The school canteen

is apparently becoming a thing of the past. It is said they are no longer financially viable. There are schools with no canteen at all. Others have a canteen open one or two days a week. 

I suspect one of the reasons for this is not just the increased cost of running a canteen but why those increased costs are being incurred.

When I was a mere kitten school canteens were very different affairs. My first school had no canteen but it was a small country school. Once a term the mothers might run a "soup and pasty" day. This would mean tinned tomato soup and homemade pasties brought in by the mothers and sold as a fund raiser. We might get sweets of some sort on Sports Day - but I am hazy about that one.

In my next school the then standard arrangement applied. If you were "buying your lunch" you brought along your money and gave it to the teacher who wrote the order on a brown paper bag. This was for the very youngest children. As you went up the school things changed slightly and by the final year of the primary school children wrote their own orders. The bags were printed with room for your name at the top and then boxes to tick with only a sandwich or roll filling to be entered.

The menu was definitely limited. You could have a pie or pasty or sausage roll if you wanted something hot. Other than that you could have a sandwich (only white bread available) or a roll. The latter could be "single" or "double" cut. "Double" meant two layers of filling and was naturally more expensive. 

After that, if your mother was feeling generous with the money, you could have something like a "cream  bun" (with ersatz cream and a dob of red "jam") or a "finger bun" or a "jelly tart". 

I almost never bought my lunch. I might be able to count the number of times I did it in the first five years of school on all my fingers and toes and have some fingers and toes still to count. It was a once a term event. (We had three terms back then.)  Many other children would have been the same. There were a few who bought lunch once a week and an even smaller number who bought lunch every day.

Our mothers ran the canteen overseen by a canteen manager who was paid a small sum to see to things like orders and cleanliness.

All that has changed dramatically. If there is a canteen the manager will be paid a proper wage. There are very few mothers who help there. They have gone off to paid employment instead. Those who do work there need to have "working with children certificates" and they need to have done a course in food preparation and have a certificate to show it too.

And the food has changed. The menu we had is now considered unacceptable. Children are being offered "healthy" options instead. These so called healthy options tend to be much more expensive to provide. I also suspect they are much less attractive to eat. Parents are also being told not to send their child to school with a range of the very sort of food children want to eat. One local school actually inspects lunch boxes in the lower grades and "advises" parents if something unacceptable appears in them. Well intentioned? Perhaps -but I do not believe it is acceptable to say "that piece of your birthday cake from last night should not be there".

Is it any wonder that school canteens are fading away? I remember a teacher quietly providing one child with a sandwich from the canteen each day for a week when his mother was in hospital and his father really was not coping. It was easy to do it discreetly and the boy repaid her by doing extra to help not because he was asked to do it but because he wanted to do it. It would be much more difficult to do that now.  School canteens have a value for that sort of reason alone.

I wonder how the food police feel about all this. Does it worry them at all?