06-04-2025
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.
