Banning schools from serving meat is a recipe for disaster

Labour donor Dale Vince has called for compulsory meat and dairy options to be scrapped in schools across England. Now, our education system has a lot of problems, but we aren’t going to solve them by taking cheeseburgers off the menu, writes former dinner lady Ryan Coogan

‘If you haven’t had a school dinner in a while, here’s what you need to know: they actually aren’t terrible’ (PA Archive)

Before I was a journalist I was a teacher; and before I was a teacher I was a mealtime assistant (aka a dinner lady). Before I was a dinner lady I worked on a fairground (we can talk about that another time) – but before that I was a student. That means I’ve experienced school meals from every conceivable angle. I am, as sad as it is to say, a bit of an expert on the subject.

If you haven’t had a school dinner in a while, here’s what you need to know: they actually aren’t terrible. They aren’t great, but it’s not like it was back when I was in school, before Jamie Oliver spoiled the fun, when school lunches were a free-for-all of E numbers and microwaved turkey twizzlers. Now they’re prepared (more or less) from scratch by actual chefs, in an actual kitchen, using actual ingredients.

That’s why it’s kind of baffling that Labour donor Dale Vince has called for compulsory meat and dairy options to be scrapped in schools across England. Vince, an environmentally conscious entrepreneur who has donated more than £5 million to the party, told a meeting at the Labour conference that already supplies vegan food to "one in four" primary schools, and that there are schools which “don’t want meat and dairy on the menu perhaps every day of the week or even at all”.

To be clear, Vince isn’t necessarily in the wrong here. I’m not a vegan, but that’s only because of my own moral failings and lack of self-control – a vegan diet is, on balance, healthier than an omnivorous one, and meat production is an absolute nightmare for the environment.

Perhaps Vince’s idea would have been easier to swallow if he’d made a push for fresher, higher-quality meats and vegetables in our schools. When people picture school dinners they tend to think of a sad looking tray where the greens aren’t particularly green, and the mushy peas are a little too mushy – maybe the first step is to improve overall food standards, before we start removing items from the menu altogether.

The other issue is that targeting schools of all places to push an agenda, however admirable, is a false economy. For some children, the food they receive at school is the only warm, nutritious meal they’ll eat all week. Giving them as wide a variety of healthy options as possible is without a doubt a good thing, and reducing those options doesn’t do them any favours.

Government guidance on the subject already suggests that cafeterias serve a diverse range of nutritious foods in healthy portions. Gone are the days that our kids would have to subsist on square pizza slices and those weird curries that had raisins in them, for some reason – a lot of schools have salad bars now, if you can believe that.

They’re also very tightly monitored in terms of allergens – at one place I worked, a guy was brought to tribunal for adding nuts to a meal without telling his line manager, like a cunning vizier who was caught trying to poison the emperor. This isn’t amateur hour.

Working in a school kitchen was by far the worst period of my life. I was underpaid, the people were awful, and every night when I fell asleep I’d have nightmares about falling in the deep fat frier. But the food was okay. It wasn’t good by any means – sometimes when I close my eyes I can still smell the bubble and squeak – but it certainly wouldn’t have been improved with the addition of tofu. If anything, that would have made it markedly worse.

If Vince wants to ensure that children are well-fed and healthy, perhaps his efforts would be better served pushing for universal free school meals for all children living in poverty. Growing up my family didn’t have much money (hence: fairground worker), and free school meals were a lifeline not just for me, but for my mother who would have struggled with the daily expense of paid meals or packed lunches. School was hard enough – I can’t imagine how much worse it would have been if I’d also had to go hungry.

I’m all for encouraging people to eat vegan. There’s probably a way to help schools make the switch that allows for nutritionally complete, filling meals – but when it comes to whether the switch is worth making when there are so many other more pressing issues in our schools that demand the government’s attention, it’s very much an “if it ain’t broke, don’t replace it with Quorn sausages” situation.

The problem is that initiatives like this tend to dominate the news cycle. Our priority should be making sure that our kids are fed, and that’s going to be a lot harder to accomplish when you’ve got people like Piers Morgan going on TV, spitting bits of vegan sausage roll into a trash can and ranting about how the dinner ladies have gone woke.

Vince’s other suggestion, of incorporating "climate and sustainability" into the primary school curriculum sounds like a more sustainable way to save the environment down the line. At a time when climate denial is out of control, and “veganism” is seen as some trendy liberal hipster fad instead of a responsible dietary choice, helping kids stay informed early on could prove to be invaluable.

Our education system has a lot of problems – underfunding, a teacher shortage, kids in general – but not a one of them is going to be fixed by taking cheeseburgers off the menu. Maybe when we fix a couple of those, we can talk about going green.