Twitter 1, Argyll and Bute Council 0

As 1) an ex teacher and 2) a glutton, I've been watching the Martha Payne thing unfold on Twitter today with some interest. For those who have been living in a shed with their eyes shut and earplugs in, she's a precocious Scottish 9 year old who set up a blog in April photographing and reviewing her school dinners. Yesterday Argyll & Bute council told her to stop, citing tearful, demoralised dinner ladies and blatant misrepresentation of school dinner portion policy (Yes, such a thing exists!)  After a media frenzy, a bigwig at the council overturned the ban a few hours ago.

The irony is that nine times out of ten, Martha's pretty complimentary about the food, often more so than you would expect from looking at the photo. For instance, a recent dinner of Macaroni Cheese, which looked to me like something you would step round on a city centre pavement on a Saturday night, garnered a perfect score of 10/10.

Having experienced primary school catering first-hand at various points between 1986 and 2012, I think things are on the up overall, although it's been a bumpy trajectory. I managed Suffolk school dinners for about half a term when I was 9 before giving up after a meal of hockey-puck-like burgers and home-made crisps that oozed oil when prodded with a fork. The thought of this still makes me want to retch 26 year later.

My little sister's bete noire, in the early 90s  - different school, same county - was "tuna flan". This sounds revolting and indeed was. It was invariably served with frozen mixed veg of the sort that comes in 2kg bag for 79p from Heron Foods. Hot tuna is the devil's work anyway and combined with mealy broad beans, overcooked diced carrot and the hard ends of green beans, poor baby sis tried in vain to keep it down. I think that was the start of her pack-up period, too.

At the same time I was at high school and the dinners were, largely, delicious. I still hanker after their Mushroom Bake and a baked potato with cheese and herbs, followed by splitting a tiny paper bag of chips with my friend Helen if we both put in 17p. I have nothing but happy memories of the catering at high school, so it is probably no coincidence that I was a bit of a chubber.

After 1995 I didn't set foot in a school canteen until 2006, when I got a job as a TA prior to teacher training. One of the best performing primary schools in Leicestershire, the children's academic excellence clearly wasn't based on what they were eating at lunchtime. Here is a blog post I wrote at the time:

We all love the Jamester, but let’s not pretend our kids are going to come home from school packed full of vitaminy goodness as a result of the new guidelines for school meals.

The hot dinners at my primary school, which I am contractually obliged to force daily down the throats of 15 retching four-year-olds, have allegedly been “healthified” already. So don’t worry, catering managers! Just follow the [name of school removed] four-point plan for Exploiting Every Loophole.

•  When serving spaghetti Bolognese, don’t forget to make it out of the cheapest meat possible then add three times the normal quantity of water, such that it looks and smells like dog diarrhoea.


• Tiresome vegetarian pupils getting you down? Just buy a huge bag of frozen mixed vegetables at the start of term, then serve them daily. With tomato sauce and pasta. With white sauce in pastry. With pasta and cheese in a bake. With some hideous pastiche of curry sauce. Don’t worry, they don’t need protein! It’s their own fault for being pernickety!


• You can get away with serving mashed potato as a main meal if you mix it with a sneeze of Cheddar and call it “cheese and potato pie”. For maximum lethargy, serve with a jacket potato and beans on the hottest day of the year.


• You are not obliged to name a type of meat before the word “burger”.

At the school I've just left, the dinners were either fantastic or shocking. You had to read the menu really carefully in advance. On a bad day, I'd prefer an Aldi pot noodle to flabby fish fingers, dry pasta and chewy sweetcorn. In contrast they did cracking roasts, and their pizza with jacket potato and coleslaw was ambrosia of Last Supper worthy deliciousness. But there was never enough of it, and this appears to be the crux of Martha's complaint too.  One one occasion she recounts being given just one potato croquette, and says she couldn't concentrate all afternoon.

I taught the oldest kids in the school, and every time we held a class council the subject of portion sizes came up - the unfairness, as they saw it, that in a 5'9" eleven year old and a 3' four year old were given roughly the same amount of food. Martha's school apparently told the children a few days ago that they could have unlimited bread and salad. Well, so could we, in theory, but in practice a bowl of salad (of the same size I'd make at home for my husband and me) had to go round a hundred or so kids. Martha's school also seems to have the odd arrangement that you can only have fruit if you've cleared your plate. With public health in Scotland as dire as it is, surely fruit consumption shouldn't depend on whether you have already forced down sausage and chips and treacle tart?

Martha's blog is here. The famous one-croquette meal is here, a particularly nutrient-free attempt at Chinese cuisine is here and in fairness to her dinner ladies, their Jubilee efforts look absolutely lovely.