Observations on school meals

Nobody takes much interest in the humble school meal; if people talk about it at all, it is to make jokes about spotted dick and lumpy custard. Yet the school meal ought to be at the forefront of debates about health, well-being and sustainable development.

Why is it that in Welsh farming communities where lamb and beef are the staple products, school menus consist of imported, reconstituted chicken, and all the milk used in the canteen is powdered? Why are so many parents so doubtful of the nutritional quality of the school meal that they give their children packed lunches? The answer lies in the grim and dreary-sounding realms of public procurement policy and EU regulations.

Public procurement managers in the UK insist that EU regulations prohibit explicit "buy local" policies and that this explains why you will so rarely find fresh local food in schools, hospitals and care homes. But this is only technically true. The real problem is the conservative interpretation of these regulations by UK public procurement managers. In Italy, France, Denmark, Sweden, Austria and Germany, public procurement policy helps to get good-quality food for schoolchildren. Their cities and regions design contracts that specify product qualities - fresh seasonal produce, organic ingredients and so on - which allow them to practise "buy local" policies in all but name.

The benefits are considerable. First, more nutritious school food should help to reduce obesity, heart disease and diabetes. Second, more locally produced school meals would create new markets for local farmers and producers. Third, a more localised food chain would produce environmental benefits because of the reduction in the pollution caused by transporting food over long distances. The world summits - Rio and Johannesburg, for example - may play a useful role in putting sustainable development on the political agenda, but they can never be a substitute for truly important things such as how we weave sustainable practices into everyday life. If the government is serious about sustainable development, school meals are a good place to start.

The public procurement profession claims that cost is the other big barrier to the use of higher-quality food in school meals, and there is more substance to this charge. One of the most closely guarded bits of information in local government is the amount of money that is actually allocated to food ingredients in school meals: in one county, I discovered, roughly 35p of the £1.35 that parents pay. Given this sum, the miracle is that the meals are as good as they are.

School meals caterers have still not recovered from the Tory regime of compulsory competitive tendering, which spawned a culture of cost-cutting. More supportive regulations and more resources would greatly help to restore the original purpose of the school meal - as an instrument of social policy that brings health, education and welfare benefits.

Professor Kevin Morgan is co-author of the report Relocalising the Food Chain: the role of creative public procurement, available from Cardiff University's Regeneration Institute

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