Hungry for Change
With 15 minutes of lunchtime remaining at The University High School, students are still lining up for food. There are seven chicken nuggets left, two chicken schnitzel burgers, towers of two minutes noodles and one lonely, shrivelled dim sim. . There’s not a fresh, homemade salad or sandwich in sight. Does this seem like the food a school canteen should be serving? The type of food to fuel the minds and bodies of our children? We have decided to crack open the canteen and find out what the school community really thinks, and we expect to find students hungry for change.
This type of heavily fried food should not be a staple of a child's lunch. Government schools are encouraged to provide a range of healthy foods to students. These recommendations are set out inthe National Healthy School Canteen Guidelines for healthy food and drink supplied in school canteens. Food is rated according to a traffic light system; green means these foods and drinks are the most suitable to be sold in school canteens and should be available on the canteen menu every day, amber means the food contains some valuable nutrients, but may be too high in saturated fat and / or sugar and / or sodium, Foods and drinks categorised as RED are not consistent with the dietary guidelines and should not be sold in a healthy school canteen. They are low in nutritional value and may also be high in saturated fat, sugar or sodium. Unfortunately all the foods available to students in the last 15 minutes of lunch time at the canteen come under a amber and red food rating. For some students these foods are eaten on a daily basis and in large quantities. So what is the effect of this level of consumption of processed, fried foods?
To ascertain the true impacts, we interviewed some teachers from the school. All came to the same conclusion that the food was not nutritious enough and if there was a higher quality of food served the classroom would have a more active and positive environment. This call for an improvement in the quality of canteen food is echoed the the student population. Over 90% of students interviewed were unhappy with the canteen. Their complaints focused on the cost of food, waiting times, quality of food and the lack of variety. Many even said they would be happy to pay a increased price if they could receive higher quality food.
A more distressing side effect of this situation is that many students would rather go without food or leave the school grounds and risk the punishment. Many students reported that they regularly leave to school to get lunch or know of someone who does. Who can blame them? If the students believe the canteen regularly is not serving appropriate food, if students would rather risk facing a punishment, it would be assumed that it would be one of the schools top priorities to upgrade the canteen.
So what is to be done? Despite the UHS canteen producing a limited range of green and light options, such as sushi and salads, these food go quickly and due to high demand are long gone by the time many students get to their lockers, let alone join the long, winding queues. The simple solution to this problem is to make preparing quality, nutritious foods in higher quantities a priority. We need fewer nuggets and more nutrients. Less fried food and more fruit. The question is then, why has the school canteen failed to face the problem? At the time of printing the school canteen had been unresponsive to our enquiries.