Dinner ladies thank God for Jamie Oliver

WHEN I heard Jamie Oliver was going to do a series on school dinners, I couldn’t wait for it to come on. I watched every episode, thinking: "Thank goodness somebody is finally saying it."

I worked as a dinner lady for five years in an inner-city school in Edinburgh - and like Jamie Oliver (but unlike most dinner ladies), I have trained as a chef, working in leading restaurants at the Balmoral Hotel in Edinburgh, the Tower in London and also in Switzerland.

I was shocked to discover what schoolchildren are eating every day and, like Jamie, I tried to encourage changes. But, after five years of struggling with underpaid, overworked staff and trying to make healthy meals with a tiny amount of money, I gave up, exhausted by the whole experience.

One of the first things that struck me was that most children don’t know how to sit down, enjoy a meal and eat with a knife and fork and talk. One important issue is that a lot of them don’t eat proper meals at home - so their school lunch is the only chance they have of a decent meal.

And, if you give them a choice, they will live on chips, coke, crisps and burgers. They simply don’t understand what this kind of food is doing to their bodies and the implications are extremely worrying.

As Jamie Oliver said in his TV programme, this is the first generation expected to die before their parents.

The secondary school where I worked as a dinner lady operated a canteen system. You were supposed to allow the children freedom of choice.

You got kids coming up and asking for three cans of coke or just eating burgers and chips with cheese and macaroni every day.

Jamie Oliver worked out that the budget for a main course of a school meal was about 37p. I would say you would need to double that, at least, to make something nourishing and interesting.

I would also take away the choice in secondary schools and change back to a system like in primary schools where you have two main meals and a vegetarian option and get older kids to serve younger ones at the tables so that no-one has to queue.

And why not make school dining rooms more like restaurants, with plants and music? Make them places you would want to sit in, and get away from hard plastic chairs and plastic tables.

The other important thing is that, if you are going to start cooking proper food from scratch, you really have to take a long hard look at staff training, conditions and rates of pay.

Like most dinner ladies, I took the job because of the hours. I had trained as a chef and worked in top hotels around the world, but I wanted to spend time with my daughter when she was growing up.

Catering can become your life. Hotels, in particular, want you to work seven days a week and ten hours a day. I wanted to be with my family.

Most of the women who work as dinner ladies do it for that reason. But most of them are untrained.

Councils often give training in food hygiene but not in food preparation. I had one woman who didn’t even know how to whisk up a packet of Angel Delight - so I ended up having to do it myself.

And how can you introduce things like courgettes to the children at the school when you have dinner ladies who don’t know what courgettes are?

The other thing is the pay. In Edinburgh, dinner ladies are paid over 38 weeks at a rate which works out less than 6 an hour. And, unlike most other council workers like bin men, dinner ladies get no bonus payments.

It is very hard work physically, and you get a lot of absenteeism but there are hardly any supply staff, so a lot of the time you are running around trying to cover for people.

There simply isn’t enough time for training, but I think you would see a huge improvement if all the staff went on a basic catering course lasting one month before starting work.

I can’t understand why they don’t have a training kitchen where staff are taught basic nutrition and food preparation - simple things like how to use a knife.

I always tried to get the kids to try different foods. Like Jamie Oliver, we used stickers and the head teacher and staff were really supportive.

But getting vegetables into kids is always a struggle. Fruit is easier - but I was shocked to realise some of these children had never seen a real strawberry before.

To try and encourage children to make better choices, we had a no-chips day at the school where I worked - and a no-fizzy drinks day and a no-sweets day.

But you had to change the days around, or the children would just nip out of school and go to the chip shop instead.

I think getting kids to try different kinds of food and to learn to enjoy food should be part of their education. We tried having theme days, with food from different countries, which the kids enjoyed. I also tried to work with the home economics teachers, putting food on the menu that they had learned to cook in class - although the ingredients were often too expensive.

We did manage to introduce wraps and bagels onto the menu, which was an achievement. Once you get to know the kids, you say: "Go on, try it, have a taste." When they do and they enjoy it, it makes it all worthwhile.

I think as a dinner lady, someone who is not a teacher, you can have a good relationship with the kids. On good days, it was a rewarding job. What could be better than knowing you are contributing to somebody’s health and well-being for the rest of their life. But, on the bad days, it felt like working in a chip shop or a burger bar. I miss the kids, butthe job was just too hard. You would have to be a magician to come up with interesting food every day with those ingredients and that budget.

Thank God for Jamie Oliver. The man is a hero for standing up and saying something about this.