Independent readers have been debating how UK school dinners stack up against those served in other countries, as England prepares for a significant tightening of school food standards.
Deep-fried items are set to be removed entirely from menus, while sugary foods such as cakes, waffles and ice cream will be severely restricted.
Schools will also be banned from offering daily “grab and go” options like sausage rolls and pizza, with fruit expected to replace less nutritious snacks for most of the week.
Our community drew comparisons from other countries – including France, Spain and Slovakia – where children are served the same style of meals as adults, with a stronger emphasis on soups, salads, pulses and fresh, minimally processed ingredients, and far less reliance on the kind of heavily processed ‘children’s food’ still common in parts of the UK.
For some readers, the contrast with other countries underlines long-running concerns about the quality of UK school meals, with memories of stodgy, highly processed lunches and criticism that years of underfunding and outsourcing have eroded nutritional standards.
A further strand of the debate focused on provision for neurodivergent children and selective eating. Some warned that stricter menus risk excluding individuals who rely on familiar “safe foods”, arguing that packed lunches will remain an important option for many families.
Here’s what you had to say:
Early exposure to vegetables
Here in France, the school four-course meal typically starts with a salad. This means that the children eat it at the point when they are hungriest. Perhaps that’s why French children grow up liking their vegetables.
Also, there is no concept of ‘children’s food’ – typically in the UK, children eat supper before their parents and are served quick, easy-to-cook food like frozen pizza, fish fingers or nuggets, with sweetened yoghurt to follow.
In the home, children are given a small snack when they get home from school, maybe a sandwich, and then the children eat dinner with their parents and have the same food. As a consequence, France has a far lower level of obesity and people live longer, healthier lives.
Stodgy school dinner memories
My memory of school dinners is pink custard or lurid yellow paste covering huge square blocks of steamed pudding, squares of whatever it was. The obligatory two scoops of white mashed potato, teachers patrolling to ensure you ate the lot. The aim was to get calories into children, but the result was that I never eat desserts, hot fruit, mashed potatoes, or any of the other horrors we were subjected to. It certainly did nothing to reduce childhood obesity.
As for neurodivergent children, surely the solution is to teach them to compile their own lunchboxes the night before, full of white or grey stodge they do like, and just abandon school dinners as a lost cause.
We need a complete reset
Nutrition is vitally important for neurological development. School meals in the UK have always been rubbish – mainly stodge with few fresh vegetables or fruit. We have always had an unhealthy relationship with food in this country, and that got worse when we imported American food habits and quantity over quality.
There needs to be a complete reset, or we will continue to have an unhealthy population.
We vowed never to use baby food
Our daughter was fed whatever we ate in pureed form from the start. We read the labels on the ingredients of baby foods and, with a few exceptions, vowed never to use them.
She happily ate nearly everything growing up, but those of her friends fed on commercial baby foods were dreadfully fussy about what they would eat, and are still the same as young adults. Her friends whose parents did the same as us are much the same as her.
Adapting meals for an autistic child
My grandson is autistic and will only eat certain foods: dry wholemeal toast and a soup where we cram in vegetables galore, some chicken and, most of all, pineapple to sweeten it, and then it is blitzed to death. That is all he has eaten since he was 5 (now 17).
Obviously, school has never provided that, so he takes it to school with him every day, in agreement with the school. There is no shame, no name-calling, no nasty comments by others – we simply provide what the school can’t and no one makes a fuss.
Soup first
In Slovakia, school dinners and most dinners start with a soup. The stomach fills up with low-energy food and the hunger is staved off before the second dish. Not much emphasis is placed on desserts; fruit is normally available. Children are used to having pulses and vegetables in the soup. The soup is usually relatively thinner and more flavoursome than stuff sold in supermarkets in the UK.
Children eating adult food
In Spain, typically, children sit down with the family and eat the same food as adults. I remember on one occasion watching little ‘Jose’ tuck into espetos de sardina with the pleasure British children reserve for ice cream, picking them up and eating the flesh off the bones as you are supposed to – no overprotective mum cutting them up for him. Many places serve half portions, so children’s portions aren’t universal, though some places – mainly tourist ones – do.
Family life is stronger here, and it shows in the behaviour of the children.
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