition and economies of scale. I was at school in the Sixties and Seventies, and apart from the obligatory milk (frozen in winter, curdled in summer) I remember most vividly the dinners at my village primary school. We ate in the gravy-smelling village hall, to which the food was delivered in metal vats and dispensed by dinner ladies who kept a beady eye on my attempts to scrape away my uneaten meals. I was a weedy child with a negligible appetite, and I struggled with gristly beef and watery cabbage, the brown slop with pink sauce ('Medway mud and shaving cream') that passed for pudding and the horror of Gypsy Tart – a dire Kentish delicacy of congealed evaporated milk and tough pastry. Of my grammar school lunches I recall only the Spam fritters, served in a cacophonous space that doubled as the school theatre and gym, pungent with the pong of deep-frying and teenaged angst. Younger pupils arguably had an even less appetising experience after the opening of provision to private tender in the 1980s. On Radio 4 a dinner lady recalled Pork Hippos and Cheesy Feet – not to mention the Turkey Twizzlers that reduced Jamie Oliver almost to tears during his gallant attempt to reform school food in the 2005 television series, Jamie's School Dinners. Studying the school menus of that era, you can see the future obesity crisis inexorably forming. Over the years menus have evolved but the memories of former schoolchildren seem strangely consistent: a kind of rueful affection for the comic nastiness of school food. Bridget Phillipson, the current education secretary, recalled her school dinners as 'absolutely awful', featuring 'custard with a thick skin and orange fish fingers'. Phillipson was born in 1983, but evidently catering standards had not noticeably improved in the decades since Nigel Molesworth's devastating analysis of 'Skool Food, or The Piece of Cod Which Passeth All Understanding'. Meanwhile the role of dinner ladies can be traced in a direct line from Dickens's fearsome Mrs Squeers ('I can't find the school spoon anywhere') to the Beano's unforgettable dinner lady, Olive Sprat, with her concrete-reinforced ladle. These days, current government standards for school meals virtuously minimise salt, processed foods and sugar. But other nations still seem better than we are at persuading children that food is one of life's civilised pleasures. In France, meals still tend to reflect the cultural as well as nutritional aspects of food, with several courses and proper plates and cutlery (back in 2008 the then schools secretary, Ed Balls, called for school meals to be served on china plates, rather than 'prison-style food trays'). A recent episode of Radio 4's Food Programme explored public catering in Copenhagen, where 90 per cent of school meals are prepared from scratch with organic produce. The budget is strict, the ingredients mainly plant based – and the secret of popular uptake? Sprinkle a bit of bacon over the top, apparently. Education budgets, like everything else, are sharply squeezed, but some aspects of the European approach could be worth considering, if we don't want our children and grandchildren to look back on their own school meals with the blend of nostalgia and comic dismay so vividly captured by the Food Museum's exhibition.
BBC News
02-04-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
School dinners exhibition in Stowmarket will celebrate history
The organisers of a new exhibition are hoping to transport people as far back as the 1940s with memories of school Food Museum in Stowmarket, Suffolk, will feature a tasting kitchen where visitors can sample the delights of semolina, sponge pudding and turkey open, the exhibition will run until February 2027."School dinners have changed massively over time," said curator Katherine Bridges. "Politics and who's in government has really changed the way we think about school food and what standards are in place." The new exhibition was created as a result of visitor feedback to the Food Museum and has been shaped through the stories of local school dinner Bridges said: "I hope visitors will come and really have fun with a sense of nostalgia."There is a really serious side to this topic as well, so I hope visitors will learn something." In September, organisers urged people to donate objects such as lunchboxes, staff uniforms and menus to help bring the stories of school dinners to Bridges continued: "Starting with the 1940s with menus from Norfolk, they will be able to learn about the history of the school meals policy and poverty behind it, through to the young voices involved in school food today and the dinner staff who make school food possible." Follow Suffolk news on BBC Sounds, Facebook, Instagram and X.
Yahoo
28-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Festival cannot go ahead after recording breaking year due to financial pressures
An annual festival has announced it will not take place this year due to financial pressures. The Primadonna Festival, held at the Food Museum and other venues in Suffolk, announced the news on social media. The festival said: "Despite a record-breaking 2024, rising costs and lack of funding have made it impossible to deliver this year's event. "However, this is not the end. "We are working on a plan to secure Primadonna's future and return at full throttle in 2026. "In the meantime, we'll continue with bespoke events and collaborations to keep the spirit of Primadonna alive." Primadonna Festival assured people that it is not the end (Image: Leo Cackett) The arts, culture and heritage festival has previously hosted the likes of La Roux, Katy Brand, Sandi Toksvig and June Sarpong. Primadonna is aiming to return in 2026 and has received support online.
